If you’re a businessperson and you’ve not heard about SEO, the chances are you’ve been living under a very soundproof rock. It’s a term that floods the business world and is included in many Google searches every single day. We’re led to believe that, if we want a successful marketing strategy, we need to pay attention to SEO.

There are many new business owners and entrepreneurs that ask why SEO is so important. What’s so special about it that makes it such an integral part of every digital marketing campaign? Is it really as important as everyone makes out?

With this article, we’ll answer these questions for you, while giving a detailed look at SEO and what it does for your business. Afterward, you will know if it’s as important as everyone says!

What Is SEO?

To start, what exactly is SEO? Most people will be aware that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, but they don’t really know what this actually means.

In simple terms, it refers to your website gaining traffic through organic search engine results. If a website is optimised for search engines, it will generate a high amount of traffic through search engines and be high up the rankings for all the searches relevant to that website.

The important thing to remember here is that SEO only deals with traffic coming from this one source.

Is SEO Really That Important?

This brings us onto the main question at hand; is SEO really that important? There are a handful of reasons that argue yes, it is, and there are a few arguments for the opposite. Before we talk about the reasons SEO is important, we should look at why some people think it’s a little bit overrated.

The Rise Of Social Media

Mainly, people believe SEO isn’t as important as it once was due to the sheer masses of people on social media. If you look at the list of the most visited websites in Australia, you’ll see that a lot of the top ones are social media sites. People visit them every day and can spend hours on them every single day.

For this reason, there’s going to be a lot of traffic coming directly from social media. People share links to websites on their Facebook or Twitter pages. Companies themselves will be actively trying to get people to go to their site. When you’ve got billions of people using social media, and can easily interact with them, it makes sense to try and make them visit your site.

As such, some business owners believe that your search ranking isn’t the be all and end all. In fact, some say you can get a lot of traffic by focusing on social media, and making it your priority. Some people have even conducted experiments that showed social media outperformed SEO regarding the amount of traffic produced and the conversion rates of each method.

There’s no denying that social media is very powerful and effective, but does this really mean that SEO isn’t important? No, it doesn’t, and here are some reasons why:

People Always Use Search Engines

Remember how I said a lot of the most visited sites are social media platforms? Well, anyone that isn’t a social media platform is pretty much a search engine. People are always going to use search engines to find things. While social media is definitely important, you can probably afford to neglect it.

However, you can’t afford to neglect SEO because users are always searching. If you need to find something or find a business, you Google it, you don’t Facebook it. There’s a reason you can’t go thirty seconds without another SEO company popping up these days; people need a good search ranking. You need to work on your SEO to appear high in the results and be one of the first sites someone sees after they search. The internet isn’t going to stop searching for things, it’s convenient and helps them find what they’re after. For this reason, you need to use SEO.

Rankings Improve Credibility

A lot of people think SEO is purely about gaining traffic. However, it’s also very important for gaining credibility and building a business people trust and respect. Think about it, which company seems more credible to you; one that’s always first in the results, or one that’s on page two of the results? You’ll always trust the ones high in the results because we’re used to seeing big respectable companies there.

Therefore, SEO is an integral part of your marketing campaign as it works on your reputation and public image. These are two things that every business must focus on if you want to bring in loyal customers.

SEO Helps Your Website

What people don’t seem to understand is that SEO doesn’t just make your website appear high in the search results. To make this happen, you have to optimise your site, which helps it perform and look better. A site that’s optimised for search engines is incredibly user-friendly, loads quickly looks brilliant, and functions perfectly.

As a result, you have a website that’s set up to be very effective. Users will enjoy landing on it, and you can reduce your bounce rate and increase your conversions. Again, it helps make your company look better as well. Social media doesn’t really do anything for your website other than direct traffic towards it.

In Conclusion...

Yes, social media is quickly becoming a very effective way of driving traffic to your website. However, SEO remains one of the most important parts of every marketing campaign. This is largely because it has a lot of other benefits other than driving traffic. It helps build your brand and make your company appear more respectable to everyone on the internet. Plus, search engines are still the most visited and used sites on the internet.

So, to answer the question; is SEO really that important? Yes, yes it is, and you need to focus on it in your marketing campaign.