Why SEO – Top 15 Reasons to Focus on SEO in 2017

Why SEO? is a question SEOs and digital marketers face inside of and outside the marketing organization. SEO has been around for more than a decade and a half and now makes up a gigantic share of traffic for successful websites. In fact, research by BrightEdge shows organic search is the largest driver of Web traffic for most sectors and a crucial component of revenue.

That’s why SEO should be a serious consideration for your brand in the coming year. In this post, we’ll look at 15 reasons why SEO matters now more than ever to your business. Use these points to elevate the understanding and position of SEO in the marketing mix.

1. Channel Share. Fifty-one percent of traffic to websites comes from organic search (source: BrightEdge Organic Channel report).
2. Search Share. On average, 83 percent of the traffic from search engines comes from SEO, and 17 percent from paid search (source: BrightEdge internal data).
3. Share of Focus. Even though organic search accounts for the majority of traffic, most companies spend more money on paid search.
4. Long-Term Traffic Equity. While SEO does require an upfront resource investment, search engine rankings, once earned, have long-term duration.
5. Organic Traffic. SEO traffic has no media cost and can provide a substantial ROI – higher than most other channels.
6. Structure. Proper SEO helps organize your website and makes it easier for your visitors to navigate and transact.
7. Alignment. Marketing works best when all channels are aligned on the same message – including organic search. Multiple channel alignment improves results in all channels.
8. Brand Elevation.  SEO success secures a share of voice on the search engine results pages, and this is an integral component of your brand and creating brand trust.
9. Conversion.  SEO traffic often converts better than other channels due to the fact that rankings often convey trust from the search engines.
10. Channel Synergy. Your other marketing channels generate demand for people to query the search engine for products and services such as yours. If your website is not there to collect the demand you spent money creating, your competitors will collect it.
11. Market Consideration.  Organic search is a critical part of the research process, especially for products or services with a long sales cycle. People use search engines to create a list of candidates for the product or service and use them again to collect opinions and reviews that help them make decisions.
12. Search and Social. SEO works in tandem with social media ; some queries are more sensitive to “fresh results,” and social signals, which can impact and determine positioning in the search results.
13. Research.  SEO research allows you to understand user interest and intent and build content that addresses and captures that intent.
14. Content Distribution.  Focusing on SEO and legitimate link building leads you to develop relevant, useful content that people want to share and provides digital word of mouth.
15. Global Reach.  SEO has global reach and can even provide dynamic translation and localization that can bring in new and unexpected customers from all corners of the world.

That’s 15 solid reasons why SEO should always have a prominent seat at the marketing mix table. Learn why over 1,500 companies use the BrightEdge platform to succeed at SEO and content performance marketing.

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