The short answer is Yes!

Your business should be investing in SEO. Search engine optimization offers a way to increase traffic without paying for each and every click.

When you run PPC ads, you’ll be charged for every single click that comes to your website through that channel. However, if your website ranks organically on the search engines, this traffic is essentially free (at least in terms of a cost-per-click). Of course, it takes investment into skills and resources to rank a website on the SERPs (Search Engine Result Page).

If you’re able to rank your website at the top of the search engines, you’ll benefit from a stream of traffic that won’t have click costs associated with it, and that won’t stop when ads are turned off. Rank organically, and you’ll enjoy 24/7 visibility.

But let’s also remember that organic search is responsible for an average of 53% of total site traffic. If you’re ignoring SEO, your competitors are enjoying this traffic. Most businesses cannot ignore the importance of SEO. No matter what type of company you are, whether you’re a local business, sell online, or are a global enterprise, you need to be paying attention to your SEO strategy.

SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher on the search engines. But how does SEO work?

Google uses over 200 ranking factors, and these allow the search engine’s algorithms to rank websites based upon the relevancy and authority of their pages.

“Google is striving to recommend the most relevant answer from the most trustworthy source in the most appropriate format for its user.”

To succeed at SEO, you need to ensure that your content is the most relevant result for a specific search query and that your website is seen as a trustworthy source. This is an ongoing process and never ends. It requies you to monitor and tweak as results change in Google.

If your website isn’t ranking on Google, there are a few reasons why that could be. But first, head to Google and run a site: search for your website.

e.g., “site:everzocial.com”

If you see your site’s web pages listed, you know that your site is indexed. Reasons why your website isn’t ranking could be that:

• Your site is new and hasn’t built up sufficient authority to rank for competitive search queries. You can’t launch a website and expect to rank for your target queries overnight; you need to demonstrate that you deserve to rank.

• Your content doesn’t match the searcher’s intent or lacks in-depth analysis or quality compared to the pages that rank for the queries you’re looking at. You need to ensure that the pages you serve are at least as good as, ideally better than, what’s already ranking.

If you don’t see any of your website’s pages listed, this means that it has not been indexed. Reasons for this could include:

• Your website is blocking search engines from crawling it (usually in your robots.txt file) or is instructing them not to index it (generally using noindex tags). Resolve these blocks, and you should see your site indexed.

• Your site has launched very recently (within a few days), and you have not submitted the site to Google or linked to it from anywhere, meaning it hasn’t yet been indexed. Set up Google Search Console and request indexing.

• Your site has received a sitewide manual penalty for violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This is rare and unlikely. However, you would need to have been using some seriously black-hat SEO tactics for this to happen.

Think about it this way: the internet is made up of two things—content, and links between content. When search engines first started indexing web pages, they needed a way to determine which pages were most relevant to certain queries—a system of ranking.

The quality and number of backlinks pointing to a page immediately became a factor in determining that page’s rank. Backlinks represent a vote of confidence from one site to another. The more quality backlinks your page earns, the more valuable it is in the eyes of the search engine, and the more likely it is to achieve a high ranking.

You need to determine whether your website’s organic traffic has dropped suddenly or gradually over time.

If this has happened suddenly…

• Check whether or not your website has accidentally had noindex tags added. This can sometimes happen when developers move a site from a test environment to live, forgetting to remove these. If these are left in place, they will cause your website to be de-indexed. If you use WordPress, check:
  Settings > Reading > Search Engine Visibility
  This box should not be ticked.

• Check Google Search Console to see whether your site has been removed from the SERPs due to malware. If Googe deems that your site could be harmful to users, you may find that this happens, usually, if your site has been hacked. You can find out more about how to request a review once you’ve fixed the issues here.
• Your site may have been impacted by a manual action, although this is unlikely. You can check the manual actions report in Google Search Console by heading to:
  Security & Manual Actions > Manual actions
  If you see an issue listed, this is potentially the reason for your site’s traffic loss. If there is no issue listed, you can rest assured that this is not the problem.

If this has happened gradually…

• Google may have rolled out a core algorithm update that has seen other sites gain traffic and rank above yours. As Google says,

“There’s nothing wrong with pages that may perform less well in a core update. They haven’t violated our webmaster guidelines nor been subjected to a manual or algorithmic action, as can happen to pages that do violate those guidelines. In fact, there’s nothing in a core update that targets specific pages or sites. Instead, the changes are about improving how our systems assess content overall. These changes may cause some pages that were previously under-rewarded to do better.”

• The advice here is to analyze what the top-ranked sites are doing that you aren’t.
• The more likely reason is that your competitors are rolling out a more aggressive SEO strategy than you are, and they’ve overtaken your organic visibility.

 

In short, they’ve earned some of the rankings that you previously held. In this case, it makes sense to conduct a full analysis of your competitor’s strategies to understand where you can improve.  If you are concerned this has happened to your site, we offer a free analysis and consultation. No obligation to buy anything, we just want to help you understand what is happening to your site.

Well, as is the answer for many SEOs: it depends. ??

If you are doing SEO yourself, long gone are the days of launching a website, optimizing your title tags, and ranking in a few weeks. You can’t launch a website and expect it to rank for competitive search queries overnight. It takes time for a website to perform organically as Google ranks relevant sites that have built up authority.

You need to earn your way to the top of Google and deserve to be there.

A good answer is somewhere between six months and one year, but this is very much based on the level of resources you allocate to your strategy, the level of competition, and what others who compete for the same queries are doing.

It might only take a few months to rank for a local term (e.g., plumber in [location]), whereas it could take years to rank a new website for, let’s say, the term “laptops.”

And Google’s John Mueller recently said that it could take up to a year for them to figure out where a new site should rank, and that fluctuations are expected during this timeframe.

At Everzocial, we have developed some unique technology along with tried and true processes that allow our customers to get ranked for niche keywords in 90 to 120 days.

If online marketing is an important part of your business (and, to be frank, it should be!) then SEO can be a serious asset. It costs nothing to do a little keyword research, come up with a content strategy, and regularly practice external and internal link building. And while SEO may not return immediate, tangible conversions, it is a pivotal part of driving organic traffic; and driving organic traffic is a pivotal part of building brand awareness and familiarity.

If your audience can rely on you to deliver relevant, high-quality resources at the top of the SERP, they’ll be that much closer to purchasing your product! Is more revenue and profit worth it? Only you can answer that question.