With an estimated 80% of users shopping online- yes, SEO is definitely worth it. Not only is it worth it, but investing in SEO is critical if you want to compete with the other players in your industry.
If you are evaluating whether SEO is right for your business, here are a few questions to consider:
Are potential customers searching online for your services or products?
When deciding whether or not to invest in SEO, it is important to assess the existing opportunity that you are not capitalizing on. For example, say you are currently producing sustainably made running sneakers, and you are not sure if there is search interest for your product. A quick search using a keyword research tool shows just a few potential keywords that type of business could target:
In this table, KD represents keyword difficulty, or how difficult it is to rank for a keyword on a scale of 1 (the lowest) to 100 (the highest. Volume represents the average number of monthly searches for that particular keyword in the US. GV represents global monthly search volume. As you can see, just looking at the 4 relevant keywords above, there are 1,740 customers a month in the US searching for this business’s products. By not optimizing for SEO, this business would lose out on targeting those customers.
Are users currently finding my website?
Do you currently have an online presence? If so, are you reaching organic customers? You can evaluate this by analyzing the data in Google Analytics or Google Search Console. If you are not seeing a lot of organic users coming to your site, this is a sign that it is worth investing in SEO.
Another consideration is whether the traffic you are getting is branded or non branded. Are you only recruiting users that are searching for your specific brand or product? For example, if you are Adidas, are you reaching organic customers through branded keywords (“Adidas shoes”, “Adidas Samba shoes”) or non branded keywords (“white running sneakers”, “neutral colored sneakers”)?
If most of your traffic is coming from branded searches, and not non branded, this is another sign that you should consider investing in SEO. Optimizing your website for relevant, non branded keywords will help you tap into a wider audience.
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