Why Is SEO Still Important?

With all the talk about social media marketing being the new king of traffic delivery, you would think it was the only method. In the cold hard light of day, most businesses still rely on search traffic, and they will for years to come. Social media marketing and search engine optimization complement each other, they certainly don’t work against each other.

There is an easy way to look as this issue – why chase only half the traffic when you can gain traffic from both channels?  The number of people using search engines to find information is still growing, even if it is only slowly. More importantly, when you look at the volume of search undertaken each day, if you were to receive .001% of that traffic, it would most likely crash your servers – that’s a lot of traffic and a lot of search queries being run.

So, why is SEO still important? Search engines are still supplying traffic for free. The only cost to you is the time effort that you or a consultant put into optimizing your pages to rank as highly as possible in those search results. Do it well and your web site will receive significant traffic from the search results.

In many cases, SEO serves one further purpose, a purpose that many don’t consider. A good SEO program will ensure that your web site is put together in a very slick, tidy and well-managed fashion. Whether your traffic is coming from the search engines or social media, that tidy and slick web site will gain instant approval from visitors. Without the housekeeping that SEO demands, web sites would run out of control, will start to look untidy, and will most likely frustrate users who can’t find what they are looking for.

Search engine optimization helps your web pages to rank highly in search results. It also helps you to stay in control of your web site. Both are important if you want to be successful.