Why Search Engines are Important for your Website and Blog

In this article, we’ll explore why search engines are important for your website and how they help internet users discover your content. It’s estimated that there are 1.7 billion websites on the internet right now. The only practical way to find information online is by using a search engine.

According to a study by Datareportal, 43.2% of internet users aged 16 to 64 consider “researching products and brands” as one of their primary online activities (Source: Search Engine Statistics).

This underscores how crucial online visibility is for businesses in attracting potential customers and boosting brand recognition.

Let’s get started!

Table of Contents

Search Engine Importance to Bloggers and Website Owners

Search engines are crucial in achieving success for your website or blog. They drive traffic, enhance credibility, improve user experience, and provide a competitive advantage.

Investing time and effort to optimize your content for search engines is a wise decision.

The growth of the internet and the number of websites online means users have no choice but to use search engines for products or services they are looking for.

Let’s take a look at some of the key reasons why website owners and bloggers benefit when search engines index their content.

Visibility and Traffic

Search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are typically where most people begin their online journeys when searching for information, products, or services. If your website or blog doesn’t appear in search results, you are missing out on a huge chunk of traffic to your website.

Google is a winner-takes-all game. Websites on the first page of Google get all the traffic. No-one goes to the second page. Don’t believe me? Look at this statistic:

You need to be on the first page of Google – nothing else matters.

Organic Traffic

Ranking well in search engine results pages (SERPs) allows you to attract organic traffic, which is unpaid traffic driven by users’ search queries.

Organic search traffic is highly valuable and more likely to convert to sales than paid traffic.

People are constantly searching Google for content, products and services. Take a look at this chart:

Credibility

Users trust websites that appear at the top of search results more than lower ranking ones. It makes sense, right? You need to have other people read your content for it appear higher up on Google. Highly ranking content likely has backlinks from other websites.

Google searches for signs of authority and credibility when ranking content so appearing at the top of search results indicates that Google considers your content credible.

User Experience and Engagement

When you optimize for search engines, you also optimize for user experience and engagement. Google collects data that can indicate poor user engagement such as bounce rate, click through rate, pageviews, return visits, and performance metrics.

Technical factors that impact user experience and engagement include:

• Website loading times
• Mobile-friendliness
• Structured content
• Easy navigation

These factors boost your search engine ranking potential so high ranking content is more likely to have higher user engagement and a better user experience than lower ranking content.

Of course, your content needs to be top-notch as well.

Competitive Advantage

In any competitive niche, your competitors are likely optimizing their content for search engines. If you don’t implement SEO for your website, you will likely fall behind them.

Additionally, if your competitors are paying for traffic, but you receive free traffic because you have superior content and rank for more niche keywords, you will gain a competitive advantage and reduce customer acquisition costs.

Long-Term Sustainability

Paid advertising can be expensive, and the costs can quickly add up. SEO, on the other hand, provides long-term sustainability. Once you rank well for the top niche keywords you will continue to receive daily free organic traffic without paying anything.

Global Reach

You can get free traffic from around the world by using SEO for your website and blog. Even from countries you hadn’t thought about.

You may want to consider using a CDN if you want to attract a global audience otherwise page loading times far from your web server will be slow.

What is SEO traffic?

SEO traffic means visitors to your website that originate from search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search engines).

Other sources of traffic are:

• Links from other websites (backlinks)
• Social media links
• People typing your website directly into a browser
• Bots (usually bad but not always)

For most websites traffic from search engines is a big component of traffic and something you should optimize for.

The Role of Keywords

One topic we haven’t discussed so far but is crucial for organic search traffic is keywords.

These are the words that searchers type into Google when they are searching for information. If your content is indexed and ranks well for those keywords it will appear on the search engine results page (SERP).

Your goal is to find the most relevant keywords for your niche and to write the best content you can for those keywords.

We have extensively covered the topic of keyword research before.

Read more: The Ultimate Guide to Finding the Perfect SEO Niches for Your Business or Blog

Competition Research

Your competitors are also using search engines to acquire visitors and customers.

Why not research what keywords, strategies and content they are using?

This is the purpose of competition research. You will need to invest in a tool for researching your competition. Luckily, keyword research tools normally include analyzing competitors as part of their features.

Let’s use the SE Ranking Competition Report as an example. I am quite familiar with this tool because I use it for my own competition research. Type in the name of a competitor website to see the report, e.g. “acme.com“.

As you can see from the report you get a wealth of information about your competitors that you can use to improve your strategies.

For example:

• Organic traffic
• Paid traffic
• Keywords
• Domain Trust / Page Trust
• Backlinks

And much more. You’re not limited to the entire website, you can research a single page to discover the keywords it’s ranking for.

Next time you’re about to write a blog article using a niche keyword, check out the competition to see what keywords they are using. Maybe they are using keywords you haven’t considered yet

Targeted and Relevant Traffic

Not all traffic is the same. You want to attract website visitors for your niche – visitors who are most likely to buy your services and products.

Receiving general traffic is nice, but it doesn’t pay the bills. Only visitors who “convert”, meaning they sign up for your newsletter, inquire about your service, or make direct purchases are relevant.

That’s why you need to find the most targeted and relevant keywords to write about.

Useful SEO tools for Bloggers and Website Owners

I recommend using a number of tools to help you with your website’s SEO tasks and to research niche keywords to help you grow your website and blog.

First, for your on-page SEO, I recommend investing in an SEO plugin that will identify SEO issues in your content before you publish it.

An SEO plugin will also assist you with your headline title, generate a table of contents, sitemaps and many other related SEO issues.

For WordPress users they are many excellent SEO plugins you can choose from, such as Yoast and RankMath.

Personally, I use All-in-One SEO, but they are all excellent so choose the one that you prefer. By the way, all these SEO plugins have a free version available so try them out first before deciding if and when you want to upgrade.

In addition to an on-page SEO tool, it’s useful to invest in a tool that offers the following features:

• Keyword research
• Competition research
• Track your keyword ranking positions
• Comprehensive website and individual page SEO audit

Again, as with the SEO plugin, the market offers several of these tools, but the cost of the top tools can be quite high. The most well-known tools can easily cost over $100 per month. If your budget can stretch to that then take a look at Ahrefs and SemRush tools.

For others on a smaller budget or just starting out with a website or blog I recommend a mid-tier tool. In my personal experience I find the SE Ranking tool meets all my needs for keyword research, keyword tracking and SEO audits.

You can create an SE Ranking keyword report by using the widget below. Type in a keyword phrase to see the report (e.g. “keto diet“).

Final Thoughts On Why Search Engines Are Important

Thanks for reading this article, I hope you found it helpful and informative. Here is a quick recap:

• Your website or blog content needs to be indexed by search engines
• Search engines provide increased online visibility, credibility and free traffic
• Your website has a competitive advantage if it outranks your competitors
• Lower cost of acquiring customers if you have visitors from organic traffic vs paid ads
• Using niche keywords are vital in order to acquire free website traffic
• Focus on acquiring visitors from your target audience – not general traffic
• Invest in an on-page SEO tool and a keyword research/competition research tool

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