SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimisation”. In other words, it is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility when people search for terms related to your business, products or services on search engines such as Google or Bing for example. Visibility is measured with your ranking : the higher you appear as a result for a determined search, the more likely people are to visit your website. This is important because people researching topics related to your activity are prospective or existing customers that you can attract.
If you are a part of a B2B organization, chances are that you have developed an array of Sales collateral. SEO can help leverage its impact as it increases the chances of people finding it. In fact, SEO adds a layer of harmonisation between your website and the content that it hosts.
If you are new to SEO, this article is for you! Indeed, we will quickly describe the interest of considering this subject for any business followed by some amazing statistics that will make you think twice about SEO.
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Why can SEO be so powerful in combination with your Sales Collaterals?
As we mentioned in the introduction, SEO is about a website’s visibility on the internet according to different searchers. For search engines such as Google, it is the way to determine which website should be ranked higher for each query. Without SEO, it would be extremely simple to manipulate search results and therefore not necessarily have the most relevant website appear as a result. For example, without SEO the website with the most pages or most links (that can easily by generated automatically by software) could be ranked #1.
There are two types of SEO: on-page and off-page. On-page SEO is related to anything you can manage on your website. It is linked to things such as keywords, speed, structure, header text and so on. On the other hand, off-page SEO refers to what other websites do that can influence your ranking. Most of the time, it is about links that lead to your page.
To put it simply, SEO is essential because it keeps search results fair and relevant. It reduces the ability to manipulate said results and thus ensures that the sites that appear first for each search deserve their ranking. As you can probably imagine, a high ranking is related to a great deal of work in terms of content, website appearance and other criterias. To increase a website’s ranking, they must aim to meet the search engine’s criteria as well as they can.
Users trust search engines : think of your own Google searches! You are more likely to look for the answer for your question on a website that appears on the first page than one that appears on page 40. In other words, top rankings signal a website’s credibility. The higher the ranking on result pages, the more traffic and clicks a website will generate. It also has a positive impact on user experience, appealing to new prospects but aso making it more likely for your customers to become repeat buyers and advocates for your brand.
Another great thing about SEO is that it is cost-effective! It does not cost much to adjust your website and its content to positively impact your ranking on search engines. Sometimes, businesses are not even aware of the impact simple changes can have. In the same way, they might not even know that their current website structure or content is penalizing them.
Of course, companies can always purchase ad space and rank on the first results listed as “Adverts”. However if your company is working on a tight budget, SEO is a great way to drive qualified traffic to your website for free!
From a Sales Collateral angle, SEO can help your content’s visibility and even generate leads. For example, your SEO strategy can value landing pages on your website where downloadable content is available. SEO drives qualified traffic that needs to fill in an email before downloading a document for example.
Some surprising SEO statistics to boost the visibility of your Sales Collaterals
As we like to say: a statistic sometimes says more than a thousand words. So, if you are still not quite convinced of the importance of SEO, here are a few that will definitely change your mind!
- 92.96% of global traffic comes from Google search, Google Images, and Google Maps.
- 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
- SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media.
- SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate.
- 60% of marketers say that inbound (SEO, blog content, etc) is their highest quality source of leads.
- 90.63% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google.
- Only 0.78% of Google searchers click on results from the 2nd page.
- On the first page alone, the first five organic results account for 67.60% of all the clicks
- Google’s search algorithm uses more than 200 factors to rank websites.
- 61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority.