There are many good reasons to pursue SEO for your website. If you’re a numbers person, you may find these stats compelling:

A 2004 survey found that in business-to-business (B2B) purchasing decisions, 63.9 percent of respondents stated that a search engine would be the first place they would go to research a product or service. (Source: Enquiro/MarketingSherpa) Pearl of Wisdom: The person you most want to find your website is the person who is searching for you!

Research conducted in 2005 by search engine consulting firm OneUpWeb.com showed that top 10 placement in Google increased site traffic to five times its previous levels in the first month.

A 2005 survey by search marketing firm iCrossing found that search engines are the most popular tool for researching products and services before making an online purchase, and of these searchers 74 percent use search engines to research products and 54 percent use search engines to find the website from which to buy. But if you do SEO for no other reason, do it so you won’t be handing website visitors over to your competitors on a silver platter! Here are a few embarrassing situations that SEO can help you avoid:

A potential customer is trying to find your phone number so they can call in an order. Searching for your product name, they come across your competitor and call them instead.

The good news is that your website is #1 on Google! The bad news is that your #1 rank is wasted on a tedious technical PDF that you didn’t even know was on your site!

Congratulations: You’ve accrued 157 high-quality links to your home page over the years! But since your last website redesign, you’ve spent the last six months with 157 links to your “File not found” error page!

The best thing about SEO is that when it’s done correctly (follow the advice in this Blog and you’ll always be on the up-and-up), it benefits both you and your site visitors!