For Business Owners: Five Reasons to Invest in SEO

We often meet business owners and heads of marketing,
and we hear the same things again and again.

“SEO costs too much.”
“SEO takes too long to work; we want activity that pays off straight away.”
“We are not sure there is any real point in working on SEO.”
“Our company does not need SEO.”

It is true that working on SEO takes Cost、time、effort and a good deal of cost on several fronts.
But internet use is rising, partly because of the coronavirus, and for a company it is becoming important to start working on SEO early.

This article sets out why SEO matters and what you gain from it. We hope you find it useful.

1. What is SEO?

The full name of SEO is “Search Engine Optimization”, which means optimising for search engines.

You will often hear the term SEO, and
“the work of getting your owned media and content rated well by search engines such as Google and Yahoo! for particular search terms”is how to read it.

The better that rating, the more likely the page is to appear near the top of the organic results.

Search engines do not publish the ranking algorithm, but
what matters in SEO is being recognised by both“searchers”and“search engines”as
“a site or page that answers what searchers need” and “a useful site”.

So if you work carefully on both, higher rankings follow naturally.
If a site or page genuinely answers what searchers need, the search engine rates it well and places it near the top of the organic results.

SEO methods include on-site activity and off-site activity and fall broadly into these two kinds.
On-site activity includes optimising tags, canonicalising URLs and content work; off-site activity includes optimising internal links and the backlink structure.

Among these, content work is called “content SEO”, and it means producing content on particular themes (articles, columns and so on) to match what people search for, in order to increase search traffic through that content.
Both the amount and the quality of content matter. Analysing what users need (their search intent), choosing keywords and related terms, and creating content that answers what they want to know increases sessions to your owned media and content, and the number of customers you win from it.

Five advantages of working on SEO

Competition in SEO is now fierce, between companies and between individuals,
but for owners who want to bring in more customers and raise revenue, SEO has become impossible to leave out.

Even where that importance is understood, many owners think
“We do not have owned media in the first place.”
“We would like owned media, but it costs money and time, so it is hard to start.”
“We do not need it.”
and so on.

But the way people gather information today is varied and complex.
Because of the coronavirus, a survey by a US think tank found that around 90% of people said the internet was important, and internet use looks set to rise further.

As use rises, people naturally gather information online rather than offline, and in that situation there is a great deal to gain from working on SEO. That is what we want owners to know.

▼Reference URL:https://www.jetro.go.jp/biznews/2021/09/f69d37ba9fc61906.html

Below are five advantages of working on SEO.

2.1. Stronger customer acquisition as part of cross-media marketing

You may have come across the term cross-media marketing (CMM).
Cross-media marketing (CMM) is“a marketing strategy that uses several media, strengthens the combined effect between platforms, gets more customers to know and understand a product or service, and moves them towards buying”.

It aims at the interaction between several media, such as the internet, television and magazines, and using that to raise advertising results such as footfall and revenue is cross-media marke
ting.

How to make marketing work with cross-media marketing

Before they decide, people check the company’s credibility and the product’s credibility across a range of media.
Someone looking for a new job, for example, gets information about the industry, the role and the company through search engines and through social media.
If Twitter is where someone first hears about a company or service, they will not decide to apply on the strength of Twitter alone: they click a search ad and read the landing page (LP), read the company’s owned media and articles, and only apply once they understand the company well.

As a matter of human psychology, the more often we see information, the stronger our willingness to act (buying, applying, downloading and so on) is said to grow, so as part of cross-media marketing working on SEO is well worth it.

One point to watch: working on SEO alone makes no sense either.
SEO takes at least three months to show results, so running it alongside faster-acting activity such as web advertising and social advertising strengthens the effect of both. We recommend using them together.

2.2. It becomes an asset rather than short-term activity

Seen over the long term, SEO and content SEO become an asset.
Digital marketing covers a wide range of activity: web advertising such as search advertising and display advertising, social advertising, affiliate advertising and more. All of it is consumed and leaves nothing behind once you stop running it.
Advertising is of course effective as short-term activity, so it works when you want results quickly.

But to get results from that advertising you want a budget of at least around 300,000 yen a month, which comes to 3.6 million yen a year, plus staff costs. Over the long term that consumes a considerable amount of money.
You win customers while you are investing, but nothing remains once you stop, so winning customers means running ads for ever.

SEO and content SEO, by contrast, need an initial investment, but once made they stay on the web and become an asset.
You do need to keep improving your owned media and content as search engines change, and staff costs or agency fees may follow, which is worth bearing in mind. Even so, it is activity where you can recover what you invest later on.
For example, at around 100,000 yen per piece and two pieces a month, you can produce 24 pieces for 2.4 million yen.
Choose the right keywords for winning customers and build up good content against them, and you can win conversions through that content without running ads at all.

2.3. It works together with search advertising

Search advertising and SEO each have disadvantages and advantages, and the two cover for each other’s gaps. If you can, run both at once and test which suits your service and your customers better.

When you are after customers, the risk is running only one kind of activity: “SEO only” or “search advertising only”.

Companies naturally want results quickly and cheaply, so many would rather not take on this and that when the eventual return is unclear.

We recommend using both in the end, but if the budget is small or you need customers quickly, go in the order search advertising ⇒ SEO.

The table below sets out the differences between the two, for reference.

2.4. It builds trust

SEO is activity that contributes greatly to raising the trust a company earns from users
If your owned media and content are of high quality, users will give serious thought to using your service or buying your product.
Greater trust also helps bring in customers and raise your profile.

In SEO there is a concept called“E-A-T”.

Expertise (specialist knowledge) Authoritativeness (authority) Trustworthiness (reliability)

Reference URL:General Guidelines

Whether your owned media and content have E-A-T is something Google treats as very important.
Owned media and content that hold to E-A-T give
Google grounds to judge them “a site or content that gives users the right information”, which makes higher rankings easier to aim for.

It does more than raise Google’s rating: users are reassured when the name of a specialist or supervising expert is given and they can see the source is vouched for.
That lets them trust the company, and raises the chance of them using the service or buying the product.

We will cover the thinking behind E-A-T and how to reflect it in owned media and content in a separate article.

2.5. It can win conversions through SEO

SEO can increase traffic from organic search in order to raise conversions, and it is a marketing method that can win those conversions in the end.
The pages with the highest click rate in organic results are the ones near the top.
As the table below shows, positions one to four in particular have click rates in double figures, while position five and below fall under 10%.
From position 11 onwards (that is, the second page of results and beyond), pages are said to be barely clicked at all.
You need to work on SEO so that people searching for information can reach your owned media and content.
In SEO it is important to choose the search keywords relevant to your service or product, set themes in line with the keywords you should target, and produce owned media and content accordingly.

Ranking near the top increases sessions, which in turn increases clicks and conversions.

3. In closing

We hope that was useful.
This article has covered the following points.

① What SEO is, restated (there is on-site and off-site activity, and content SEO in particular matters)

② There is something for a company to gain from working on SEO (five advantages set out)

We hope it is useful for your marketing activity and business decisions from here.

Thank you for reading.

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