Why Google and SEO will be more important than ever in 2020.

Why Google and SEO will be more important than ever in 2020.

As business owners, most of us know that the higher our websites rank in Google, the more traffic we’ll gain, and the more sales we’ll make.

However, with the incredible popularity of social media and the ability to simply pay for ads to promote your business (both on social platforms and on Google), you may be wondering how important organic SEO strategies really are, as we move into 2020 and beyond.

After all, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) done right, in a way that gets results, can be a lot of hard work. It’s also incredibly time-consuming.

It can take months before you see a return on investment, as your website slowly creeps up through the rankings. Whereas with paid ads, you can throw a little money at it, and you’ll be up on that first page potentially, within minutes.

So why bother with organic SEO?

The answer here is really quite simple. No matter how much effort we put into building our Facebook presence, and no matter how engaged our audience is, quite often, our customers will still head straight for Google when they want to find something or buy something. It’s still the number one way of attracting customers who are ready to buy, right now.

When you think about it, you probably even do this yourself. The second you feel like you need a product or a service to solve a pressing problem, we tend to head straight to Google. You may have even Google searched ‘SEO agencies’ or ‘SEO trends in 2020’ or even ‘digital marketing agencies’ to have found this very article.

Facebook and social platforms are great to build your brand awareness and audience, but have you ever tracked your actual conversions from your Facebook efforts? If it works for you and your business that’s great – but its never a good idea to rely on Facebook, or any platform, alone.

The risks of losing your Facebook page or audience are far too great, as Facebook constantly changes their minds and their rules, at a whim. Your business is effectively at their mercy.

And while Google Ads can be a great strategy to increase your website traffic and your ability to make more sales or book more clients relatively quickly, the majority of us still prefer to click on the organic search results, rather than the paid ads.

Why? Well, we’re sceptical creatures, at our very core. We know those paid ads are there because a business has paid to be there. Not necessarily on their own merits or because they’ve actually earnt that right to be there. Organically ranking businesses are our preferred ‘go-to’ – as clearly, they’re more reliable and trustworthy, due to the effort involved to be there.

And if you need any further convincing, Google enjoys around 3.5 billion searches each and every day, or around 40,000 queries each second. And that grows around 10%, each and every year.

Woah – that’s a fair few, right? Which ultimately represents endless opportunities for you, as a business owner, to get your business up there, ready to be seen by the people who need you.

Ultimately, it then comes down to one question.

Do you wish for your business to be in it, to win it, for the long-haul?

Yes, SEO is a longer-term game. It takes knowledge, it takes experience, it takes time and plenty of effort.

Yet if you wish for your business to achieve success and stick around long-term, it’s a very worthwhile investment. Because the more you win on Google, the more your business wins those all-important clients and customers, and therefore Google tends to provide you with plenty of business income. And without income, you won’t survive.

The good news is, you don’t need to do all of this yourself. That’s where trustworthy digital marketing agencies and such as Livelong Digital come into play. We pride ourselves on being one of the best SEO companies out there servicing Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth.

Which leads us to…

Seeking out trustworthy SEO assistance!

The trouble is, SEO is still considered to be rather a ‘dark art’. Or at least it can seem that way as a business owner, particularly if you’re new to the digital marketing game.

And believe me, there are ‘white hat’ SEO strategies (they’re the good ones) and there are ‘black hat’ SEO strategies that could well get results momentarily, but inevitably can get you into trouble with Google. When you’re not particularly technically-minded, it can be a problem distinguishing between the two – and who offers what.

There are literally thousands of SEO consultants and companies who offer ‘SEO Services’, at a wide range of price points, and so many of us have been burnt. Many companies tend to promise the world and charge a small fortune yet fail to deliver actual tangible business results.

It’s an industry full of empty promises and ‘consultants’ who have jumped onto the SEO bandwagon, all claiming to be guru’s and specialists when in reality, they’re only submitting your website to a thousand online directories each month and calling that a strategy. That, however, is simply NOT a solid strategy.

And worst-case scenario – employing the wrong strategies can put you on Google’s ‘naughty list’, which is a place no business wants to end up. Once you are penalised by Google, it can be very hard work to reclaim Google’s trust and climb your way back up.

Plus, Google Algorithms change constantly, making it hard to keep up, even for the trustworthy ‘pro’s’ like us at Livelong Digital. Because none of us really know the precise formulas that Google uses to determine who ranks where – we’re all simply making educated guesses.

Which can lead to lots of industry ‘opinions’ as to what works and what doesn’t and therefore a tonne of confusion among business owners!

The ‘real’ and ‘really great’ SEO agencies, such as us, at Livelong Digital, therefore, have to work incredibly hard to gain our customers’ trust. We need to constantly stay on top of the Google algorithms as much as possible, to find the proven strategies that actually get real results.

Which of course, we do.

Over the next little while, we’ll be focusing on all of these areas in future blog posts, so you can gain a full understanding of all the different aspects of a solid SEO strategy.

We’ll reveal as much as possibly can to ensure you understand the fundamentals of SEO and provide full transparency around our proven SEO processes and strategies.

Because we don’t like it when business owners get ‘taken for a ride’ by the ‘turkeys’ in our industry. We want you to succeed – just like all of our clients inevitably do.

Whether you run a locally based store or an online global enterprise, we’re here to help guide you with your digital marketing needs.

So make sure you keep an eye out for our next SEO articles.

And in the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about our approach to SEO at Livelong Digital, you can read about our SEO services here.