Top 7 Reasons Professional Services Firms Should Invest in SEO

What first comes to mind when you need to buy a mobile phone, replace your washing machine, locate a restaurant nearby, or reach out to a Law or Auditing Firm for consultation?

Google.

Specifically, the first page of Google, where your entries into the search engine will likely resemble:

“best phones (within your price range)”,

“best washing machines”

“restaurants near me”,

“best (name of service) firms near me.

The unique search pages that appear first—the ones you’re most likely to click on— are only able to do so by the power of SEO.

What is SEO?

Simply put, search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy to ensure that when someone googles your service category, your firm’s website comes top.

Regardless of the niche of services you’re in— Engineering, Architecture, Telecommunications, HR, Fintech, etc., —your overall digital marketing plan ought to include a search engine optimization strategy for some relevance in today’s market. This way, when people search for your services, your firm appears on the first page of Google.

Here’s an example:

7 reasons professional services firms like yours should invest in SEO include:

SEO increases your brand visibility and ranking.

Visibility is a term that describes how prominent a particular domain is in search engine results while Ranking is the process that search engines use to determine where a particular web page in SERPs should come up.

In a recent study by HubSpot, it was found that 77% of people research a brand before engaging with it.

Lower search visibility occurs when a domain isn’t visible for many relevant search queries, interpreted as lower rankings. In a nutshell, your professional service firm is leaving money on the table by not positioning itself right (with SEO) and leveraging this audience of people who use search.

In the long run, your brand’s visibility and rankings will impact the main SEO objectives – traffic and conversions.

In a world where B2B buyers carry out a dozen searches, on average, before engaging with a brand, coupled with 18% more shoppers preferring Google to Amazon, investing in SEO is a smart move to increase the chances of your pages coming top, thereby positioning your brand throughout almost their entire buying journey.

2. SEO communicates with your target audience

Which would you rather do: invest in creating helpful resources and making helpful information more easily accessible to people looking for them, or making passes people might find intruding and annoying (cold calling, spam emails, interruptive ads, random billboards, and handbills) primarily because they didn’t ask for it in the first place?

Thankfully, one of the biggest advantages of SEO is that it’s an inbound marketing strategy. What this means is that unlike traditional (outbound) advertising channels, which involve reaching out to consumers whether they want to hear from you or not, inbound methods center on making it easy for your audience to find you when they want information.

Not only is this much more convenient for consumers, it also results in more qualified leads for your business. What is more effective than reaching out to a prospect with relevant answers while they’re already considering contracting a service you render?

In fact, in HubSpot’s most recent State of Inbound report, 59% of marketers said that inbound practices provided the highest quality leads for their sales teams.

Focus on attracting users who are actively looking for information related to your services, you’ll be much more effective in reaching your target audience.

3. SEO is a cost-effective way to do marketing

SEO gets more clicks than PPC. This is despite the fact that PPC ads appear above organic rankings.

A lot of work (obviously) goes into doing SEO right. But a mastery of the needful technicalities will make the digital world become your oyster.

When you consider that 71.33% of searches result in a click on an organic result on the first page, and the fact that you can market virtually all of your services for next to no cash out of your pocket, it would be an effort truly worth it.

Another cost-effective yet super-efficient way professional services firms can connect with their audience is via Podcasts. You can read all about it here.

4. Attributable & Measurable Organizational Growth

One of the many benefits of SEO is that it allows you to objectively track your company’s growth.

Relevant details like the duration visitors spend on your site, the number of pages they visit, etc. ’ll help your firm take more informed decisions to boost your market shares.

What’s more? While growth is a metric that every business will always strive for, it’s more than simply a badge of honor. Possessing the data of your business’s current growth (and potential for growth) is a stellar way to attract investors if you happen to be in need of funding, or take the decision to start another company.

5. SEO will help you build a long-term audience.

Paying for Ad placements; be it search engine marketing (SEM) pay-per-click, programmatic ads, and the likes, will only bring you short term results for a high price.

These modes of advertisements are not bad in themselves, but take the back seat as statistics prove that even if yours is a firm big enough to pull off running ads on multiple platforms 365 days of the year, SEO favours brand credibility and trust.

With SEO, you get to consistently provide your website visitors with the content they want, in place of having traffic downswing the moment an advert budget runs out, thereby building a community of clients. They’ll consider you a resource hub, the go-to firm, and not the intrusive one.

6. Overtake the Competition

So, chances are that your competitors make up the 61% of marketers who say “improving their SEO and improving their online presence is a top priority”. This means that they are likely already taking steps to establish high rankings in search results and if you’re not moving forward and improving your position, you’re losing ground to a competitor who is.

SEO is a widely acclaimed staple of any digital marketing strategy, which makes it a valuable tool you can’t afford to ignore for too long.

The earlier you get on board with an SEO strategy of your own, the higher your chances of keeping up with and ideally, moving ahead of your competitions.

7. SEO will help you make informed business decisions

In addition to advancing your brand visibility, establishing thought leadership, and garnering customers’ trust, SEO is also a major research resource.

The best part is that the same data that helps you understand customer behavior can be further expanded and used for a host of other marketing actions. The knowledge can be applied to the overall business strategy to shape the decisions your firm makes, resulting in bountiful ROI.

Once you figure out the consumer, converting them is easier work.

All you have to do is to segment your audiences, automate your marketing processes, and voila!

Conclusion:

Considering 93% of all web traffic comes from Google, it is only natural that the most coveted position for any business (website) is to rank on page one organically; a process known as SEO.

Having your firm rank on the first page of Google, gives you the bountiful benefits of consistent leads, calls, and customers, which is why achieving this feat can be challenging not to mention highly competitive. But like any great success, those results require a fair amount of time, effort, and SEO expertise.

Need help developing a winning SEO strategy to have your professional services firm rank on Google’s first page? Click here to book a free consultation with a member of our team