Website Content SEO

Let’s first make sure we understand the absolute basics of SEO, including why it matters and how it compares to other marketing channels.

Why is SEO important?

Most web traffic comes from Google’s organic results.

In other words: organic search accounts for more traffic than all other sources of traffic combined.

If you read our guide to how search engines work, you’ll know that Google and other search engines choose which pages to rank based on hundreds of signals. SEO is important because it’s the process of boosting these signals to rank higher in the organic search results.

What are the benefits of SEO?

Ranking higher is the most touted benefit of SEO, but rankings are really just a means to an end. Many of the real benefits of SEO are traffic-related.

1. SEO leads to more traffic

Because most people tend to click one of the first few search results, ranking higher usually drives more traffic to your website.

2. SEO leads to consistent traffic

Ranking in search engines usually leads to both consistent and passive traffic. That’s rarely the case for mediums like social media and email marketing that often result in traffic spikes that quickly fade to nothing.

This happens because social media networks are designed to surface fresh content. Emails often get marked as read, forgotten, or land in the spam box. However, because the number of searches performed on search engines is typically consistent from month to month, the traffic tends to be both consistent and passive once you rank.

3. SEO leads to ‘free’ traffic

Unlike paying for ads, search traffic is ‘free.’

That’s a big deal because ads on search engines can be expensive.

For example, according to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, the Ahrefs Blog gets an estimated 390k monthly visits from search engines every month. If we paid Google for that traffic, it would cost us an estimated $1M per month.

Of course, creating content that ranks in Google isn’t free—but it’s usually cheap compared to paying for ads.