SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization, and is a measure taken to improve the search ranking of articles that are displayed at the bottom of listing ads when searching on search engines such as Google and Yahoo!.
Key Benefits of SEO
The main benefits of SEO are:
It doesn't cost much
If you achieve results, you will be able to attract marketing directors email database customers continuously at low cost.
Reach out to customers with a strong desire to buy
Less annoying to users
Being ranked highly leads to branding effects
It doesn't cost much
To implement SEO measures, you can get started without incurring any other costs as long as you have purchased a server and domain.
If you outsource the writing of articles for SEO, you will need to pay an additional fee, but since there are no monthly advertising costs like with listing ads, you can get started relatively cheaply.
If you achieve results, you will be able to attract customers continuously at low cost.
Once you work on SEO and your company's articles actually start appearing at the top of the search results, you will be able to continuously receive traffic from searches using the keywords that rank highly, enabling you to continuously attract customers at low cost.
Reach out to customers with a strong desire to buy
Like listing ads, SEO is a method of displaying articles when searched by users with relatively high purchasing intent, so it is more likely to lead to results than other methods.
Less annoying to users
Articles that rank highly through SEO are not advertisements, unlike listing ads.
Users tend to shy away from advertisements, but since users do not find articles that rank highly through SEO particularly unpleasant, they tend to click on them more actively, and when an article ranks highly it is easy to attract a relatively large number of visitors.
Being ranked highly leads to branding effects
If your company implements SEO measures and its content appears at the top of search results, customers who see it will often assume that the company is trustworthy, so in that sense SEO measures can also have a branding effect.
The main disadvantages of SEO
The main disadvantages of SEO are:
Lack of immediate effect
Content creation requires significant human resources
A lot of SEO knowledge required
Depending on the content of competing sites, it may be difficult to rank highly.
Google updates can cause ranking drops
Lack of immediate effect
Generally, it takes more than three months from the start of SEO efforts until you see results such as an increase in site traffic.
For example, if you purchase a new domain and want to implement SEO measures on a site that has almost no articles on it in order to achieve results, you will first need to add at least 100 articles of high-quality content.
This is because a domain needs to have a lot of quality content in order for Google to rank it as a trustworthy domain.
Google also mentioned this.
That is the sentence below.
Remember that results take time. Once you start making changes, it usually takes four months to a year before you start seeing benefits.
Google Search Central
In our case, we started working on SEO measures and the number of visitors began to increase dramatically within about two months. This was because there were fewer companies in our industry that were working on SEO measures compared to other industries, so it was easier to improve our rankings.
As such, although it depends on the quality of your competitors' websites, it is important to understand that SEO measures are generally not an immediate solution.
If you want to immediately increase your ability to attract customers, it is important to use fast-acting methods such as listing ads.
Content creation requires significant human resources
As explained above, it takes several months or more from the start of SEO efforts until you start seeing results, which naturally involves considerable human resources costs.
Our company is also working on SEO strategies, but to produce high-quality content, it takes at least a full day to complete one article, so it would take three months for one person to write 100 articles.
As such, it is very likely that engaging in SEO and achieving results will require significant human resources costs.
A lot of SEO knowledge required
There is a lot you need to know to tackle SEO and get results.
It takes time to master these skills, so even companies that are interested in SEO measures often give up.
One disadvantage of SEO is that it requires a lot of knowledge, but on the other hand, if you work on SEO while many of your competitors give up simply because it seems difficult, you will be able to widen the gap between you and your competitors, so it could also be a chance to beat them.
In many cases, it is possible to rank highly for niche keywords that your competitors are not ranking highly for, so SEO measures can be said to be a method that has the potential to dramatically increase sales in the medium to long term.
Depending on the content of competing sites, it may be difficult to rank highly.
While working on SEO measures may allow you to dramatically increase your sales, depending on the industry, it may be quite difficult to rank high through SEO.
Search rankings are determined relative to competing sites, so no matter how high-quality your content is, if your competitors are producing even higher-quality content, your ranking will not improve.
To understand the strength of a competing site, it is best to actually search for the keywords you want to rank high for and consider how well it meets the search needs, whether it is written in easy-to-understand sentences, and more importantly, whether it is confident in its ability to create content that is useful to users.
Google updates can cause ranking drops
Google regularly updates its search ranking algorithms to give users more quality content that meets their search needs.
Therefore, even if a piece of content has previously ranked highly in search results, it may suddenly drop in ranking due to an update to Google's algorithm.