SEO — the mystical term you hear thrown around often when it comes to the topic of increasing your website traffic. Many people believe SEO is too difficult and time-consuming to be worthwhile. But that is not the case. The fundamentals of SEO are actually fairly straightforward. And with Google accounting for 57.8% of all web traffic, it’s definitely something worth learning about if you operate a website.

So why is SEO so damn important?

For starters, most web traffic comes from Google’s organic results. What are organic results exactly you ask? This refers to Google’s non-paid search results. Advertisers can’t buy or alter these results; they’re the ones the search engine thinks are the most relevant to the user’s search query.

Hundreds of signals are used by Google and other search engines to determine which pages to rank. And SEO is the process of boosting those signals to rank your page higher in the organic search results. In addition, SEO brings other benefits to the table for your website.

Here they are:

1. SEO gets you more traffic

Because the majority of people click one of the first few search results on their screen, ranking higher in the results usually means more traffic to your website.

2. SEO gets you consistent traffic

Search engine rankings typically result in both consistent and passive traffic. And that is rarely the case with platforms like social media and email marketing, which frequently result in traffic spikes that go away faster than you can say SEO.

This is due to the fact that social media networks are built to surface new content. Emails are frequently marked as read, forgotten, or end up in the spam folder. However, because the quantity of queries made on search engines is often steady from month to month, once you rank, traffic tends to be both consistent and passive.

3. SEO gets you ‘free’ traffic

Unlike paid advertising, search traffic is ‘free.’ This is significant since search engine advertisements can be costly. Creating content that ranks in Google isn’t free, but it’s usually less expensive than paying for ads.

4. SEO builds trust and credibility for your brand

If you’re at the top of the rankings, you’ll be perceived as an authority, which will almost certainly increase conversions and expand your customer base.

5. SEO ensures a good user experience

This is due to the fact that a good user experience is one of the major conditions for a high SEO score. Which, incidentally, also increases your website traffic.

But remember, it is a process…

These are the basic benefits of SEO for your website. But remember, it is a process, which means it will comprise constant reporting. And you should know the difference between bad SEO reports and good ones. In bad SEO reports, you get lost in pointless data, have no idea what work was done, and receive no useful comments. But good SEO reports provide you with crucial data summaries as well as easy-to-understand insights and an overview of the job completed.

Now let’s get your website ranked!