Search results are now more important than your website

Recent marketing research has been pointing to a certain trend of late that can really no longer be called a trend. It is now less a trend and more a behavior pattern. While your website will be critical to making those conversions, search has now become the number one way potential customers are engaging with your business. It is your SEO strategies that are working in the long run. It is the listings and the maps that pop up on the SERP that are causing customers to find you these days.

In fact, latest research from one of the top analytics companies in the country has found that stand alone brick and mortar locations have increased their traffic and business nearly three percent over the last year or two due to SEO search results. Their businesses have been found at search results, apps, social media platforms and GPS systems at nearly three times the rate that potential customers are finding them at their own websites.

Mobile search has begun to dominate the way in which people are locating businesses. In fact, the search god itself, Google, declares that nearly 80% of all mobile searches actually turns into a visit by a potential customer either at a location or at a website within 24 hours of conducting the search. It has now become a matter of managing your brand awareness and your SEO strategies so that you are popping up everywhere someone might search to include the search engines, the social media platforms, search apps and GPS readouts.

This is why it is so important to the future of your business that you are forever updating and providing fresh content wherever your brand footprint happens to be. Even though people are reaching out to find you on some systems and technology that you can’t measure all that easily with regard to ROI, those places, nonetheless, are critical to increasing your brand awareness. Your website traffic means more than ever now as does such places as Facebook and Yelp as customers are turning to what they consider to be reliable sources about you and your business.

You need to stay on top of your SEO as it has become crucial that you condense what is on your website so that it shows up on the search. You have less than ten seconds to engage someone so give them as much information about you as you can in that short time span. Your hours, what you sell, clear directions, sterling reviews and any other info you believe will tip their search in your favor.

Today’s mobile searchers want everything they can get in as sort a period as they can get it. They don’t seem to have the stamina anymore, or the attention spans, to actually go out to a website and do some comparison shopping. They are in a hurry, these new customers, so you had best give them what they want or you will quickly get left behind.

-Written by Kevin Sawyer