Why you should be investing in SEO

By Laura Holland

SEO is often seen as a bit of a dark art, and often overlooked in its importance by those that don’t understand it or the ROI it can bring to the company. So we’re here to tell you exactly why you should be investing in SEO and what the future holds.

​SEO can give you competitive advantage

Ensuring that you have a good SEO strategy means that you’ll start ranking higher in search engine results than your competitors, over 25% users visit the first result, this goes down to 15% for second, 11% for third and a small 2.5% for tenth. So ranking above your competitors leads to a higher share of organic traffic to your website and ultimately, the opportunity for higher conversions.

SEO helps to drive website traffic

SEO will help your website become more discoverable to prospective customers/clients. Your SEO strategy shouldn’t just be limited to direct traffic, you should also be leveraging social media and other platforms that can drive traffic to your website. The more website traffic you can drive the more you can utilise the data to help shape your business and marketing strategies. ​

SEO can help to increase your brand visibility

Increasing your brand visibility is key in the oversaturated world of online marketing. The best way to do so is via SEO. Optimising for branded terms either via meta keywords and descriptions or via ads is a great way to establish your brand identity into new or curious audiences who may want to use your services/product.

SEO can help you reach mobile users

When SEO began users were restricted to visiting websites via their desktops, these days people use their mobiles and search to answer quick queries. Ensuring that your website is mobile responsive will mean that your website is shown to the majority of search engine users.

SEO is cost effective

You don’t need to pay out a fortune to have good SEO, most of it is good common sense which is aligned to your current goal for your website. Ensuring that your content is properly structured for search engine crawlers and adding in meta descriptions, keywords and alt image descriptions is a very quick win to boost your rankings.

​What is the future of SEO?

SEO has come a long way since its inception back in the late 90s, but with technology advancing at a rapid rate, what's in store and how do you stay ahead of the curve?

AI and Generative Engine Optimisation or Search Generative Experience

There’s been a lot of excitement around using AI for website copy, but this should be used as a tool to support and not completely replace a skilled writer, however from September 2023 Google published an update which means that you will not necessarily be penalised by publishing copy generated by AI as long as it is written for humans and not search engines, something that has been a bit of a hot topic over on LinkedIn as you can see. ​

With Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) or Search Generative Experience (SGE) starting to make an impact on page rankings and search result snippets, it’s important to ensure that your copy reads naturally. You can find out more about Generative Engine Optimisation in our deep dive here.

Answer Engine Optimisation

Ask Jeeves lives on with more and more people using search to answer questions, so if you’re sitting within a smaller niche you’ll be able to get ahead of your competitors if you’ve got a good AEO strategy in place.

This should be no surprise with social answer platforms (such as Reddit and Quora) seeing good user growth over the last few years, coupled with Google’s latest data deal with Reddit which will see Google utilise the data for training its Generative AI platform.

What this means is that search engines will prioritise websites that directly answer the question the user has input, so knowing the most asked questions for your niche, and answering them in an easy to understand and human way is key to getting your page top of the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Topical Authority

Last but not least, is topical authority, this should make up the core of your SEO long-term investment. 

All major search engines are now prioritising content which demonstrates authority in the chosen field or topic. Google especially has a framework called E-E-A-T which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness.

This means that Google search will display websites that best showcase they have; experienced what they’re writing about, they have expertise in that topic (this usually means using the correct or scientific terminology within the content), and showing good understanding and flow of the topic, all culminating in a higher trust rate and ultimately resulting in higher search page result rankings.

As you can see the future of SEO is still relevant content, but taken up a few notches. 

If you’d like some guidance on SEO, please do get in touch. Email: [email protected], or call us on 020 3357 9740