Your business needs to look at search engine optimization as an investment, not a cost. When you pinpoint the keywords with the best conversion rates and optimize your site to focus on them, the return on investment is incredibly hard to beat. While other advertising methods focus on the quick return, a strong SEO and digital marketing strategy focuses on building and maintaining lasting, long term results.

Companies invest lots of time and money into building their website. After all, it’s the foundation of their digital presence. But many of them get the site finished and call it good — HOPING that people find it. While good web designers factor in SEO when developing a site, their main goal is to focus on the design. When a business invests in optimization after the launch, that’s when the magic happens. When a great design is paired with excellent optimization and stellar online marketing, the results are exponential.

One of the biggest factors in how a site ranks is how authoritative the search engines determine it to be. This is achieved by having excellent content that is relative to the keywords you are trying to rank for. Once you have this content, people need to find it and agree that it’s useful. Then, most importantly, they need to share it with other people. Since most of this sharing is done on social media, lots of shares on a site like Facebook will lead to more links and more views for the website.

People TRUST Google. In fact, every time someone performs a search, they are trusting that Google will show them the very best and unbiased results. If your business shows up in the top of a search result, then in the potential customer’s mind, you have instant credibility. If the title and description of your search result is the solution they are looking for, then you will get the click.

Search engines level the playing field. While digital marketing campaigns are all about how much you bid and how big your budget is, organic search results have to be earned. When you implement a great search engine optimization strategy, your business will be better positioned to come up higher in search results and allow you to harvest the traffic.