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SEO is one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted terms in the world of marketing. That’s right, folks: I said marketing. While SEO has been painted as some sort of black-magic secret that requires an internet illuminati membership to learn the ways of, at its core, it is a marketing method. SEO’s unfair characterization as a kind of alchemy over the past decade has caused many otherwise savvy business people to devalue its importance as part of a good, solid marketing plan for small, mid-sized, and large businesses. I find this extremely unfortunate, because SEO is a very viable marketing outlet that can, in concert with effective landing pages and content, bring your business qualified leads and customers. Moreover, studies have shown that SEO can have a better ROI than traditional forms of marketing like TV and print ads. It isn’t magic, and SEO alone is not going to transform your business from a shop in your parents’ basement to a Fortune 500 company. But neither is any other single form of advertising. What it can do is provide a business visibility, branding, traffic, a high ROI, credibility, and insight into customer behavior. Let’s discuss each of these in turn. SEO is Good for Business Visibility and Branding When people search for your products and Branding services, you obviously want to appear as high in the search engine rankings as possible, but the reasons for this are more than just because you want them to click through to your website. In fact, there is a certain amount of value in simply appearing in search results for terms directly related to your business. For instance, most searchers don’t just simply search once, click on some websites, and be done with it. Instead, they search, click on some websites, edit their search terms, search again, click on some websites, further hone their search terms, search again, and so on. So what does this mean for your business? It means that if you can continually show in all these search results that you are gaining more and more mindshare with each potential customer. Chances are very good that they will eventually click through to your website, and since you continually displayed in all their search results, they will trust you that much more. Which brings us to the next reason why SEO is important for your business. SEO Provides Your Business Credibility Searchers make mental notes of the rankings for the terms they enter into Google and other search engines. They may not realize it, but they do. And in the minds of consumers, your ranking is a vote of confidence — “Google says this business is relevant, so that must be the case.” This may sound a bit far-fetched, but let’s look at it like this: back in the golden age of the yellow pages, if you were looking for a plumber, did you feel more confident in calling the guy on the seventh page of the listings, or did you, like most people, start from the first page and work your way through? Your customers may not admit it, but high search rankings makes you more credible in their eyes.
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