The Benefits of Good SEO
A robust SEO strategy provides a foundation for a thriving online presence, delivering benefits that compound over time such as:
- Increased, High-Quality Traffic: The primary goal of SEO is to increase visibility. When your pages rank at the top of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP), your visibility skyrockets. More importantly, good SEO focuses on attracting the right traffic—users who are actively searching for the exact products, services, or information you offer.
- Building Trust and Credibility: Users automatically trust Google. When your website consistently appears on the first page of results for search terms relevant to your industry, it makes people believe that your brand is an authoritative and trustworthy source. People are more likely to click on and engage with a business they perceive as a leader in their field.
- Sustainable and Cost-Effective Growth: Unlike paid advertising, which stops generating traffic the moment your budget runs out, SEO is a long-term investment that grows in strength the longer it’s in use. Once you’ve earned a top ranking, it continues to drive free organic traffic 24/7.
- Improved User Experience (UX): Modern SEO goes hand-in-hand with user experience. Best practices, such as improving site speed, ensuring mobile-friendliness, and creating easy to use site navigation, are all crucial SEO factors. By optimizing for search engines, you are creating a positive experience for users, leading them to build trust with your brand and website.
The Cost of Poor SEO and Neglected Best Practices
In contrast, ignoring SEO or, worse, using outdated methods can hurt a website’s performance and growth. Some negative effects you may see are:
Plummeting Search Rankings and Invisible Content: The most immediate and painful consequence of poor SEO is the loss of visibility. Without proper keyword research, optimization of title tags, and a healthy backlink profile, your pages will be buried past the first page, where up to 75% of users never venture. If search engines cannot understand what your content is about, it simply won’t rank, making your entire website virtually invisible to potential customers.
Terrible User Experience and High Bounce Rates: Technical SEO flaws are often a user’s nightmare. Two of the most common examples of these flaws are:
- Slow-loading pages, which can be caused by large image files or clunky code, create impatient users to “bounce” (leave the site) quickly.
- A design that looks broken on a smartphone, which alienates the majority of today’s mobile searchers.
SEO Penalties and Loss of Authority: Attempting to “outsmart” the system with old SEO tactics—like keyword stuffing (overloading a page with keywords)—will likely lead to a penalty from search engines. These penalties can result in a massive, immediate drop in rankings, or even complete de-indexing of your site. Recovering from a penalty is a time-consuming and expensive uphill battle that can take months or even years.
Not Regularly Checking SEO Best Practices: By neglecting to continuously improve your SEO, you are putting long-term and new customer relationships at risk for your website. You can easily fall behind in your rankings with search engines and start losing your place on the first page of search results.
Are you ready to start your SEO journey?
Some simple items you can start checking and improving on your website today are:
- Do your pages on your site load under 3 seconds?
- How does your website look and function on a phone? Is it easy and fast for users?
- Are you using keywords and meta descriptions for each page on your site?
If you answered no to one or more of these questions, don’t worry! At Enthusiast we help clients improve their online presence and boost their SEO very frequently.
Reach out to us today to schedule a quick call and work on updating your site! And don’t forget to come back for the final part in our 7-part series on signs it may be time for a website redesign!
