Gone are the days when a business could get by without an Internet presence. Even if you offer “real world” products and services, too much of the buyer’s journey happens online. If you don’t reach them online, someone else will.

But the web is full of competing voices, making it hard for small growing businesses to reach an audience cost-effectively. Understanding how SEO helps your business is critical.

Do you know why SEO is so important? Let’s take a look!

1. It Drives Sustainable Traffic

90% of all organic traffic is search engine traffic. Organic search (almost exclusively Google) is responsible for over 53% of all web traffic.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a long-term digital marketing strategy, and it takes some time and effort to rank well in search, but once you do, this is sustainable, continual traffic that you don’t have to pay per click for.

2. It Lowers Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)

The next biggest traffic driver is paid advertising (15%), where you pay for every click. Paid advertising certainly has its place, and in all honesty, you’ll probably need a balance of both to generate revenues for your small business. That’s because search rankings are something you earn over time and you need to generate revenues now.

With that said, if you’re relying solely on paid traffic long-term, you have higher acquisition costs forever with no plan to get those costs down. Sometimes that’s still a model for success, but in general organic traffic CAC gets lower the longer you run your SEO campaigns.

3. SEO Generates Targeted Traffic

SEO doesn’t just drive more traffic to your website. It drives an extraordinary kind of traffic. In SEO, you focus on becoming visible organically in searches that your target audience uses to find what you offer when they need it or need to learn more about their options.

This increased visibility at just the right time allows you to convert a visitor into a lead or customer. Conversion rates and time-on-site are almost always higher for organic traffic from your SEO efforts than other traffic channels like paid and social.

4. It Provides Social Proof

92% of people trust non-paid recommendations more than any other brand message and have been shown to influence buying decisions.

Social proof doesn’t just happen on social media, word of mouth, or review sites. Having search engine visibility is its own kind of social proof.

Sites rank higher because they are valued by their visitors and Google. But it goes both ways. When people see a certain brand appearing repeatedly in their search, they recognize your site as a more trusted site. This isn’t a coincidence. Most people don’t understand this, but Google really cares about which websites they show at the top of search results! Over time, people have come to expect that the first page of Google will contain a product or service website link that has exactly what they’re looking for, and that the business is reliable. Correspondingly, it’s social proof if your website ranks in organic search results on page one of Google!

And because they see you repeatedly, they’re also more likely to click your site even if you’re not sitting in the number one spot just because you’re the name they know.

5. It Increases Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Yet another benefit of being so visible in search is that people see you, so they visit your site more often, leading to higher customer lifetime customer value CLV.

You’ve probably already heard that it costs 25X as much to acquire a customer as it does to keep them. SEO is a powerful tool to retain customers.

Ultimately, asking how SEO helps your business comes down to what really matters to a small business: higher revenues and lower acquisition costs.

SEO checks both boxes nicely.