Search engine optimization is necessary for anyone trying to make a sale. Without it, your business is forced to rely too heavily on word-of-mouth recommendations and advertisements. The premise of SEO is simple enough: it’s a technique used to help your business rank and appear higher on search engine results pages, which in turn increases site awareness. The higher a site appears on search engines, the more likely a user is to discover it.
Unlike advertising, once you’ve invested in SEO, the benefits are long-term, and can stay with a site for years to come. Businesses depend on SEO to stay ahead of their competition. By appearing on the first page of search results when someone searches for a product or service related to your business, you increase your website’s traffic and you reel in additional potential consumers.
Conversely, if your website isn’t one of the first a consumer sees, your business will likely miss out on many opportunities. In fact, 75% of search engine users won’t scroll past the first page when they look through search results. Therefore, a spot on the first page is critical for meeting online business goals. If you still have your doubts, take a look at these four companies (of different sizes and caliber) that benefitted tremendously from SEO.
FedEx
Even one of the largest shipping and delivery companies in the world needed a search engine boost. FedEx was struggling to garner consistent traffic to their website, and their business was suffering as a result. The company employed local SEO strategists to improve their organic search traffic. A full-site audit helped discover key areas for improvement, including better keyword targeting. Listing optimization helped boost their organic search traffic by a staggering 50%, which resulted in a 26% increase in conversions.
Rocky Mountain Ski & Board
This online ski shop enlisted the services of AIS Media to help increase sales. With the majority of their customers shopping online for ski gear, they knew they needed a reliable way to reach them. The agency optimized the store’s highest value keywords, and reverse-engineered the SEO strategies of some of the best players in the market. The results speak for themselves: there was a 77% increase in organic traffic and 73% increase in revenue from organic traffic year over year.
Maldive Traveller
This tourism company had an online strategy was lackluster. Their online marketing campaign failed so dramatically that they reached out to an SEO company for advanced help. The company reinvented Maldive Traveller’s strategy and used to improve the website’s content and keyword usage. Maldive Traveller saw a 40% increase in visits to their website per day, and an increase in users that visited the website more than once.
Meridian Financial Advisors
Meridian Financial, small-fee financial advisor from Massachusetts, hit it big with SEO after just ten months of working with their strategist. The company was gaining virtually no new clients via their online presence and needed to remedy the situation.
After working with an SEO team, Meridian Financial Advisors watched as their average monthly website traffic more than doubled. Before optimizing, MFA’s website received an average of 128 visits per month. One year later, the visits were up to nearly 450 per month. Client engagement boosted significantly and Meridian Financial Advisor’s considers the results highly successful.
Private MD Labs – Medical Services
Private MD Labs offers medical lab and blood tests for a variety of health conditions. The company began working with an SEO company to help sell more blood tests through their online store. Their company provided conversion rate optimization and SEO to improve the company’s web traffic. Results were better than expected. The website experienced a 319% increase in traffic for competitive searches and an improvement in their organic search rank.
Search engine optimization can really go a long way towards improving your website’s traffic and with nearly 80% of Americans shopping online, web traffic is extremely valuable. There are many more cases beyond the four described that demonstrate how businesses use SEO to increase their online traffic and conversions. To create your own success story, it’s important to consider the benefits of SEO and their long-term potential.
As competition increases, and hundreds of thousands of new businesses open in the United States alone on a monthly basis, you’ll soon realize that to stay ahead of the curve, being searchable is a necessity. Keep in mind that hiring an SEO team that is well-versed on the topic is an investment into the business, and should be treated as such.