I find SEO (Search Engine Optimization) remains a mystery for most people. Not only because they simply don’t know how to do it, but generally the whole concept of “how can SEO be beneficial for me” is unclear. So if you’re looking forward to understand the benefits of SEO, you’ve come to the right place.
So let’s clarify all the possible benefits SEO can hold for you. You need to know why you’re doing something in order to fully understand the concept and being able to actually use it in practice.
Benefits Of SEO: What You’ll Find In This Article
Just a quick sneak peek into the 7 benefits of SEO. Click on any of these links if you want to read about one particular advantage:
- Generating Online Traffic For Free
- Helping You Establish Your Brand And Build Trust
- Making List Building Easier
- Building Passive Income
- Understanding Online Marketing
- Teaching You To Communicate With Your Market
- Generating Direct Sales
SEO Benefit #1: SEO Generates Online Traffic For Free
This is the most obvious reason, and it’s definitely an indirect goal as more traffic is not good for anything by itself, unless you know how to monetize it.
But if you’ve ever done anything online, you’ve learned to appreciate traffic. In fact the abundant flow of qualified visitors to your website (i.e. traffic) is the very cornerstone of every successful online business activity.
I find the most difficult challenge for any online business is to get traffic. If you have enough visitors, you can always find ways to monetize that traffic. But if there’s no one visiting your website, there are no tricks or online marketing secrets that can generate you a stable flow of money.
Big players in the online marketing field pay a fortune to get visitors. This is actually the reason why big companies like Google and Facebook thrive. They sell ad impressions to divert their own visitors and convert them into traffic for other websites. And because this game has been around for a long time, it has to work. All those billions of dollars spent on online traffic generation need to pan out, why would otherwise this whole online advertising industry flourish?
Of course not every traffic can be monetized right away. People are not always in buying mode when surfing the web. But sooner or later even those who are just looking around right now, will spend their money somewhere.
SEO Benefit #2: SEO Helps You Establish Your Brand And Build Trust
Before you can make substantial money online, you need to build trust. The lack of confidence from part of the audience is the main reason why people struggle to monetize their online presence.
It sounds easy to build an online business. If you have no experience, you might think that it’s all about tricks, website design, marketing copy and other magic settings. But nothing could be further from the truth. Just imagine yourself. How do you surf the Internet? How do you decide on where to spend your money? Which is the single most important factor that defines your purchasing decisions?
It all comes down to whether you trust that online seller or not. Of course anyone can sell a thing or too, even if no one knows them. But I suppose most of the money you spend online is with companies and people you know and trust. If you know the name or brand, it’s good. If someone you know recommends you that business, even better. If you’ve already shopped with them and you are satisfied, the best.
And this is exactly where we can utilize our SEO knowledge. Because even if you don’t make money directly, moreover if you don’t even convert someone into a website visitor, you can still benefit from simply being present in the search results related to your topic.
How can you do that?
You can make use of the fact of how search engines display your website in the search results (SERPs). Even if people don’t click on your website, they still see your name or brand. This is due to the fact that your brand name (your website’s name, your actual brand name or even your own name) is almost always displayed in the search results. By the way, read my article on Title tag SEO on how to manipulate this.
It is as simple as it gets. If people see your brand popping up again and again when they’re searching for something in your niche, they will subconsciously internalize your name, and get familiar with it. A brand or a person they’ve always known, will be their feeling when they see your name again.
Also, if they see someone popping up in a topic, they will unintentionally assume that he or she is an expert. Why else would Google or any other search engine show their website? I had customers telling me that the very reason they decided to do business with me was that they had seen my brand name again and again when they were searching in that particular topic.
And one more important thing to note here. Notice that I’m talking about popping up again and again in the search results in general, and not about appearing for one particular keyword. Most people unfamiliar with the real strength of SEO think that there exists that one special keyword they need to rank for, and all of their financial or business problems will magically be solved. Although there might be keywords like that, but you have no real chance to rank for those extremely lucrative keywords.
Instead you can find and target literally thousands of keywords in your niche effectively. This is the way to reach out to as many readers as possible, and to build that trust I’m talking about. And this method additionally ensures that you can rank any website in any topic.
SEO Benefit #3: SEO Makes List Building Easier
Oh yes, building a list. Whoever you ask about what the real deal in making money online is, it always comes down to building a list. A list of email subscribers that is. And I can just verify that. Your list will be your most powerful asset in monetizing your online presence, no matter what part of the world or what niche you operate in.
