In this post, we will cover why SEO is worth your time and valuable resources – because it’s not just about free traffic.

1. SEO is A Bottomless Well of Free Leads

One of the best reasons to invest in SEO is that it provides a bottomless well of free high-quality leads.

SEO gives you the opportunity to rank highly for keywords with high buyer intent and generate more organic traffic. When done right, you can create an evergreen stream of new leads without expensive promotion or traditional marketing.

The potential ROI of your SEO campaign is also significant, depending on what you’re selling and how much each conversion costs you. Search traffic is also free, so when compared with other paid advertising platforms, SEO is a cost-effective way to get new customers.

Additionally, if your business has a blog with valuable and helpful content, you can reach a broader audience that will drive more traffic to your website.

When people find content that they enjoy reading on your site, they will often return in the future for valuable information – and some of them will become your paying customers.

This is just one example of how search engine optimization can help bring in a steady stream of free leads for any business.

2. SEO Expands Your Customer Base

SEO can significantly expand your customer base because you are not limited to your local area – people all over the world who are looking for what you offer will find you in search engines.

SEO helps companies expand their customer base in multiple ways:

• Expanding the visibility of your company’s website to more people who are actively looking for what you offer
• Increasing the general awareness of your business and your products or services
• Increasing the pool of potential customers finding your site if you approach SEO in a strategic way
• Reaching key industry influencers.

SEO is a form of marketing that expands the customer base of a company because it makes more people aware of what you offer and helps reach key industry influencers.

3. SEO Brings Sustainable Long-Term Results

If you are a business owner who is looking for sustainable long-term results, SEO should be your go-to strategy.

According to leading digital marketing experts that offer SEO in UAE, one of the key benefits of SEO is that the returns keep happening long after you have invested. For example, one link that you had built on a high niche and traffic website will continue supplying you with a regular stream of clicks and queries even though you had made the same two years back! This is just one example that demonstrates the effectiveness of SEO as a long-term digital marketing strategy. 

SEO has been around since the early 2000s and continues to grow in popularity as search engines become more advanced with their algorithms each year. This means that not only will your investment today produce dividends tomorrow but also five years from now, ten years from now, and so on.

While other forms of marketing come in a flash – such as TV advertising or radio commercials that fizzle out in just a few days – SEO provides sustainable long-term results with very little maintenance costs.

Investing in your company’s ranking is one way to ensure that your company will keep generating leads and sales for years to come.

It’s important to remember that SEO takes time to get results. There are a number of variables that can affect the amount of time it takes, such as how competitive your industry is and whether or not you have useful content on your site.

It usually takes about 3 to 6 months to see results from SEO. This ballpark estimate can vary based on your industry, product, and competition.

4. SEO Helps to Accurately Identify Market Needs

42 percent of startups fail due to no market need. If you want to ensure your business will not be one of those failures, then SEO is a must-have.

SEO helps companies identify market needs by showing what consumers are looking for on the Web and which keywords they use most often. This information can help businesses make decisions about their products or services in order to attract more customers.

In the end, sales are the lifeblood of your business – without paying customers, your days are numbered. 

Whether you are an online retailer or brick-and-mortar business, SEO is a great way to ensure that your marketing efforts will result in revenue for your company – as the keywords your users enter into search engines reflect market demands.

There are a number of tools that can help with keyword research to find the product-market fit; some of the most popular ones include:

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Ubersuggest
• Wordstream’s Free Keyword Tool
• SEMrush
• KWFinder
• SpyFu
• Long Tail Pro

With these tools, you can learn about the keywords that people are using in your niche and find out which ones they use most often. This information can be used to guide decisions on topics, content development, or business offerings.

5. SEO Helps You Better Understand Your Customers

In today’s world, a data-driven approach is necessary for success.

With SEO, you can better understand your customers by tracking what keywords they use when searching online and the websites they visit before coming to yours.

