When you’re running your business, it can often seem that there is an overwhelming amount of things to learn about, of which search engine optimisation is just another thing on top of the already sizeable pile. But SEO is something you should invest some time into learning about, particularly if you want to improve your online presence and put your website to work driving more business for you.

Here are five reasons that you should spend a bit of time learning about SEO

Increasing your organic traffic

The first, and most obvious, reason you’d want to know more about SEO is to increase the amount of organic traffic (that is, traffic from search engines such as Google or Bing) that comes to your site.

At its most basic level, this is what SEO is all about — improving the ranking of your website in the search engine results pages. At its most basic level, these are the simple organic links on the page.

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However, there are also other important elements in the SERP’s, such as local maps results (pictured below), or business descriptions and more. Ensuring these are well optimised will help to drive through more organic traffic.

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Learning about SEO will allow you to see where your website is doing well, where it could be improved, as well as provide you with some strategies you can use to plan out this improvement.

Adapting for a mobile-first world

More and more browsing is done on mobile devices, as opposed to the traditional desktop format, with mobile, smartphone and tablet browsing overtaking desktop browsing for the first time in 2016. Even in the UK, where desktops are still used more than mobile, smartphone and tablet traffic accounted for 44.4% of all web traffic, making it an increasingly important market.

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Google have been shifting more and more towards mobile-friendly content to keep up with this shift in browsing, and they have begun to make their index mobile-first, as well as moving to a mobile-friendly algorithm. This makes the appearance and accessibility of your website on mobile devices critical, and SEO knowledge can help with this. It can arm you with the best practices to ensure your mobile site can be found, can be crawled by search engines, and performs well for important mobile metrics, such as page speed.

Getting ready for voice search

Another important shift in the search ecosystem is the heavily increasing importance of voice searches. Some studies suggest that by 2020, up to 50% of all searches could be voice searches. In addition, voice activated personal assistants such as Google Home read out snippets from the search results. Good SEO work can allow you to optimise for those snippets within the search results, and to get your brand in front of users on these devices.

Making sure you aren't producing poor content

Or rather, content that can’t be found and that users aren’t searching for. Without giving SEO proper consideration, you can spend a great deal of time creating a wonderful piece of content in a very specialised niche that people aren’t searching for, where a small amount of keyword research might have pointed you towards a more searched for path.

SEO knowledge can arm you with the right tools and processes to get the information you need regarding search volumes, competition in search engine results pages, and with that information, to make an informed decision about which topics you want to target.

UX improvements

An indirect benefit of conducting on-page SEO is that you can also improve the user experience on your site, spotting issues such as broken links, poor navigation, or long loading times.

Fixing these will help not just to improve your site’s SEO, but it will also improve the experience for users, making sure they can navigate your site without issues. Some SEO’s suggest that user interaction is a ranking factor, making UX even more important when trying to rank your site.

These five points are just some of the reasons that you should consider learning more about SEO. Hopefully, you’ve been inspired to learn a little bit more about SEO yourself after seeing some of the coming developments and opportunities that will be shaking up the world of search soon. A good place to start is with our e-Book covering on-page optimisation of your website, which you can download by clicking the button below.