Why SEO is important for your online success in a startup business?

Why SEO is important for your online success in a startup? I met a startup client last week. He asked me why to bother to do SEO as it needs more times and effort. I heard my friends say, use facebook marketing only, his friend has earned 10x times of ROAS (Return Of Ads Spend). Simple and easy.

I said I agree with you. Facebook marketing is one of the fastest ways to see the return of the investment. So, after that, I asked him a few questions.

What would you do if your friends or family members come to visit you and you want to bring them to eat some special dish, needed to find an unknown restaurant for dinners?

What would you do if you needed to replace your bedroom aircon and you weren’t sure which model to buy?

What would you do if you left your house key inside the house and you have no spare key with you?

What would you do if you are researching your options to find a wedding event planner?

What would you do if you are looking for other suppliers for your business?

His answer: Google la.

So I said since you’re like most people, type a keyword into Google either from phone or laptop, scroll through the 17 results on Google page and click on the site that attracts you the most. For business, it’s important to appear at the first 3 pages.

It has become a daily habit for most people to search for information. As a business owner, SEO is important to help to improve the ranking in Search Engine Result Page(SERP) and increase the conversion rate when the audience search for specific products or services words.

Key Success Of SEO for Startup Business

There are 4 key success to implement SEO for a startup business which are cost-effective, conversion increment, long term result and brand authority establishment.

Every day there are hundreds of billions of new webpages created. While Google ranking systems are designed to present the most related information based on the query that you put in among hundreds of billions of webpages in SERP.

Cost-Effective

Most of the startup business has business funding issue. Basically, you do not need to pay the advertising fees.

Google ranking algorithm is based entirely on high-value content of site or page which can ensure user experience for any given query.

If Google sees your website’s content that the search engine deems worthy of directing the user to, your site will be pushed further to the top ranking.

When your site reaches the first page, your site will continue to get a lot of traffic.

To start an SEO service, you need a website. If you are able to do-it-yourself, like writing blogs, priority on low competitive searching keywords, on-page optimization, social proof, link building and etc.

You can always outsource to an agency to cover the whole SEO services for you. Services fees will range from USD 400 till USD700 every month.

Once your site reaches to the top-ranking position, you might need to update the content every few months. Good news is, your valuable spot in search results is free of charge.

Increase Click-through-rate/ Conversion/ Profits

Click-through-rate is the percentage of total click over the total impression. The higher the CTR shows more users are interested or trust the content in the site. A good CTR is above 2%.

Organic SEO is the dominant source of trackable web traffic, with 53% of traffic coming via this channel compared to paid’s 27%.

The reason behind is the majority of user prefer to click on non-paid ads website as they think the content is more genuine, non-bias and better content they will get it even though paid ads are ranking top.

Another reason is user trust Google’s algorithm and believe Google will show them what are the higher value content’s page at top ranking.

Conversion rate is the percentage of website visitor who visits a website and performs the preferrable action such as website registration, purchase, lead generation and etc. Any conversion rate between 2% to 5% is good.

A good conversion rate will lead to the closing of a good sale as long as a strong follow-up action is done. If good sales are made, higher revenue and higher profits. This is the goal of every business to get better profits.

When your website rank higher, CTR is improving, the conversion is higher and revenue & profit as well. At the same time, you can save up the advertising cost as you are not only relying on paid ads to generate the leads or enquiries.

Furthermore, the quality of the leads is better than paid ads as users have buying intention when they type in the query.  Users are aggressively looking for solutions for the query they are searching for and turn them to become a paying customer. This is the beauty of pull marketing.

Long Term Result

SEO is meant for long-term results. From publishing the first article and consistently update the content, it needs three months to six months to rank the keywords depends on the competitiveness of the keywords.

It may need longer time to push the ranking to the top but it brings massive benefits to the business and branding in the long term. In the long run, it will be more cost-effective. When your website ranking high, the competitors are hardly to threat your position if you consistently maintain the ranking. Eventually, you will have free organic traffic to your website and you will get more quality leads.

This kind of result is permanent as compared to most another advertising method. Unlike the paid ads method, when you want more leads, you need to increase your advertising fund. But SEO, the marketing investment will be exponentially reduced when times go. Still, you still can get a strong traffic flow or still increase to your website.

Most businesses have invested SEO for a way of long-term marketing that can offer awareness as well as conversion to gain better revenue and profits.

Brand Authority / Identity

SEO grant businesses the chance to stay ahead of their competitors. If the website is fully optimized on-page and off-page, your website will be ranking high in multiple keywords. This will bring more visitors to land on your website from different queries. More people will recognise and remember this brand and so will improve brand authority.

If your competitors rank better than you, it means they have a high potential to grab your potential customers from you.

Conclusion

So, when I explain to my startup client, he now understands why SEO is important for your online success. It covers from the user search and purchase behaviour. SEO takes a better positioning for any startup business because this method does not need any paid ads and at the same increase branding awareness which it is vital to a startup business.

So, what is your say? What do you think what is the initial marketing strategies that a startup business must consider? If you have any opinion, let’s chat with me.