You’ll be able to see which content is performing well on the search engines so that you can replicate it in order to find more leads or sales from a given keyword.

This information can help you decide which content should be the focus of your marketing efforts so that consumers will stay on your site and engage with your brand.

Additionally, SEO gives you a glimpse into how your customers interact with your website.

You’ll be able to see when they visit, how long they stay on your site, which pages they view, and the content that interests them. This information can provide you with valuable insights about what is working well for your business in terms of marketing strategy.

Competition is fierce these days- this makes SEO a necessity if you want to stay ahead of the curve.

6. SEO Helps Identify Hidden CRO Issues

SEO is now an integral part of CRO because it allows you to identify potential conversion rate optimization issues on your site.

With the help of web analytics tools, you can get accurate data to uncover things causing your potential customers to hit the exit button just a few clicks away from making a purchase.

For example, you may think your site is loading quickly. But in reality, it’s taking someone on a mobile device over five seconds to load – which isn’t quick enough when they’re browsing from their phone.

Here are just some of the issues that can negatively impact your conversion rates:

• Lack of content relevant to the visitor’s needs
• Broken links
• Duplicate content on the site
• Slow-loading pages or images that take too long to load
• Unclear navigation options and/or broken search functionality
• Outdated design, with a lack of visual appeal
• Lack of customer reviews or testimonials from previous customers
• Site takes too long to load
• Poor site usability
• The website is not mobile-friendly
• Too many pop-ups or data requests

The list could go on and on, but the point is that these are all issues you can quickly identify when you’re looking at CRO through the lens of SEO to analyze your site’s performance.

Over to You

As you can see, SEO can be a safety net for your business. There are many ways that it can help you avoid failure and increase your chances of success. If you’re not using SEO in your marketing strategy yet, then you should consider it.

If you’re not sure how to get started with SEO, there are many online resources where you can find help. Some of these include Moz, Digital Marketing Institute, and Google Analytics Academy.

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The post 6 Reasons Why SEO is a Safety Net for That Can Save Your Business appeared first on Tricky Enough.

With digitalization permeating the economy on every level, cybercrime has become the stuff of nightmares for the business world.

In fact, 48 percent of SMBs fear that a major data breach or cyber attack has the potential to deliver a devastating coup de grace to their companies, putting them out of business permanently — and without any prospect of recovery.

Content marketing — a tool for increasing brand awareness and nurturing relationships with potential customers — may end up being the very thing decimating your brand in one split second, wiping out years of hard work, as a result of poor cybersecurity hygiene.

To prevent that from ever happening to you, you need to understand where the most common cybersecurity challenges in content marketing lie.

1. Content Theft

They say good artists copy and great artists steal, but apparently, some people tend to take this notion to the extreme.

When you schedule your content in advance, a rival from overseas or disgruntled ex-employee who gained access to your website can release your work before it goes live or gets indexed by search engines, effectively claiming ownership of it.

The issue plagues highly competitive, narrow niches in particular.

Taking into account the resources poured into producing content, the potential lost revenue, and the cost of opportunity, such leakage may result in thousands of dollars of damage, a tough blow to shrug off for small businesses.

2. SEO Spam Link Injections

The 2019 Website Threat Research Report carried out by Sucuri states that 62 percent of all hacked websites have one thing in common: they get broken into specifically for SEO purposes.

Among the myriad ways in which bad actors can leech off of your website, stealthily inserting spammy links into the source code to boost the SEO value of their digital properties is one of the nastiest tactics to prevent your content marketing campaign from ever taking off.

Some of the links are planted to be clicked on by the visitors as a means to siphon away your traffic.

However, the lion’s share of the links is typically hidden from the human eye, injected deeply into the source code to be seen only by search engine bots. In fact, the practice has been so widespread over the years that even has its own name — cloaking.

Not only do link injections tarnish your SEO authority, a factor that directly impacts your rankings in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), but they also discredit your company’s brand image.

