Before a customer interacts with a brand or business, odds are they’ve searched online for an answer to a problem or question they had. If your business can solve their problem or answer their question, you want your site popping up in their search results.
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Almost all online research happens on Google, so figuring out how to get your web pages found on their search engine is key.
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Ideally, you want to be as close to the #1 result for relevant queries as possible. You’ve probably searched for something yourself on Google, and you’ve likely clicked on one of the first three results that popped up — or at least one on the first page. The point is, people rarely look at results further down the page, let alone go past the first page of hits.

Landing on that first page takes strategic, consistent SEO efforts. (And time — it takes an average of three years to reach a #1 rank.) To do it well, you need a holistic approach that takes into account your business offerings, goals, content strategy, and the keywords you want/need to rank for.
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The good news is with the right SEO strategy, you can get the most out of your content and make your marketing work for you while you sleep. Imagine, for instance, you are Shopify or BigCommerce and you rank for the term “e-commerce,” which has 94,000 search queries per month. If you can rank 1-3 on Google’s search results for that term, you’ll be driving an additional 9,400 sessions to your site a month. That’s a lot of traffic! Then, your team can optimize that page to convert searchers who land there, or re-target them with your solutions.
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Of course, ranking for a term like “e-commerce” is hard. Really hard. Ahrefs says that the term “e-commerce” is an 85 out of 100 on the difficulty scale, where 1 is easy and 100 is the most difficult. It would take years for any one company to rank for that term, but once you do, it becomes harder for your competitors to steal it away from you.

This is the moat that SEO builds for your brand. It will start small, but the more optimized your site and content, and the more keywords you rank for, the more traffic you will consistently get and the harder it will be for competitors to earn that same traffic –– at least, without paying for it.

If you’re looking for a long-term growth strategy that is fairly evergreen and want to avoid putting money behind ads, investing in SEO would be wise for your business.