With all the buzz about social media and mobile, you might be thinking that search engine optimization, or SEO, strategies are old hat. Think again!

Here is a look at how SEO can help drive advertising sales, making it a crucial part of your online marketing efforts.

Drive Traffic to Your Site

SEO is an essential strategy, part of every search engine marketing, or SEM, campaign. It gets you seen and nudges people toward your site. Here are three benefits when you’re trying to get traffic.

Visibility. It makes you more visible when people search for your types of products and services. The easier it is for people to find your website and the content you have posted, the more likely it is they will buy from you.

Remember when businesses tried to get listed in the Yellow Pages at the front of directory? That’s what good SEO does for you today. More leads come to your site when you are on page one, hopefully in one of the first five spots, when people search for your product or service.

This happens because following SEO best practices appeals to the criteria set by the search engines, especially Google. This gives you higher SEO rankings, meaning you are listed higher on the search results page.

Clicks. Did you know that if you are ranked number one for a Google search, you will get a full third of all the clicks? But you don’t have to be number 1 to get traffic. Over 90% of all traffic clicks on page one results. Fewer than 5% ever click on page two and over.

Feedback. When you know what keywords are using, you better understand what your customers are searching for. That gives you the data you need for analysis to help you tailor your online advertising strategy and the wording on your site to what your customer base is looking for.

Turn Visitors into Customers

Once you get those visitors coming to your site, you want them to buy from you. That’s what improves the bottom line of franchises and business opportunities, allowing them to stay competitive and grow.

SEO is one of the principle ways that online businesses use for lead conversion. It makes your website more than a static store front. It turns it into a vital sales channel. According to Hubspot in its State of Inbound report, more than 15% of marketers online consider SEO tactics to deliver above average conversion rates.

Good SEO increases your buying rate. Team an intelligent SEO strategy with strong lead nurturing tactics, and your will turn your visitors into buyers.

Step-by-Step

This doesn’t have to be overwhelming. SEO best practices are straightforward. You can’t control Google and its algorithm updates, but you can follow the basic guidelines and see more sales.

As an example, imagine you sell hunting shirts. Your first step is to focus on the best long-tailed keywords for people looking for a comfortable, durable and warm shirt when hunting season opens. You figure the best words out by putting together a persona of your ideal hunter-buyer. Then think like this fictional person. Put yourself in his place and determine what words he would type into the search bar.

By doing this, you will know what keywords to use. Then put them into your meta tags and content. This means you must consistently update your website design, articles and descriptions and do regular keyword research.

The result is that you will likely end up close to the top on the search results page. That position means that a hefty percentage of searchers are likely to click on your link.

Once you’ve got your visitor due to your hard SEO work, you want them to buy your shirt. Because you have also concentrated on producing good content on a regular basis, you already have a persuasive call-to-action on your landing page. This will convince your hunter to give you email address. Now you can send out regular newsletters and updates with useful information for hunters and your current deals on shirts.

As you nurture this relationship with your subscriber, he is likely to develop feelings of loyalty and trust. Over time, he will buy from you. Another very reasonable scenario is that he will click on the link on the search page, come to your site, like what he reads and sees, and buy from you right away.

Ka-Ching! SEO drives sales.