Sadly, SEO spam injection attacks tend to fly under the radar, chipping away at the hacked website for years to come while devaluing any content published on it.

3. SEO Spam Content Injection

On top of lacing the source code with external links, having snuck in, cybercriminals may also approach sabotaging your content marketing strategy from a different angle: by creating spammy web pages (also known as doorway pages) behind your back.

And as you may have guessed, the purpose of such practice, again, is to manipulate search engine algorithms at the expense of the website’s reputation.

Obviously, that often leads to a perfectly legitimate website getting penalized or even blacklisted by search engines, bleeding it dry of any organic search traffic.

And here’s the rub: Business executives are typically not even aware of the problem since they lack the technical SEO knowledge and special software it takes to timely spot holes in their website and patches them up before Google gets a whiff of trouble.

For small businesses that double down on content marketing to reach out to their potential customers, the aftermath of a successful SEO spam injection may easily push the company off a cliff.

4. Social Engineering Attacks

90 percent of all successful cyber attacks are attributed to human error.

Social engineering and phishing attacks rely on psychological tricks to dupe the victim into making a certain action or giving up sensitive information that grants cybercriminal access to the victim’s digital properties.

Be it your website or social media profiles, having your digital marketing channels hijacked that way to spread deceitful or embarrassing information is yet another way to wreak havoc on your content marketing strategy.

5. Erasing Content

When applied to small businesses neglecting regular data backups, destroying databases of a compromised website is a surefire way to knock a rival out of the race for a while, if not permanently.

When someone gains access to the server hosting your website or the content management system (CMS) administrator menu, all the content can be erased with just a few lines of code.

For that reason, always, always, always create copies of your databases and store them somewhere safe.

Never forget that any website can be hacked, even the ones shelling out top dollar for the best cybersecurity systems under the sun.

However, scheduled database backups allow you to instantly reverse the damage should you find yourself on the receiving end of a cyber attack.

How to Safeguard Your Content Marketing Campaign from Cyber attacks?

Any cybersecurity expert worth their salt will tell you that you are never completely safe from the many dangers that lurk online, no matter how deep your pockets are.

But since most cybercriminals are on the lookout for an easy target, it is perfectly within your power to dramatically reduce the likelihood of a successful data breach or cyber attack by implementing a series of simple security measures:

1. Create strong passwords. Instead of relying on easy-to-remember combinations, use online password generators to come up with a long, hard-to-crack password.
2. Turn on two-step authentication. The practice will prevent cybercriminals from breaking into your accounts, even if they somehow got their hands on your password.
3. Change the default CMS admin login. The login URL is the gateway to the website’s dashboard, a place that should not be easily accessed by anyone other than your team.
4. Avoid logging into your accounts from public Wi-Fi networks. Since most passwordless Wi-Fi hotspots do not offer any encryption whatsoever, anyone with a drop of technical knowledge can snatch your sensitive data.
5. Make sure your CMS, plug-ins, security software, and firewalls are up to date. Developers constantly roll out new updates to close the loopholes found by cyber criminals.
6. Control who can access your accounts. Only a handful of trusted people should be authorized to log into your accounts, which helps minimize the risk of a data breach.
7. Restrict access to the CMS dashboard based on user roles. Most of the popular CMSs make it possible for you to limit the parts of your website a certain user is allowed to access.
8. Back up your data on a regular basis and stash away the copies of your databases somewhere safe so that you can bounce back from any cybersecurity incidents, no matter how devastating.
9. Promote good cybersecurity hygiene in your organization. Raising cybersecurity awareness among your staff fortifies your company against social engineering attacks.

While seemingly primitive, the easy-to-do security measures mentioned above should help you stave off trouble and protect your content marketing campaigns from ever becoming the prey of cybercriminals.

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The post Top 5 Cybersecurity Threats That Can Ruin Content Marketing for SMBs appeared first on Tricky Enough.