Being a business owner or an entrepreneur is not easy in today's highly competitive digital landscape. Although brimming with creative ideas, these people often find themselves overwhelmed with their marketing campaigns. They struggle to determine what they should focus on. Although there are multiple ways by which you can increase your website traffic, many aren't able to decide on which one will bring them the best results. 

Many start-up owners do not usually have elaborate marketing budgets. They don't have the kind of advertising prowess that giant multinational companies have. They need something that would be cost-effective and bring them the desired outcome. 

Enter search engine optimization or SEO. This inexpensive digital marketing strategy has enabled countless small to mid-scale enterprises to establish a robust online presence for themselves. Through it, you can monitor and measure the amount of traffic your site gets. SEO entails optimizing every single site content to make it rank higher on search engines. 

The better your website's ranking, the more visitors and traction it'll gain. As a result, you can effectively enhance your brand awareness and visibility. 

In order to decide whether you should focus on SEO as your effective digital marketing channel, you must weigh its pros and cons. Let us break it down for you. 

The Pros of Using SEO for Your Online Business

Gain a steady stream of targeted traffic

Let's start by giving you a statistic to ponder over. According to sources, over 2.2 trillion searches are conducted in Google in a single year. A simple calculation will allow you to know that that's roughly 5,922,000,000 searches every single day of the year. It means that a search engine-optimized website can easily tap into this massive source of constantly flowing free and targeted traffic.

Why do we call it free? Free means that you don't pay for the traffic to enter your website. You don't need any paid advertising channel to direct the traffic flow to your site. It will inevitably bring down your costs and execute other crucial SEO tasks like building links and content production.

Expose your business services to people who are looking for them.

People everywhere use search engines for an overarching common purpose. It's to discover a solution to the issues or concerns bothering them. In their quest to discover the perfect answer for themselves, they tap on various links they find on the World Wide Web. More than half of them (70%) come from organic results they saw while using search engines. 

In the search engine result pages, close to 40% of people simply tap on the first few items they see on the list. They don't bother to go down this list or turn to the next page of the search engine results. In such a case, if your website is among the few top results, it will see a more significant number of people coming over to it. When it has valuable information to offer to such people, you can ensure that your business visibility will get a major boost.

Generate more leads

Did you know that SEO generates leads as much as a 14.6 percent close rate compared to the 1.7 close rate marketers get just from email or print advertising? Online users from sectors like insurance, finance, and airlines have a 93 percent likelihood of tapping the first few search results. In comparison, those from the electronic domain stand at 44 percent. After reading these statistics, it won't be difficult for you to find how significant it is for your business to rank on the search engine results pages.

Every business owner desires to gain as many conversions as possible. It is entirely possible when you have a good SEO strategy in place.

Build a strong authority in your domain

To enhance your website's ranking on search engines, you need to have great content. Only high-quality content appeals to Google as well as your target audience. If your content satisfies users' queries, they will find it interesting and share it. It will help you to build a robust authority and rank high. Thus, you will enhance your likelihood of getting more conversions and coming across as a thought leader.

Are There Any Cons of Using SEO?

SEO is hands down one of the most effective ways to build a robust online presence, especially for small and medium-sized business owners. No other marketing technique can provide the kind of results that this strategy can provide, especially in such a cost-effective manner. 

The only con associated with it is that it takes a considerable time to get you long-term results. Success in digital marketing accrues from establishing your site and acquiring a strong presence in various search engines. This procedure entails your content getting indexed by these search engines. It can take anywhere from a few hours to days to even weeks. So, those businesses who want instant results from their SEO campaign should look for something else. 

It also requires a good amount of time to achieve a lucrative return on investment from your marketing efforts. It's not suitable for businesses that want good revenues in the short term. Every marketer or business owner desires their website to be on the first page of the search engine. There's no immediate guarantee that you'll gain this top spot when you direct your efforts in this direction. You need to be quite patient and wait for a considerable time till you see your website ranking high for the relevant keyword.

Lastly, every marketer can tell you how difficult it is to constantly keep pace with the ever-changing search algorithms of Google. The search giant has been consistently changing the algorithms for as long as 2014. In such a case, even a well-founded SEO campaign can crumble in a few days if not monitored according to the changing guidelines. So you need a lot of resilience throughout this process.

Wrapping up

There's no doubt that SEO is crucial for every business to flourish in today's dynamic digital environment. Although there are certain risks associated with it, the long-term benefits it provides definitely outweigh them. In the face of the many risks that a business owner constantly faces, the only thing riskier for them will be not to undertake any SEO efforts at all.