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The rumors about SEO death are as old as online marketing. Yet, search engine optimization continues to live, although in a slightly different way.

As for 2019, the number of daily searches on Google is somewhere between 5.5 billion and 2 trillion. So, as long as people are still asking Google, SEO will continue to stay relevant for content publishers and businesses alike.

For example, the search term “digital marketing” has 450,000 monthly searches, and even long tail keywords, such as “which SEO plugin is best for WordPress” has 50 monthly searches, and judging from the number of search results for this query – lots of competitors.

But, only few of these results are even visible to the human eye and most of them are well hidden in the second page and lower. So, what makes the difference between complete anonymity and constant traffic? The answer is SEO.

Some Background – What is SEO?

SEO is the series of actions taken to convince Google that your webpage provides the most relevant answer to a given query. To choose the best answer from the millions of possibilities Google uses different factors such as the occurrences of the keywords in the text, the page’s structure, incoming links and more. Websites that succeed to work these factors for their advantage can theoretically guarantee a constant stream of visitors from the world’s largest search engine.

Although Google’s ranking algorithm changes on a regular basis and it can make websites drop down in second. And as if it’s not enough – the search results themselves change all the time, the paid results takes up bigger and more prominent space, and more queries return “zero click” results. Still, SEO offer something that no other online marketing channel can offer.

Some Reasons to Stick with SEO

1. More users click on organic search results

According to several researches from recent years, organic CTR (click-through rate) is significantly higher than paid CTR. It means that even if you have an endless PPC budget (and you probably don’t), organic traffic from the same keywords would probably generate more traffic.

2. SEO is a long-term investment

Unlike paid marketing channels (from PPC to traditional offline marketing), where traffic is generated as long as you keep paying Google/Facebook/Taboola/Outbrain, when investing in SEO you may continue generate traffic for a long time. Although SEO is not completely free and requires time, effort and resources, organic traffic doesn’t disappear once you pull the plug on the media budget.

3. SEO helps you reach the target audience

Potential clients often visit Google to solve a specific problem. Yet, they may use different search queries according to their intent.

For example, if you are an SEO company, people can visit your site after asking Google the following questions:

• How to get my website found on Google
• How to be number 1 on Google

Later, when those searchers will learn more about SEO and look for a company, they may ask Google about prices, recommendations, local SEO companies and even specific brands and expertise.

Each stage in the customers’ journey offers an opportunity to write content that will answer those questions and solve their problems. Although many of these search queries usually won’t have a significant search volume, they may still send visitors to your site.

4. Your competitors are probably doing SEO

Whether you own a local business or an ecommerce website, if your customers can’t find you when they google your products or services – they’ll probably find someone else. Researches show that being on Google’s first page usually doesn’t help, and CTR drops with the ranking. On average, the first position gets 30% of the clicks, the second position – only 15%, the 3-5 positions get between 5% and 10% of all clicks, and 5-6 positions get about 2.5% of the clicks. So, if you’re website is at the bottom of the first page, or even at the second page and farther, you would probably get only a small portion of traffic, leads and conversions.

But, don’t despair. This injustice also has some advantages: your competitors are probably doing something to outrank you, so you can analyze their activity and get inspired.

To summarize, SEO helps you to reach your potential customers where they are – on Google. And you will not be there, your competitors will reach them before you. Do you want to start? Contact us.