SEO a Good Idea?

by Brian Lance

It’s no secret that the future of retail includes a healthy dose of eCommerce. In fact, the growth of online sales over the past few years has been nothing short of spectacular. The growth of online sales for 2021 in the U.S. is expected to grow 13.7% when compared to 2020. That means that if the forecasts are accurate – and there is no reason to believe that they won’t be, online sales should be worth $908.73 billion by the time the first of December is reached.

Now, what are the implications of this for those who want to start up an online retail operation or make sure that their Online business stays competitive? In fact, what does it mean for any business that has a website?

In short, those figures give a good indication that online business is becoming a fight to the death for dominance. That’s a fight that is made even more cutthroat by the fact that the barriers to entry for any business that wants to establish itself on the Internet are far lower than for a ‘brick and mortar’ business.

Start Investing to Beat the Competition

Companies need to start investing in their local SEO efforts in order to ensure that they feed their sales funnels and encourage customer loyalty. SEO (pout simplistically is Search Engine Optimization. It is the science (and some would say art) of inserting words and phrases into a website in order to ensure that it appears near the top of any SERP (Search Engine Results) page. Any potential client looking for specific services or products will almost inevitably do a search on the Internet and if the organization’s SEO is poor, they are going to be relegated to page two (or heaven forbid page 3) of the results that are returned by the search engine algorithm.

It is extremely unlikely that the person doing the search is going to check out page three of the Google (for instance) results. In fact, those involved in the SEO business have a saying – ‘the best place to hide a dead body is on page three of the Google results.’ No one ever looks there.

Hiring a Consultant

For any business to thrive in an increasingly Internet-driven marketplace the advice of a professional SEO consultancy is an absolute must. It needs to be done properly by following the pillars of SEO – and will require ongoing fine-tuning depending on the results of measuring effectiveness. Any business that ignore this strategic imperative is at a distinct competitive disadvantage.