This Is What Makes SEO Important For Every Business Fantastic results can be achieved without you having to go overboard on your marketing budgets

In today's digital era, where consumers are just as dispersed as the ways to reach them, there are few digital marketing tactics that hold good for all types of businesses—small, medium and large—across almost all industries. And that tactic is search engine optimization (SEO). A lot has been written about SEO and its merits, but today, I will be sharing the reasons why I believe SEO is not just a good-to-do, but a must-do for all businesses.

Put simply, SEO is essentially a way to ensure that your business organically ranks higher on a search engine results page for relevant industry keywords you wish to target, and thus gets seen by a larger group of prospective clients and customers. The best thing is that all of this can be achieved without you having to go overboard on your marketing budgets.

Sounds exciting? I can bet on it.

Here are top five reasons why every business should invest in SEO.

Expand Your Visibility Manifold

With the right SEO work coupled with regular updates and relevant posts, you can expand your visibility to a much wider base of prospects, giving you the precious opportunity to attract and convert them. Given that there is an average of 63,000 searches on Google per second, and this is only likely to increase in the future as the collective dependencies on digital mediums increase, I am not even going to start talking about the huge loss of opportunity if your business doesn't rank on the relevant results.

Exponential Increase in Website Traffic Over Time

This will be a direct consequence of better visibility on the right type of keywords. Keywords are a great indicator for search intent, and once your website starts ranking higher in search results, you are also commanding a lot more credibility than the results after you. Organic search results are the primary source of most website traffic, and over time, you will likely see a dramatic increase in relevant site traffic, which will continue to add up exponentially with continued SEO.

Know your customers better

With increased visits, and by implementing site analytics, you will get a better idea of who your customers really are—what is it that gets them to your site, where do they like spending time and how do they behave once they are there? All this is over and above demographic stats like gender, age and location. This will help you make your content more appealing for your customers, and in some cases, even help you tweak your products and service design.

Continuous increase in RoI

SEO is super effective not only at building credibility and trust, but also converting prospects into leads, and if they are taken care of well, then converting those leads into sales. It is no different than having a very effective salesperson make a compelling argument about choosing your brand over your competitors'. Unlike other marketing tactics where you end up seeing short-lived results after heavy budget allocations, the results of SEO work add up to give you better returns on your SEO cost over time.

Continue evolving your user experience

A great user experience has become pivotal to SEO, and most search engines are able to recognize that. One common example is structuring your content to be able to answer direct search queries, and featured snippets are becoming more common, with search results displaying these at the top of the page, before the listed results. Ongoing SEO work will ensure that you stay on top of the game when it comes to user experience, which in turn will maintain or improve your SEO ranking, helping you realize all of the benefits I just shared above. So yes, it is a cycle of staying on top of the search engine charts, which will continue keeping you there.