Insights

Posted April 1, 2019
By Diane Mahan |

Do I need SEO on my site?

We get that question from every industry and market including small businesses, B2B, manufacturers, B2C, e-commerce and international companies. Our answer is usually, “yes.” Often, B2Bs and manufacturers are leery of SEO because they are targeting a small niche. For that reason alone, we encourage SEO.

SEO is not the black hat, behind the scenes and manipulate Google it used to be in the early-mid 2000s. Google’s algorithm has evolved in response to manipulation tactics and now focuses on user experience. What does that mean for your site? It equates to user engagement (users spending more time on your website) and user interaction (visiting more pages). Achieving those goals requires a different strategy for every company but in general, sites need to have:

• rich content that is relevant and recent (copy, videos, audios, PDFs, etc.)
• great overall design that is easy to navigate
• accessible, mobile-friendly responsive design
• well-written metadata for both search engine results pages (SERPs) and accessibility
• fast load times
• return visitors
• social integration

The point of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to create a positive online experience for users AND get found in search. Google and other search engines have a way of calculating which websites create a positive online experience for users and rank them accordingly. 

Why SEO is Important?

Depending on your industry, the number of people clicking on a first position organic result is a widespread (e.g., 39% for the computer & consumer electronics industry and 78% with the airline industry).

We’ve curated some stats from reputable sources to make it easy to digest. References are listed at the end of this article.

• 90% of searches made on desktops are done via Google. (Statista)
• 60% of Google searches are done via mobile devices. Only 5 years ago, the figure was nearly half that—34%. (Statista)
• Google captures 95% of the mobile search engine market in the U.S. (Statista)

Why do we focus on Google?

As of Feb 2019, Google’s browser, Chrome, has 92.92% of global market share followed by Bing 2.38%, Yahoo! 1.79%, Baidu 0.56%, and Yandex RU 0.55%(http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share#monthly-201902-201903).

Google is still popular in the United States (88.6%) but Bing (6.01%) and Yahoo! (4.09%) have a higher domestic market share than global. (http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share#monthly-201902-201903)

Google’s Android (36.5%) and Microsoft’s Windows (35.99%) each have a higher global market share than Mac products, iOS (13.99%), OS X (6.37%) combined (http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share#monthly-201902-201903)

SERP Position is Important

53% of search traffic goes to the top 3 positions of search results 

• Position 1 gets 28%
• Position 2 gets 15%
• Position 3  gets 10%

Rand Fishkin from SparkToro discussed organic results on mobile vs. desktop. They found that for every 100 desktop searches on Google in September 2018 approx 65.6 clicked on an organic result, 3.7 clicked on a paid result and 34.3 did not click on any searches, confirming the need for a solid SEO strategy for organic desktop. Mobile showed nearly the exact inverse making paid search even more important on mobile. To read more about SEO opportunities, explore the Strategy section of the site.

Tags

• SEO
• B2B
• B2C
• Strategy
• Content