With 93% of online experiences starting with a query in a search engine, natural referencing remains a particularly important acquisition lever for companies on the web. Many companies rely on this channel to develop their notoriety and their turnover. And for good reason, natural referencing has many advantages for advertisers.
Despite everything, it also has limits, and it is important to have them in mind before embarking on a natural referencing optimization process. Here is an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of natural referencing .
Infographic / summary
Pressed for time? Here is a summary of the pros and cons of SEO.
- Benefits
- His power
- Its lower cost
- Visibility and sustainable traffic
- A qualified audience
- Trusted results
- Measurable results
- The inconvenients
- SEO takes time
- Competition on search engines is (sometimes) high
- Penalty risks
infographic that summarizes the pros and cons of SEO
The benefits of SEO
His power
The statistics and studies on the subject are unanimous: in 2021 search engines (with Google in the lead) have definitely become part of consumer habits, whether in France or internationally. Whatever the theme in which your business operates, there is a good chance that the services or products you offer will be regularly searched for in search engines. By developing your visibility on these Internet queries, you will considerably increase the traffic of your website , your notoriety will grow and the opportunities for conversions will be more numerous.
Its lower cost
The work undertaken every day by search engines, which browse and offer pages in their natural results, costs nothing to the companies that own the referenced sites. This is the reason why we sometimes hear that natural referencing is free. In reality, it is more accurate to consider that if ranking by search engines will cost you nothing, the resources that you will mobilize (in-house or via a service provider) to optimize your SEO will still have a cost.
That being said, the cost of a natural referencing approach is often much lower than that of other levers, because it does not incur direct costs unlike advertising. Above all, the visibility that you will have acquired thanks to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is visibility that you can benefit from in the long term, which brings us to the third point…
Visibility and sustainable traffic
Unlike more traditional acquisition methods, natural referencing is a lever that allows you to generate long-term traffic from the moment it has been worked on. Thanks to the content and all the optimizations that you will put in place as part of your best SEO company approach, your website will continue to be offered by search engines in their results pages for several months (or even several years) after implementing your strategy. This is one of the main advantages of natural referencing over paid referencing., where you pay each time a visitor visits your site, and where the traffic stops when the campaigns are stopped (or the budget is exhausted).
A qualified audience
Working on your natural referencing consists in making yourself visible , through the engines, to a target audience when it carries out a search related to our theme / activity. Visitors generated via SEO, before arriving on your site, will therefore have expressed a need (commercial, informative, etc.). This is not the case in many other marketing actions, which even when they target larger audiences, are aimed at people who are not necessarily interested in the services/products offered (urban billboards, sponsorship, canvassing phone…). One of the great strengths of SEO services company therefore lies in its ability to reach a qualified audience., more likely to drive conversions than a traditional marketing audience.
Trusted results
It is not uncommon for natural results to be preferred by Internet users, to the detriment of paid results which may be displayed on certain queries. This can easily be explained: it seems natural to give more confidence to content that has been chosen for its relevance by search engines (natural results), rather than to links that are only offered because they were bought.
Measurable results
Thanks to SEO or statistical monitoring tools (such as Google Analytics), it is possible to know precisely the SEO performance of a site. Whether by studying its positioning (list of queries on which the site stands out), the share of traffic represented by natural referencing, or the number of conversions generated by visitors from search engines.
Although this measurability is not specific to SEO, it remains a determining criterion that makes it possible to easily assess the optimization efforts undertaken upstream by your company.