If you’re a casual Internet user, you may not have heard of search engine optimization. In actuality, it’s mainly designed to be a behind-the-scenes sort of thing anyway, so it’s okay. If you’re unfamiliar with search engine optimization, or “SEO” for short, it’s an umbrella term given to the collection of strategies, design elements, formats, and tweaks to Internet content that one might employ if their goal is to design a web page that interfaces with the massive search engines driving most of the Internet’s traffic today.
Basically, you’re dressing your web site up so it impresses Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and the others!
The more optimized a web page is for a search engine, the higher that page will rank in users’ searches and the more visible it will be to people surfing the web. It’s a good idea to think about SEO if you have a web site that’d benefit from increased traffic — an online store, an informative or educational web site, or some other such site.
Facts and Statistics About Search Engine Optimization
Below are some fast facts and statistics about how revolutionary and game-changing SEO has been through the past several years.
- Leads generated through utilization of SEO were found to have a 14.6% close rate. This beats outbound lead generation by a country mile, which only enjoys a roughly 1.7% close rate.
- Nearly three-quarters (74%) of brand marketers reported an increase in web traffic after an initial investment of only six hours per week on social media — content marketing at it’s most efficient.
- Blogs, social media profiles, and other pages designed for SEO now reach eight out of 10 Internet users in the United States. Our obsession with the Kardashians and other social media phenomena now account for roughly 23% of all web traffic in the United States.
- Companies and individuals who marketed a product by optimizing their web presence for search engines generated three times as many leads as did their more traditional outbound counterparts. The icing on the cake? Companies paid around 62% less in initial costs for their leads, too.
- Companies and individuals who blog typically have much “larger” web sites, in the sense that there are more indexed pages than sites that do not feature a blog of any kind. The more indexed pages a site has, the higher it will rank among search results. Blogging is actually a very solid marketing strategy!
If you have any questions, feel free to share in the comments.
