Marieke van de Rakt
Marieke van de Rakt is the CEO of Yoast. Her main focus is on growing the company. She attaches great importance to maintaining an open and friendly corporate culture. Marieke is also heavily involved in the marketing of Yoast and with the Yoast SEO Academy, the online course platform.
Why is SEO so important? And why will SEO continue to be important in the future? Isn’t it much easier to advertise to attract visitors to your website? In this blog post I explain the importance of SEO. I’ll also go into the differences between SEO and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, and the benefits of SEO over a marketing strategy that focuses solely on advertising. Let us begin!
To make sure we’re on the same page, I’ll briefly explain what SEO is and what pay-per-click advertising looks like. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the practice of optimizing your pages so that they get a high position in the organic search results from search engines like Google.
Pay per click advertising is the advertising that you see at the top of these search results pages. This is an advertising model where an advertiser pays when someone clicks on the ad.
Example of advertising and organic result on Google’s search results page
SEO can lead to sooooo much traffic
A successful SEO strategy can generate LOTS of traffic. If your website ranks high on Google’s results pages, it will lead to a lot of organic traffic. Overall, organic search results have a much higher click-through rate than ads on Google. Organic search actually drives 53% of website traffic while paid search only accounts for 27%. That could be because a lot of people (25.8%) use ad blockers and don’t even see the ads on Google. In addition, the “normal” search results may simply match the search query better or feel more trustworthy.
You should try to rank on the first page of google and preferably the first result. The first page of Google’s organic search results accounts for about 92% of all traffic. Almost a third of all clicks go to the first result on the organic search pages. If you get the tenth (last) result on that first page, the click-through rate actually drops to 2.5%. This shows us that being the number one or one of the top results really pays off!
SEO has a high return on investment
SEO can be a lot of work. You need to write great content, do keyword research, and make sure your internal link structure is top notch. But every effort you put into SEO is always an effort that pays off! SEO has a really high return on investment (ROI). Not only is the average conversion rate higher when it comes to SEO, but it’s an investment that keeps paying off. SEO is always on and although you may need to update your content from time to time, you don’t have to pay to keep it in search results. If your content is good and you make sure your website is accessible and easy to use, Google will show your content in the results. That means you will see ROI long after your investment.
You need to have great content to convince people of your product or service anyway, even if you are getting your traffic through advertising. It’s not that much work turning great articles into SEO friendly articles that will help you rank in the search engines! And once you turn your blog into a traffic generating asset, you can get tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of unique visitors every month with little extra effort.
SEO is very sustainable
Advertising is never a sustainable way of driving traffic to a website. You have to keep doing it, you have to keep paying to keep attracting traffic. SEO is a long-term strategy and takes time, but it’s also a solid, long-term, sustainable strategy. A good website with quality content and brand authority won’t stop ranking overnight.
SEO is easy
Advertising can be difficult. In the future, it could very well be that advertising will become even harder and more expensive. Attracting the right audience and retargeting audiences are profitable advertising tactics. However, there is a chance that these types of advertising tactics will become more difficult as data protection laws become stricter. SEO as a strategy is a pretty straightforward strategy that privacy laws won’t change that much. It would be a good thing to invest in SEO now so that you have an edge over your competition who are still (only) running ads.
SEO is important because it affects the buying cycle!
The main difference between SEO and advertising is search intent. When people search Google, they are looking for something in particular. If a person is looking for a particular type of jeans or shampoo, they will likely buy those jeans or get that shampoo. The target audience that you can reach through search is a highly motivated audience, a target audience that has a tendency to buy. They are much easier to convince to buy your stuff when they are looking for it than when they come across an ad.
SEO is important because the people you want an SEO strategy to reach are the most motivated people. Make sure that when people looking for products you sell can easily find your website when they want to buy something. And make sure you are ranking on the right site!
SEO is becoming more and more important as Google gets smarter
SEO has always been important, but it is becoming more and more important. That’s because over time, Google is getting smarter to understand texts. You need to have well-optimized copy and at the same time implement a great schema.org implementation to get these fantastic rich results. These rich search results actually have a 58% CTR, compared to 41% for non-rich search results.
To have a chance of outperforming your competitors in the search engines, you have to do your best! Using an SEO tool can get you started. In fact, research shows that 73% of content marketing teams use an SEO tool for their marketing efforts. Our Yoast SEO plugin can be one of those tools that will help you rise in search results and attract more visitors.
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Conclusion: SEO is a sustainable and long-term marketing strategy
SEO will be a bit more work than setting up an advertising campaign. It won’t bring you instant results. But in the long run it is the most important strategy for driving traffic to your website. So don’t underestimate its power and start working on your SEO right away!
Read more: WordPress SEO: The Definitive Guide to Higher Rankings for WordPress Sites »
