The value of the massive search engine optimization (SEO) market ranges between $65 billion and $80 billion, depending on the source. It has more than tripled in value since 2008 and its growth has outpaced market forecasts calculated in that same year.
Nearly Everything Starts with a Search
The market continues to grow as our reliance on the Internet, especially mobile search grows. While we once surfed the Internet from home on a computer, today we conduct most of our surfing from a mobile device. That accounts for 61 percent of all Google searches, for instance.
We also rarely travel directly to a website. Instead, 93 percent of our online time starts with a search engine visit. Also, most of the searches made consist of individuals who search for a need or service while out and about. This underlies the importance of local SEO marketing.
Local SEO Gets You More Business
You need your business to win the SEO war. Local SEO can help you do that by combining your business’s top SEO keywords with your location. It also includes listing your business on Google Maps (GM) and Google My Business (GMB).
Those three items – your on-site SEO, GM and GMB – help you win the top spot in mobile searches. Most of those mobile searches center around “where to buy” and “near me.” That combination has grown more than 200 percent since the 2008 forecasts.
Since people have changed their methods of shopping, the SEO market answered by changing its strategies and tactics. The market now targets long-tail keywords, search queries that contain multiple words rather than a single word keyword. More than half of search engine queries now contain four or more words.
Target Audiences Grew and Widened
Not only did people change, but there are also many more of them online now. Smartphones have become ubiquitous and the staggering number of users of today’s Internet widened demographics and created greater diversity of target markets. Now, every business needs an SEO-friendly website and GMB, at a minimum.
Increased Number of Search Outlets
The number of search outlets grew, too, as did social media, a frequent substitute for businesses that don’t yet feel ready for a website. A need for search visibility on Google and Bing, plus their alternatives has also fostered growth in the SEO market. You now need to also corner the SEO market on digital assistants’ searches and store-based search engines, such as eBay.com and Amazon.com.
Traditional Ads Lost Traction
Traditional advertising lost traction, but search engines stepped up to handle the slack. The SEO market has room for growth because many businesses continue to rely on traditional ads but eventually will need to turn to SEO for inbound marketing campaigns.
Corner the SEO Market
The SEO market once considered a potential fad, now stands as a respected marketing discipline. Where do you have room to enter the fray and corner a bit of this juicy market? Four areas stand out to provide new businesses an entry point.
Featured snippets: Currently, only 12.3 percent of search engine results contain a featured snippet. That leaves you a whopping piece of the pie to nab since Google chooses its snippets based on SEO content and content quality. It is all about what source best addresses the question in a snippet length response, then expands on it later in the article.
Develop links: You need internal and external links to build SEO. Only 42 percent of SEO professionals currently devote equal time to this link building. If your content all targets both, your content rises to the top.
Use H1 tags: One-quarter of small business websites still don’t use the H1 tag. Search engines look for these headline tags and want to see SEO keywords used in them in a quality manner. Putting the business’s name in an H1 on the main page and secondary pages also helps SEO.
Repurpose content: If you already have a website, repurpose your old content by refreshing it. Re-write it with fresh statistics and update the published date with the last updated date. You can increase organic traffic by up to 106 percent using this method.
Grab a piece of the massive $80 billion SEO market by implementing SEO best practices. Vault yourself ahead of your competition by using the strategies that huge portions of the business world have ignored. Your SERP will thank you for it.
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