Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key offering by every brick and mortar or online marketing agency (including any professional marketing agency in Vancouver). This comes as no surprise, as investing in effective SEO is demonstrably one of the best digital marketing choices any firm can make. This is because:
1. Approximately 87% of consumers habitually start their purchasing process online [1].
Additionally, approximately two-thirds (68%) of those people begin by examining search engine results [2]. This number is even higher (75%) for consumers conducting searches on mobile devices [3]. That makes SEO the potential first point of contact for six to seven out of ten consumers' purchases.
2. More than 50% of smartphone users and 53% of desktop browser users identify new brands to patronize while using a search engine [4, 5].
This makes search engines the most common source of brand discovery.
3. Approximately four in ten ready-to-buy consumers (39%) are motivated to make a purchase after seeing relevant search results [6].
4. More than three-quarters of mobile users will patronize a search-engine-recommended storefront within one day of searching for something “near me” [7].
Moreover, 28% of those people will make an in-person purchase during their store visit [7]. This trend towards locally specific queries is significant, with the use of local search modifiers increasing considerably since 2017. For example:
The number of “where to buy” + “near me” searches grew 200%;
The number of “store open near me” searches grew 250%; and
The number of “on sale” + “near me” searches grew 250% [8].
5. High-quality SEO reduces bounce rate and increases the amount of time potential consumers spend on-site.
This is proven to increase overall site earnings and individual order values [9].
6. The conversion rate for website visitors gained via organic search results tends to be at least 33% higher than that of any other digital marketing channel [10].
7. The average website draws 53.3% of its organic traffic from search results [2].
Yet 90.63% of pages get zero organic traffic from Google/search engine results [11]. This suggests that as many as nine in ten businesses could at least double their website traffic by investing in (effective) SEO.
8. Approximately 40% of a firm’s revenue comes from search-engine-generated organic traffic [12].
9. Just 0.78% of search engine users visit websites listed on the second page of search results [13].
Consequently, any given website’s search-engine-generated traffic increases more than 850% if it can increase its rank from a second-page result to one of the top three [14].
This clearly illustrates that good SEO, though challenging to effectively cultivate, is something of an “all or nothing” investment. Firms that do not make SEO a core component of their digital marketing strategy — either by underinvesting in SEO or by fully neglecting it — see similar results.
10. Firms that develop an effective SEO strategy are 13 times more likely to see a positive ROI for their digital marketing activity [15].
Related post: What should a competitive analysis include?
The Hidden Costs Of Successful SEO
It is important to note that SEO is a relatively slow-acting digital marketing tactic. For example, the average webpage featured on the first page of results for any search query is at least two years old [16]. Moreover, fewer than 6% of pages will populate within the top ten search results within a year of their publication [16].
Nevertheless, industry best-practices for prolonging webpage “freshness” call for refreshing/updating content every couple of years [17]. This creates a need for continuous content maintenance, which dramatically inflates the financial and labor costs of successful SEO marketing.
What Successful SEO Investment Looks Like In Canada
Given the relatively long investment timeline and compounding workload of content updates, many firms find it beneficial to outsource at least some SEO-related digital marketing activity to a credible brick-and-mortar or online marketing agency.
In Canada, specifically, that number is as high as 47% of businesses [18]. Gaining access to expertise motivates more than eight out of ten of these firms to outsource SEO-related tasks to a marketing agency in Vancouver or another province [19].