- Michael Knowles
- 3 Min Read
- Blog, SEO
Why Your Business Needs SEO Software [Part One]
Why Your Small Business Needs SEO
Increase brand awareness
Awareness is the first stage of the customer journey. Without being aware of your brand, it’s fair to assume your business isn’t going to do very well. When consumers want to learn more about a new business, product, or service, 62% of customers use a search engine when they want to find out more about a business, product or service. While 41% of customers use them when they’re ready to purchase. This means if you’re not appearing in a search engine, you’re only appealing to 38% of your potential customer base. That’s a lot of missed opportunities.
Increase website traffic
Google processes 2 Trillion searches a year. That equates to about 5 billion searches a day, with 228 million searches an hour. If Google was a high street, that’s like 67% of the earth’s population walking along it every day. That’s a lot of digital footfall your business could be attracting. With 53.3% of all website traffic coming from organic search, SEO is by far the best way to attract that potential traffic to your business.
Keyword Research
In order to tap into the huge pool of potential customers which Google provides, you need to know what terms and phrases potential online users are using to find their desired product or service. That’s where keyword research comes in. Yes, there are some ways in which keyword research can be done without a dedicated SEO platform. Using Google Trends and Google Ads for example. Or other 3rd party paid for sites such as ubersuggest. However these each come with their own problems and limitations. Google Trends is more topic-focused than actual keywords and doesn’t give you detailed metrics. Google Ads keyword planner requires you to create and launch an ad campaign before you can freely access its keyword planner, and is primarily PPC focused on info. Most 3rd party software will only offer a limited number of keywords to research or a limited number of suggestions before your hit with a paywall.
Backlink analysis
Backlinks are key to a successful SEO strategy. They’re what gives your website credibility and trust in the eyes of Google. Without it, the search engine may not ‘feel comfortable’ in suggesting your website to searchers. There is frankly no way to monitor your backlink profile without some powerful SEO software. Not having a handle on your websites domain authority, toxicity levels or spam score could greatly impede your ability to rank highly. With only 0.78% of searchers clicking on results on the second page of Google… well, you can see for yourself how important getting on that first page is.
Competitor analysis
Knowing what your competitors are up to is essential to any marketing strategy. In terms of SEO, competitor analysis plays a key role in two main areas. Keywords and backlinks. As discussed earlier, you need to know what terms customers are using to find products and services likes yours. Competitors are the best place to start. By knowing what your competitors are ranking for, you can begin to target the same keywords so you can take a share of their traffic. Plus you can also use this information to find keyword gaps. These are keywords that your competitors rank highly for, and you don’t. This is a great way of catching those “low hanging fruit” by identifying keywords your competitor is on page one for which you are on pages 2-10 for. These are ideal candidates for your keyword strategy to focus on.
In regards to backlinks, knowing where your competitors are getting their backlinks has two main advantages. The first being it gives you a good starting point for your own backlink strategy. The second is that by being that because the value of backlinks is calculated both by the domain authority of the referring site and on their uniqueness, by obtaining the same backlink you deprive your competitor of this uniqueness bonus. Reducing their ranking power, and increasing yours.
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Part two of Why Your Business Needs SEO Software coming soon!