How to use SEO to Increase Your Business’s Online Sales

It’s 2013. So if you have a small business, you probably already have a website to go along with it. You might even have invested in social media like a Facebook page or a Twitter account as well. These are all wonderful things, but if you’d like to increase your online sales, there is nothing better than some good old search engine optimization. Search engine optimization (or SEO as it’s known in the internet marketing biz), is one of the best ways to get your website noticed and increase your online sales. Here is some information regarding SEO, and just a few reasons why you should be taking advantage of it for your website.

Here’s one reason SEO is so important: 93 percent of internet users begin their online experience by visiting a search engine. And once they’ve started searching for something, they don’t want to go very far past the first page of results. A full 75 percent of people who perform an internet search don’t even bother going past the first page, finding whatever they need right on the first results page. And paying for sponsored results that appear right at the top of the page doesn’t really help either. 79 percent of search engine users only click on organic search results, while 80 percent say they rarely or never click on sponsored results.

So what’s a small business that wants to increase its online sales to do? Make an investment in a company that will provide your business with quality SEO. A high quality SEO company can do several things to improve your search engine ranking. One of the simplest ways to increase traffic to your website is to make its code more search engine friendly. An SEO company will be able to edit your website’s code directly to put it higher in the search results. Additionally, an Seo firm can create quality content that links back to your website. Genuine links from useful content can be great for your website’s search engine ranking.

But maybe you’re thinking this whole SEO thing isn’t worth it and you don’t really care about getting more online sales. Quite the contrary. Compared to traditional marketing methods such as direct mail or print advertising, SEO leads have a much higher close rate. 14.6 percent compared to 1.7 percent for the outbound marketing of direct mail and print advertising. And online sales themselves are certainly not going away, either. Forrester Research predicts that online sales are expected to grow from 7 to 9 percent of all retail sales by 2016.