How to Increase Your Brand Awareness in 2022
February 25, 2022
As a business owner, it is crucial to build a loyal and profitable customer base through SEO and local SEO – but what exactly is SEO, what does it look like in 2022, and what benefits can it bring to your business?
In this article, we will cover the basics of SEO and local SEO, as well as discuss 12 of the key benefits of the strategy for your business. Let’s start by defining exactly what SEO is and what it means for both your online and in-person traffic:
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization – or SEO – is a strategy for increasing your online visibility, engagement, conversion rates, and more. In the simplest terms, SEO deals with how high you rank on Google and other search engines for specific search queries.
Prioritizing your ranking on Google is particularly important. According to a report from SparkToro, Google accounts for nearly 90 percent of all internet search volume globally.
Understanding Local SEO & Its Importance
Local SEO is a subcategory of SEO that focuses on attracting customers within a specified location and physical range. By using local SEO, you can vastly improve your local brand awareness and attract more customers within your local area.
Think of it like this – when you go out to eat, you search for restaurants “near you”, or you type in highly specific search terms such as the name of a city or neighborhood. The results that appear first on your search results page are there because the owners of these businesses have prioritized using local SEO and keywords to drive both web and foot traffic to their business.
What is the Google 3-Pack?
When you search for local businesses in your area on Google, the search results page will give you a selection of the top 3 options at the top of the page. This is what is known as the Google 3-Pack, a list of businesses that rank highest according to the search terms you use.
Appearing within the Google 3-Pack is essential for local SEO, as the 3-Pack is reported to appear in 93 percent of all searches with local intent.
12 Benefits of SEO for Your Business in 2022
There are many advantages to improving SEO for small businesses, startups, entrepreneurs, and everyone in between. Increasing your brand awareness is key in today’s local and digital world.
Here are 12 key benefits of SEO for your business in 2022:
1. Reach Your Ideal Audience
One of the greatest benefits of SEO for your business is that it helps you to connect with your ideal audience. More generalized marketing strategies can attract a wide pool of customers that are not necessarily interested in the products or services you have to offer.
Comparatively, SEO helps you to pinpoint the exact customers who are already searching for the products or services you offer. As a result, your business has to spend less time convincing customers of why they need to buy from you and can spend more time building relationships within your niche.
2. Increase Both Digital and Foot Traffic
General SEO helps you to increase your digital and online traffic, while local SEO assists you in attracting more in-person foot traffic. This is especially important if you have either a traditional brick-and-mortar store or a hybrid business that combines both in-person shopping and online ordering.
3. Find Customers Near You
With local SEO, you can vastly improve your search engine ratings in localized queries. Along with appearing high on a search engine results page, this will also provide customers with exact information of your location, business hours, website, and more – allowing these customers to easily pay your business a visit when they are nearby.
4. Out-Perform Your Competition
SEO is excellent for improving your competitiveness, especially if your business exists in an overcrowded industry. Many traditional businesses do not pay enough attention to SEO, meaning your business can stand out from the rest and earn those coveted top spots on search engines with ease.
5. Improve Your Brand Awareness
Along with helping you to stand out from the competition, SEO can help your business to build greater overall brand awareness as well. Brand awareness refers to how familiar the average consumer is with your goods, services, business name, and logo. The better brand awareness you have, the more you can rely on word-of-mouth marketing!
6. Achieve a High Google Ranking
In the United States alone, more than 82 percent of all search traffic originates from Google. As such, having a high rating on the Google search engine is essential for both finding your ideal customers and attracting them to your business.
7. Increase Your Conversion Rates
A conversion rate refers to the percentage of online users who have completed a desired task you have set before them – be that making a purchase, signing up for a membership program, or whatever other actions you hope for your web visitors to carry out.
While the main purpose of SEO is to improve your search engine ratings, it also helps you to drive very specific audiences towards your website. By utilizing this high level of specificity, you can attract customers who are the most likely to want to buy from you and sign up for your services, ultimately increasing your conversion rates by improving the quality of your web traffic.
8. Create a Better User Experience
To rank high on Google and other search engines, you need to prioritize back-end SEO as well. Back-end SEO has a lot more to do with creating a more pleasant user experience, such as ensuring you have fast page load times and that your website is optimized for mobile use.
In addition to this, an excellent user experience can also help to further increase conversion rates as well.
9. Spend Less on Marketing
The beauty of SEO is that it requires much lower upfront costs compared to more traditional marketing strategies. While it can take some time to build up your SEO and improve your search engine ranking, the pay-off can be massive thanks to its low cost of investment.
10. Boost Your Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to your web traffic that arrives at your website purely through non-paid search engine results, rather than by clicking advertisements. Focusing on organic traffic is essential, as it drives more than 53 percent of all web traffic on websites.
By appearing within the Google 3-Pack, you automatically have an excellent opportunity to drastically improve and boost your organic traffic – after all, most people select a website that appears within the first page of results!
11. Build Trust & Credibility
A core component of a strong SEO strategy is to fill your website with high-quality, relevant content that is useful to your ideal audience. This can include white papers, guides, blog articles, and more.
By focusing on building up a large catalog of content for your users, you not only improve your chances of a high SEO ranking but you also build trust and credibility with your customers by offering highly valuable and free resources.
12. Increase Your Engagement
A more niche area of SEO is engagement SEO – a practice that analyzes current trends and works to keep any content on your website and social platforms up to date with the most relevant information for your customers.
Engagement SEO helps to drive the value of your website and content, keeping customers coming back again and again to see what new insights and information you have to offer. As a result, you not only boost your overall engagement but also work to build a loyal returning customer base.
How to Evaluate & Improve Your SEO Strategy
The key to evaluating and improving your SEO strategy is to measure the effectiveness of your current strategy through a variety of performance indicators.
This can be accomplished with both free and paid tools – one of the most popular being Google Analytics, which allows you to access free tools for analyzing your online traffic and data.
Along with regularly measuring the effectiveness of your SEO with analytical tools, you can also improve your strategy by:
- Using Backlinks to Boost SEO: Backlinks are links from one website to another. To build up your backlinks, there are many approaches, such as publishing guest posts on various blogs and websites and networking with other business owners to create a mutually beneficial link-sharing relationship.
- Updating Your Content: Keeping the content on your website regularly updated with the newest and most relevant information is key. Additionally, you can run regular audits on your content as a means to keep your relevancy score high with search engines.
- Optimizing Your Metadata: As mentioned, back-end SEO is massively important. Your metadata refers to your titles, descriptions, keywords, alt-tags, and alt-texts. When properly optimized, your metadata makes it much simpler for search engines to scan and categorize your website accurately.
Final Thoughts
There’s no time like the present to begin improving your business’s SEO and local SEO. Molekeul can help you achieve the desired results for reach.
By doing so, you can greatly improve not just your search engine rankings but also your brand awareness, customer loyalty, and credibility. If you liked this article you may also want to check out 12 Reasons You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy.
