What are The Intangible Benefits of SEO?
By Melissa | Jul 21, 2020 (5 min read)
Whenever a business owner thinks about doing some SEO for their website, the main goal is to increase the amount of organic traffic.
It seems like having a ton of people clicking on your site listed in Google will translate into dollars in the bank.
Well, the truth is that sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.
SEO can be fickle in terms of results, so it is often hard to know if it’s worth doing.
When it comes to measuring SEO success, here are the typical results people look at:
- Increased keywords tracking for your website
- Increased amount of site visitors
- Longer time on-site per visitor
- Higher volume of backlinks
- Increased domain authority
These kinds of results will create a lot more traction for your website. You will typically see a spike in online traffic within 3-6 months of working on improving your SEO.
However, there are also long term benefits. Some of them aren’t apparent until a few years after gaining traction in the SERP results. But they are well worth going after.
Here are three intangible benefits of improving the SEO of your website:
SEO Builds Authority
Having a website that ranks well in Google is great for building the authority of your brand. When people search for products or services, and your company has a top ten (i.e., first page) position in Google, it shows you are an authority.
Perhaps an even better authority builder is when you can get a featured snipper (aka position zero) that shows your brand as an authority.
While these results take time to get, they can build brand authority a lot faster than paid advertising.
SEO Builds Trust
Once people find your website in the top Google results, they are much more likely to trust your site content.
The whole purpose of Google is to provide the best quality of information from trusted sources. It spends billions of dollars creating algorithms that can source what is most relevant and valuable.
A recent 2020 Google Search survey showed that over 65% of people find content in featured snippets as ‘highly trustworthy.’
SEO Builds the Value of Your Website
The final intangible aspect of well-performing SEO is that, over time, your website’s value increases. If you have a well-ranking website, you will find that more people tend to reach out to do guest posting and backlink opportunities. You will also find more blogs will quote your content, and get you more traffic through their websites.
In short, increased web traffic keeps increasing web traffic. It’s like a snowball rolling downhill.
Another type of value is the domain authority that your site gains, making it easier to rank for new keywords and topics that you want to share on.
Get Started With Small SEO Wins
Very often, it can feel overwhelming if you want to rank for high-level keywords, and you see the current high-ranking sites are all big names. The key here is to start small and focus on long-tail keywords that are linked to those high volume keywords. Keep consistently building your content volume and ensuring that your site is optimized.
Over time, you will find that ranking for long-tail keywords leads to ranking for more high-volume terms. But as with most things in business, it takes patience and consistency.