As a business owner, you must carefully consider where your funds and assets are allocated, carefully choosing the most beneficial marketing strategies. Professional SEO (search engine optimization) services can be expensive, and in-house SEO work can be time-consuming. So, you have a right to wonder: Does SEO really work? And is it worth it?
We’re here to tell you that it does and, if done right, SEO as a digital marketing strategy can result in substantial gains for your business. However, SEO must be done properly; while good SEO can improve your sales, weak SEO can show no results, and poor SEO tactics can result in penalization. This blog will discuss the importance of good SEO practices, how they can help your business, and how professional SEO services work.
SEO Basics
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is an umbrella term for digital marketing services and strategies that boost a website’s rankings on search engines such as Bing or Google. Search engines use bots to crawl pages on the web, taking information from each website and placing them into an index. Next, an algorithm analyzes each page in the index, using hundreds of ranking factors, and determines where they should appear on search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO strategies work to improve your website’s likelihood of being put in the top search results – and therefore the chances that users will click through to your site.
SEO is the practice of improving certain on-page and off-page factors that impact your online visibility. The better optimized your website is the higher your ranking in search results. By utilizing high-quality and current strategies, SEO can expose your business to thousands of new customers browsing for the products or services you provide.
Why Do Businesses Invest in SEO?
In terms of a healthy online presence, nothing is more important than having a website that ranks highly for relevant search terms. According to Backlinko, a Google search’s top result garners 31.7% of all clicks, and only .63% of Google searchers click on links displayed on the second page.
Think about how often you go onto the second page of Google search results. This thought alone should motivate you to boost your website’s search rankings. By using the best SEO practices, thousands of new eyes will be on your business’s website, inevitably resulting in more customers and increased revenue.
Does SEO Really Work?
The best SEO practices work wonders to boost a website’s search rankings. However, it is essential to understand that SEO is an ever-changing practice. An accepted and valid strategy that worked five years ago could be obsolete today, due to how Google has changed its algorithm. This often leads to the incorrect perception that SEO doesn’t work. If your SEO isn’t working, you are using out-of-date practices. You should use the most current SEO strategies to see satisfactory results. If you have been struggling to see results even after prioritizing SEO, you should consider seeking professional SEO services.
Harmful SEO Practices
You must avoid bad SEO practices, as they can lead to your website being ignored or even penalized in the search ranking process. At the very worst, you could have your website completely removed from search results. Avoid these harmful SEO habits:
- Making pages without original content: Once, in the world of SEO, quantity meant more than quality. Because of this, people would create dozens of pages for their websites using unoriginal content – including reusing their own content, or even taking content from other sites. This practice is now archaic. Today, the focus of the content of your site should be to provide comprehensive, helpful information that answers questions and solves problems for users.
- Buying links: Having backlinks to your site enhances the credibility of your business and can significantly improve your search result rankings. But it is better to earn these links than to buy them. Sites like Google now have systems that ignore or even penalize websites with numerous backlinks on spam websites.
- Keyword stuffing: Correct keyword implementation is key to successful SEO work. When hearing this, it’s hard not to cram as many keywords into the content of your website as possible. But it is essential to understand that Google has ways to detect awkward, non-user-friendly content on sites. In today’s world of SEO, the user experience is king. By overstuffing your content with keywords, your site’s text can become complicated, inaccessible, or nonsensical. It is important to remember that real people will be visiting your website and that Google ranks pages that offer the most value to users. Keywords are essential if used correctly, but overusing them could lead to having your website ignored or penalized.
Best SEO Practices Get Great Results
While SEO can be time-consuming, expensive, and complex, it is essential to remember just how important it is to your business. A website with up-to-date, effective SEO strategies will benefit from a significant growth of website traffic, which can be turned into customers. Americaneagle.com has helped businesses optimize their websites’ performance through exceptional professional SEO and digital marketing services for years. Contact us to learn more about how SEO really works; we can help your business succeed through a variety of proven search engine optimization tactics.
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