Today, in an era when seemingly everyone has an online presence, it’s easy to get lost in the mix. Statistics show that if your business doesn’t appear on the first one or two pages of major search engines like Google or Bing, odds are your potential customers will never find your website. For that reason, it’s more important than ever to rank at the top of the search engines.

Our cost-effective search engine optimization techniques can help you achieve your goals by using targeted keywords to boost your rank. While we can’t guarantee you’ll be at the top, we’ll certainly do our best to get you as close as possible by using tried and true search engine optimization techniques that follow the search engines’ own standards.

There’s a lot to learn about search engine optimization and your time is valuable. To help answer your questions as quickly as possible we’ve put together the following short video that covers the basics of search engine optimization.

Advertising Isn’t The Same

As Having Good Content

When it comes to the behaviors of most search engine users, paid search results just don’t cut it. So if you think you can pay the big companies like Google, Bing and Yahoo to provide you with results, you’re likely going to be wrong. Not only will you be spending your hard-earned marketing budget on links that don’t get clicked, you also won’t have the quality content that the search engines use to find sites.  So when it comes time to make your choice on whether to advertise or invest in quality content, consider the facts, people are much more likely to click on organic search results to find the content they are looking for.

A Look Into the Future

It’s hard to fathom just how important SEO is, but it is one of the most important strategies that any business can undertake to ensure potential customers find their site.

You can’t just have a website with pretty pictures on it any more. You’ve got to make sure people can find it, which means website owners are now responsible for doing all of the things that make SEO work. Things like link building, citation building, site optimizing, blog writing, and social media work.

That seems like a lot of work for most business owners who are busy doing all of the things that it takes to make a business work, but the numbers don’t lie – and these numbers show just how important SEO is for continued success.

The first stat to consider is that there are 100 billion searches per month on Google1 – that’s 3.3 billion a day. To put it in better perspective, if each person on the planet were able to, they’d have to search on Google 5 times a day, every day.  This at first seems astronomical, but even today you’ve probably used Google 10+ times for searches.  What it boils down to is that Google rules, and it doesn’t really matter if your small business ranks high on AOL.

The second stat that is important to consider is this: 89% of consumers use search engines for purchase decisions2 as well as 71% of business purchase decisions are started with a search engine3. It’s easy to write these off as things that are obvious, but these numbers show the double-edged sword that modern businesses and brands have to contend with in today’s era of internet usage. Regardless of the sector or industry you’re in, both companies and consumers are using search engines to start the buying process.

You may be asking yourself: “what does this mean for me?” It means that of the 30 billion mobile searches a year, 12 billion are local4. It is widely expected that in the near future, local searches will account for over half of all mobile searches annually.  That’s where the importance of search engine optimization meets with the need for a responsive, mobile-optimized site that your site’s viewers can access with ease while on the go.  If you don’t have one yet, you absolutely need one as the statistics of people searching the web on mobile devices is huge and only growing (see our infographic on the importance of responsive website design).

With that being said, it’s important to realize that 77% of mobile search happens at work or home even though a computer may be accessible5. As strange as this sounds, it happens more often than you’d expect.  Regardless of where people are, even if they’re at their computer, they are likely to use their phone. At home, if they are browsing on the couch, they are more likely to be using a tablet than a desktop computer.  Basically, it boils down to the fact that it’s often easier to pull out the phone or tablet than to boot up the PC for a simple and quick search.

That leads to one of the most staggering stats: 46% of mobile web users are unlikely to return to a website they had trouble accessing from their phone and even more are unlikely to recommend the site6. This is succinct enough to illustrate not only the importance of having good mobile content, but a site that’s easy to navigate and isn’t confusing.

The next stat is what should be “the closer” – 55% of purchase-related conversions occur within 1 hour of the initial mobile search7. Simply and strongly put, mobile sites convert at a much higher rate than conventional websites – but if you aren’t doing SEO, no one will find your site… and no one will convert.

The next three stats further illustrate the importance of SEO to dealers: in all searches conducted, 70% of users click on organic results8, that 53% of the organic search clicks go to the first link9, and most importantly, 75% of users never click past the first page10. This is usually when the bell goes off for most dealers. They finally realize that if they  want to get more clicks, they have to rank the highest in the organic results – and that won’t happen without SEO.

Stats even show that organic search leads are more qualified. SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while those archaic print or direct mail ads only close at a 1.7% rate11. Pretty crazy – leads from search engines are 8.5 times more likely to close than a standard outbound lead.

While Search Engine Optimization is still only an industry term that most people outside of marketing probably have never heard, these numbers are proof – SEO is not only vital to maintaining a brand, it’s absolutely necessary if you want to stay competitive and grow your business.