Three main reasons why you need SEO present in your business plan

Three main reasons why you need SEO present in your business plan

Not sure if you really need SEO services? Do you consider SEO a waste of time and money? Do you need to convince people inside your company that SEO is a natural and worthy investment of capital?

Well, here are my main three reasons why SEO is beneficial for any company that has an online presence:

1. Can improve your website's user experience.

A good SEO should be a master at interpreting data, especially Google Analytics data. For example one of my biggest clients had a really low bounce rate, you might be saying "well, a low bounce rate is a good thing" - well no, not necessary. Sometimes a low bounce rate might indicate certain problems like the user not finding what he/her is looking for and instead of clicking on the menu in the hope they'll find whatever info they are looking for and eventually quit out of frustration.

So, I figured out the reason for the low bounce rate was because the clients were looking for a specific category of the website that wasn't present in the menu. So, I made a request to the client's development team to include that specific page in the main menu. 4 weeks later the bounce rate increased from 7% to 25% but at the same time that websites got around 15k visits extra organic traffic on that page alone. Google picked up on my change and boosted the importance of that specific page once it appeared on the menu.

So bottom line: An SEO is capable of reading and interpreting data from analytics tools and figure out what kind of simple UX improvements you should make to send the right signals to Google and improve organic traffic.
Other UX related improvements SEOs can help you with: Google AMP; Google Rich Snippets, Progressive Web Apps and mobile first design because of the future change Google will implement, mobile first index.
No other person, expect an SEO specialist can provide the insights as well as the ideas needed to increase that organic traffic while working with the whole team (designer, programmers and marketing experts) to do so.

2. There is no better specialist to manage your brand inside search engines.

Bulding a brand online takes time and effort. There are plenty of tutorials out there explaining how to do that and most involve the same idea, make a bunch of social media accounts and pages and stay active while increasing the number of followers or likes.
Building a brand up inside search engines is not like that and although you may think of SEO as strictly technical people doing mostly on-page SEO work, you would be surprised how many of them have some solid online marketing knowledge as well as actively contributing to general online marketing plans and strategies. At least I do, I'm an active member of the marketing team, being part of their department.

What the SEO needs to understand and figure out is the target audience, it all starts with the personas and as soon as your SEO can figure that out he/her will be able to develop a successful brand strategy. Keep in mind the SEO is the one providing the keyword research to the copywriter, both specialists must work together to create the exact type of content potential costumers want to see and are trigged by.
The SEO knows how to make the most out of keywords research, trends, traffic, as well as using cool services such as using Google My Business to develop a bigger brand exposure inside Google Search or making sure anyone that searches the brand name gets exactly the info they were looking for.

3. SEO is a long term and almost constant success factor for websites. But you also gain the long term benefits.

If you ever get to a point where you get some significant and constant organic traffic, you will realize the importance of SEO. With ads, you need to pay a PPC agency as well as the ads themselves. With SEO you only need to pay the SEO expert, the only difference is if you ever stop working with the SEO the organic traffic will continue to flow if you ever decide to stop your PPC campaigns, you ads traffic will stop the very next second.

So of course paying for SEO services might be a big investment, of course, not seeing any changes for long periods of time can be a pain, but in the end, I believe organic traffic is the best traffic a website can get and therefore SEO experts might be the most valuable teammates you can get.