Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often be viewed as a difficult, tech driven discipline that is expensive and not something that all companies need. Small businesses often think they won’t benefit from spending money on online marketing or don’t know where to focus their budgets. To help you understand the potential of SEO and how it should be key to your marketing plan, take a look at these compelling stats:
1 – International Telecommunication Union (ITU) research reports that the number of internet users across the globe has now exceeded two billion. In 2010 more than 226 million new people became internet users. IDC predicts that 2.7 billion people worldwide will be online by 2015. That’s a lot of potential customers.
2 – The average adult that is online, in the UK in this study, spends 22 hours and 15 minutes on the internet each month (according to the UK Online Measurement Company). That’s an increase of 65% compared to just three years ago. The internet is becoming a more important part of each of our lives each year.
3 – People are spending a lot of time and money online, but does that necessarily mean that you need SEO? Yes. 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine (Forrester). You cannot afford to be missing out on that many potential visitors.
4 – Although you should optimize for all search engines, it makes sense to prioritize Google. Google dominates all search engines and this allows you to focus your efforts like a laser. Google received more than 92% of search engine traffic in 2010, according to Statcounter.com. The runner up, Bing, gained just 3.17% of search engine traffic.
5 – Optify showed in a recent study that the top ranking website has an average click-through rate of 37%, while 60% of the clicks go to the top three results. It is crucial to work your way to one of these spots using search engine optimization in order to build a high volume of site traffic.
Clearly SEO is crucial to businesses big or small in efforts to generate business and is often has the best ROI of any marketing medium available due to the focused nature of searches.