Each year, there is talk among the search engine marketing community whether or not SEO is still valuable to a business.
The short answer is that SEO still matters – a lot.
Watch this short video interview in which I interview Anvil Media’s Kent Lewis on why SEO is still important and why it matters for B2B companies.
Of the three important factors affecting your organization’s SEO, two are under your control:
- The pieces of the puzzle that make up an SEO campaign, e.g., content, meta data, link earning, on-page optimization, etc.
- The technical components (e.g. site architecture, formats) associated with search crawler efficiency
The key factor you can’t affect is how, when, or why search engines adjust or significantly change their algorithms.
Each year, Google changes its search algorithm around 500–600 times. Most of these are updates or minor tweaks, but some (notably the first iterations of Panda and Penguin) have been major, and one (Hummingbird, 2013) was entirely new. Every new update impacts the organic search landscape in ways that potentially change how businesses are able to connect with qualified online consumers.
The good news is, that while it’s difficult to keep up with every new rule and consideration that impact your company’s online visibility, you don’t actually need to do that. If you understand what organic search is all about and the best practices for making SEO successful, you’ll know what you need to, in order to reap the benefits. Knowing the wrong things to do is helpful, but understanding the right things to do and putting them into play is, overall, more powerful.
According to consumer behavior research done by Google and other industry authorities:
- Google gets over 100 billion searches a month, with over 11 billion searches conducted each month within the US (75% of the total US search volume).
- SEO is the largest driver of traffic to websites, and the largest driver of revenue – even surpassing paid search.
- 70 – 80% of consumers ignore paid ads, and focus only on organic results.
- 50% of all organic mobile searches are performed in hopes of locating local services, and 61% of these search queries lead to a direct purchase.
- 81% of B2B purchase cycles start with web search and 90% of buyers say when they are ready to buy, “they’ll find you.
- Organic inbound programs cost 61% less than traditional outbound marketing sources.
For these reasons and more, it makes sense to hammer through the noise and answer the most common, the most pressing, questions about SEO.[
Act-On’s new eBook, “Your Most Common SEO Questions, Answered,” does just that. Download the book and peruse it at your leisure, and then let us know what you think. Got a burning question the eBook doesn’t answer? Let us know, and we’ll get an answer for you.