If you know anything about marketing and commerce you will be aware that every business which wants to be taken seriously should have a website. More than that, it needs a website which can be found online, and to achieve this in the search engines, SEO is the primary tool which is used. However, SEO can do much more for your website and business than simply help them to be found on Google.

Branding plays a huge part in today’s world of commerce, with some of the biggest companies in the world spending millions of dollars to build. promote and maintain their brand recognition. Assuming you do not have millions to spend on branding you need to look at alternative means to boost your brand, and this is where SEO can come to the rescue.

By ranking your business’s website higher in the search engines your business will firstly get a boost in its brand’s credibility, especially if you get it onto at least page 2 of the results. After all, having a ranking your blog posts and pages on the first couple of pages in Google is something only 20 websites or businesses can achieve, so imagine the kudos of this compared to a business lost, and virtually invisible, on page 20.

Appearing higher in the rankings also makes your brand more visible to those searching within your niche or business sector for relevant keywords especially when your website appears in the results consistently. Any prospect looking for the sort of products or services you offer will have more confidence in your brand if it shows up time and time again when they are searching.

SEO, leading to better search engine rankings, also gives you a very strong competitive edge over other similar businesses and websites. This manifests not just in your ranking, but with the research which will have taken place as part of the process.

You will have insights into what keywords they are targeting, where they are getting backlinks from, and even info relating to any social media or paid advertising they are using. Armed with all this data, you can create strategies to create more effective campaigns than your competitors have implemented, ensuring you one step ahead of them.

Using SEO will inevitably lead to increased profits for your business, and that is not simply down to more sales. Naturally, with the increased level of traffic generated by your SEO strategies, you are going to get more traffic, more sales and thus more profits. However, there is another factor to consider and that is savings in other areas such as paid advertising.

Whilst you may not completely stop using paid advertising, your reliance on it, and thus the amount spent on it will be reduced by the large increase in organic traffic which SEO will produce. SEO and competitor research will also mean the paid campaigns which you create are more efficient, more effective and subsequently less costly than they may have been previously.