3 SEO Principles to Help You Grow Your Business

by ZH SECONDARY July 13, 2021

We’re going to share a fundamental truth with you: if your business doesn’t have a website, then it’s likely that you don’t exist for the majority of consumers in today’s world.

People are finding most – if not all – of their information online: every day, there are over 3.5 billion Google searches – or roughly 40,000 searches per second. That’s a lot of information-seeking happening and without a website, your company cannot be the solution to anyone’s need.

Are Your Customers Finding Your Website?

If you do have a website, however, then SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is your BFF. In a nutshell, this is how you get people to find you on the internet. More strictly speaking, it’s about ensuring that the content on your website matches what consumers are searching for on the internet – you’re optimizing your website for search engine results. Why? Because in order to deliver results to their users, search engines will crawl and scan websites for matching content. They will also rank how user-friendly the site is, giving higher rankings to those that are easier to navigate and have more relevant content.

Are You Showing Up On Organic Search Results?

Think of it as another – but utterly essential – form of marketing. 51% of all website traffic comes from organic search, so this is a platform that all organizations need to be on. Just like with any other form of marketing or advertising, if your competitors are on the platform and you aren’t, then they’re getting more traction with the customer base through additional exposure. 93% of online experiences begin with online search, and, if your competitors have implemented SEO, then it’s their name potential customers are seeing and their websites that are being recommended. Users expect that Google (which gets 90.1% of all searches), or whichever search engine they’re using, is giving them the best results, based on what’s available. The fact is, the search engines are providing the best results based on what’s available to them. Which is why your company should be part of their repository, through a well-planned SEO strategy.

3 Simple SEO Principles To Help You Grow Your Business

While SEO implementation can become quite complex, these are the basics to keep in mind:

Optimize for all search engines: even though Google basically owns the market in SEO, 10% of searches are still being conducted on Bing and Yahoo. These are potential customers, so you’ll want to ensure that you’re not missing out on any audience reach.
Do your best to ensure you’re on the first page of results: statistics have shown that 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results, regardless of how many results there are. If you want to be seen, you’ll have to optimize your content to ensure that your company winds up on that first page of results for the search words that are most important to your business.
Focus on organic search, rather than paid search: yes, you can pay to have your website show up at the top of the search results, which will ensure that you get that first-page placement; however, research has shown that 70%-80% of users ignore paid search results, out of lack of trust (if you’re paying for placement, then you likely aren’t the best search result for me).

If you’d like to learn more about how SEO can improve your business or if you’re looking to implement your SEO strategy, we can help: contact HZ COMMERCE & DISTRIBUTION today!