How to build your list and how to use it to your maximum benefit is a whole different topic, and would be a great idea for a next article. But simply put, you can build an incredible lucrative online business on a well targeted email list. And here is where SEO comes into the picture.
With the right tools in place, whenever someone comes to your website from any search engine, you won’t be forced to sell them right away anymore, loosing them otherwise for good. You simply need to move your visitor one step forward in your marketing funnel. That is, subscribe them to your email list.
SEO Benefit #4: Ideal For Building Passive Income
I find passive income is the holy grail everybody is looking for these days. On the other hand, most people don’t even understand what real passive income is, and they’ll actually never be able to obtain this type of revenue, especially in a stable, long term form. Except those who, among others, understand what SEO is all about, and who are persistent enough to use that knowledge to their own benefit.
Let’s see how SEO works in a nutshell, when it comes to generating passive income:
- You need to put in a lot of effort at the beginning in order for it to work. For months, you won’t see any results, but still have to continue doing it. You’ll easily have the feeling that it’s simply not working, all your invested energy has been in vain, and Google might favor anyone else but you.
- But if you don’t give up, just continue putting in the energy, once you reach that “critical mass” needed to start ranking. Then you’ll notice that like magic, more and more visitors will come to your website every day.
- Having surpassed this critical mass, even if you stop doing anything, traffic will keep on coming. Even if you don’t do anything, even if you forget about your website, Google will be shoveling a countless stream of visitors to it.
In other words, once you get at the stage of getting constant traffic from search engines, that traffic will just continue coming to your website, regardless of what you’re doing. Even when you do literally nothing, as the fruit of your previous efforts, you’ll experience a continuous flow of visitors.
It is actually much more difficult to loose traffic from search engines than obtain it.
And notice that this is exactly the same modus operandi that we expect from passive income. You work once, but benefit continuously onward.
SEO Benefit #5: SEO Makes You Understand Online Marketing
Even if you don’t plan on selling anything right now, there is a good chance that you want to make some money online sooner or later. We all need money after all. And just by understanding how SEO works, learning what type of content is consumed online and what’s not, you’ll learn more about online marketing than you could from any theoretical material.
In the path to perfecting your SEO knowledge, you’ll learn how to find out what concerns people. You’ll discover topics that can motivate hundreds or hundreds of thousands of people. You’ll also learn how to write in a manner that grabs people’s attention. While building a successful SEO website, you’ll even learn how to find those nukes and crannies in the fortresses built by your competitors where you can actually attack the market with the least effort resulting in the most payoff.
Never underestimate the power of SEO! Even if you have no idea right now about how to monetize this knowledge, even if you won’t ever monetize this knowledge, it will give you a practical expertise that you can exploit in many other areas.
SEO Benefit #6: SEO Teaches You To Communicate With Your Market
This is somewhat the same as the previous one, just from another point of view. The cornerstone of online success is communication. The better you are in communicating with your market, the more money you can make, and the more chances there are that you’ll eventually succeed.
Communication is a two-way action, but in online marketing you rarely see the response directly. You can see charts, aggregate data, you might even see if money is coming in or not. But that’s just not the same when someone personally tells you what they think.
This is actually one reason why there are so many entrepreneurs struggling in the online marketplace. They try to communicate to their audience not with their audience. They try to present their products or services, even their helpful thoughts, but there is no response. And no response in this case means no sales.
I’m not saying that doing SEO you’ll get direct response from your audience. That’s actually possible sometimes in the form of comments on your website, but that’s not happening every time.
But you can surely see the reaction your SEO content evokes. There are tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and others that will show you exactly what your audience likes, and what they don’t like. You don’t have to do anything else than watch and understand your data, and you’ll understand what’s working and what’s not. And by simply focusing on what’s working in SEO and forgetting about what’s not, not only can you reach better results every day, but this is the exact and practical way to learn how to communicate with your audience.
SEO Benefit #7: SEO Can Generate Direct Sales Of Course
Yes, generating direct sales can be a huge benefit of SEO. That is when someone is searching for your product or service with the intention of buying it instantly. Once they click on your website, you can convert them into buyers.
This is online money-making heaven, just what everyone is dreaming about. And it can happen. But more often than not you will profit from all the above benefits of SEO than simply generating direct sales.
As I already mentioned it, there are two main factors why this SEO benefit actually happened to be the last one in this list.
- People are not in constant buying mode when online.
- The more money you can make directly with a keyword, the more difficult it is to rank for.
So don’t rely solely on making money directly from SEO. Learn how to utilize this incredible online marketing tool for your benefit, and you can get much more of your online presence than you expect.