Why is seo important? Lots of reasons! Namely, you want people to come to your website. For the folks who are just getting into search engine optimization and are trying to understand the importance of seo, check out this video.
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Hello, and welcome to our video where we're going to answer the question, why is SEO important? I'm Chad Hill. And I have Adam Stetzer here with me as well.
Good afternoon, Chad. Our editor works with our existing writer staff. And often, they're asking about the importance of SEO and content marketing. So I thought today we'd really walk this topic back quite a bit for those folks who are just getting into search engine optimization, are researching SEO, are on Google or trying to get their head around this. Start with why is SEO important? Why should I put some effort to that? Why do I need that for my website?
And that question why is seo important really starts with building a website. And so people, for a whole bunch of different reasons, whether it's a personal website where you can express your feelings or your thoughts, or it's a business website. It starts with creating and building a website and then ultimately saying, I want people to come to this website.
Right. So what's the point of publishing a website if you don't want people to come there? Particularly in the small business world, you're using it as a marketing tool. You're using it to sell business, e-commerce, maybe even more directly. But even for a personal blog, most of the bloggers I know, they don't put up a website unless they want people to come. So that gets into well, how am I going to get them there? And now we're into why SEO is important.
And because, really, from there, as you said, when you look at what people are doing online, according to the Pew internet study, 92% of people are using search engines to find things on the web. And so really at that point, you need people to your website. You have a website. And then the biggest audience, the biggest number of people out there are finding things are using search engines. It pretty much makes the case that you need to start thinking about how do I get traffic from search engines. That's the importance of seo.
Right, because if you didn't go that route, you'd have to tell people about your website through word of mouth or any other way you could think of. Or you have to buy advertising on other websites, which gets very expensive very quickly. So I think people turn to this question, why is SEO important, because they want cheap ways to get the word out and bring traffic to their website.
Right. And you mentioned one thing about the cost. And when you look at some of the studies that have been done out there, SEO is typically looked as one of the lowest cost ways of bringing traffic to your website. And the reason that that's the case is because ultimately all you need to do is build good, interesting, compelling content that fills a need that someone has out there.
So if someone's looking for information on the great cooking recipes or plumbers in your market, if you can write compelling content about that and then have the right mix of both putting it on your website but also finding other websites that might also be open to you guest blogging or adding content to their website and then linking back to your website, that's how you're going to get traffic to your website. That's the importance of seo.
Great. And now you're getting into Marketing 101, which is about developing channels for people to come find you who are interested in your topic. In internet marketing is no different. You want to develop these channels that bring people to you as inexpensively as possible, which is what you're talking about, Chad.
And SEO has been shown in a lot of studies to be one of the lowest cost ways to bring people to your website. So as you think through why is seo important and you're trying to promote yourself, it becomes pretty important that you need to have your arms around SEO, and you need to be doing it.