Marketers often make a big deal out of website SEO. Why is it so important that you optimize your site with great content? Here’s a breakdown of why on-site SEO is vital to your business having a successful online marketing strategy.

For unbranded searches, the top result gets 30% of clicks, the second gets 15% of clicks, the third gets only 9% of clicks, and it keeps going down from there. This means that if you want to get leads from organic search, using search engine optimization to get to the top is crucial.

What’s so great about leads from organic search? Well, SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate. In contrast, outbound leads like mail or print advertising have only a 1.7% close rate.

So, if you want to get quality leads and more conversions, the way to do it is with a focused search engine optimization strategy that gets you to the top of those search results pages.

Search rankings may get you leads and conversions, but how does optimizing your site help your rankings? To answer that, you have to understand what determines those rankings in the first place. Searchbots evaluate your site’s content and will penalize your rankings for issues such as:

• Content that’s too short or doesn’t provide enough value.
• Keywords used too little or too much.
• Images that are broken or have missing alt tags.
• Pages with title tags that are duplicates, missing, too long, or too short.
• Meta descriptions that are missing or have duplicate content.
• Pages with multiple, missing, or duplicate header tags.
• Dead internal or external links.
• URL structure not optimized for indexing.

This means that while you might think your website looks great, there could be a whole lot of behind-the-scenes issues that are dragging it down and keeping it from being ranked well and seen by people searching for your services.

On top of that, consider the fact that 60% of searches are from a mobile device. As a result, Google just announced they will switch to a “mobile-first index” which considers the mobile version of your site the “real” version. Is your site ready to be judged on its mobile-friendliness? Optimizing your site for mobile is about to become a huge factor in on-site SEO, and soon a site that looks great on a PC but not on a phone will have a tough time ranking well and getting seen.

So, more generally, what are the most important things that need to be optimized? What are the most important criteria for ranking well in search results?

Google says its top 3 ranking factors are:

1. Content
2. Links
3. RankBrain (which measures clicks and dwell time)

If the top factors for ranking sites is content, then that means that the biggest thing you can do to optimize your website for higher search rankings and more leads and conversions is to develop an SEO strategy that focuses on regularly producing high-quality optimized content.

That’s why 89% of B2B businesses now use content marketing—probably including your competitors.