The Value Of SEO for Brand Awareness in 2026

Jess Ailion
14 January 2026

There are 1.4 billion websites in the world, with 10,500 websites being created every hour, and 175 created each hour. That means, on average, by the time you’ve finished reading this article, there will be over a thousand more websites in the world than when you started reading. The value of SEO is that it is still one of the best tools to help your website stand out.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the go-to method for attracting more relevant visitors to your website in the long term. More visitors increase conversion. And so it continues.

The importance of SEO in your marketing strategy cannot be stressed enough. A well-optimized website can become the strongest source of traffic and leads for businesses. So let’s dive into exactly what the value of SEO is to get your website appearing in organic search results. But first things first:

SEO Marketing: Let’s Simplify

Whenever you have a website and want to market it online, one of the ways to do this is by using SEO strategies. SEO is the marketing practice of optimizing your website so that search engines rank it well. As a result, these search engines make your website more visible to a relevant audience: the people who use those search engines looking for the product, service, or content you’re offering. This makes your optimized website appear closer to the top of your audience’s organic search results and, therefore, increases the likelihood they’ll click on it.

A strong SEO marketing strategy will include a range of practices, like continuous optimization of top-quality content that can bring great value to your users and increase their trust in your brand, and identifying long-tail keywords or questions that your users are including when they search for the product/service that you offer.

As you’re about to learn, there are many benefits to SEO marketing.

The Benefits of SEO

SEO is a crucial part of any business’s marketing strategy. It brings with it countless opportunities for business growth and digital success. However, the true depth of value SEO can bring to businesses is often overlooked.

SEO Brings New Opportunities

You probably need traffic to get sales, but there are other benefits to SEO besides website conversions. SEO is also a nifty tool for benchmarking your business against competitor businesses. By conducting an SEO competitor analysis, you can find new opportunities to target your audience.

Competitive intelligence: 40% of Fortune 500 companies use SEO tools specifically for competitive analysis. By monitoring competitor keywords, content strategies, and ranking changes, you gain real-time insights into market positioning and can identify gaps in their approach before they notice yours.

Market discovery: Search data reveals untapped opportunities before competitors see them. International SEO expansion, when informed by keyword research, has driven subscription increases exceeding 1,000% for companies entering new markets. The takeaway: 15% of Google searches have never been searched before, representing continuous signals about emerging market needs.

Brand equity: High search visibility builds trust. Research from Google and Ipsos found that brands appearing in top search positions see an 80% average lift in brand awareness compared to not appearing at all. Your search presence shapes how customers perceive your authority.

Customer quality: Organic search customers show a higher lifetime value than customers from other channels. When you attract people who are actively searching for solutions you provide, they arrive with higher intent and lower skepticism.

The most sophisticated companies use SEO insights to inform their product strategy. Typeform analyzed bottom-of-funnel keywords tied to customer use cases and built template pages around them, generating $3 million in annual lifetime value from product-led content alone.

SEO Helps You Learn About Your Audience

Search Engine Optimization can also give you useful insights into your audience’s preferences and interests based on how they react to your content. Once you’ve implemented an SEO strategy, you can use analytics tools to track the number of clicks, length of time on site, bounce rate, and other metrics to gain insights into your audience.

For instance, you can measure:

How many visits you’re receiving from mobile users

How long they’re staying on your website

Which pages they’re visiting

When you track this data over time, you can identify your most engaged users and use this information to create a better user experience and deliver more relevant content. With this information, you can profile your users and their preferences, and use this to target your audience in different ways based on their behaviors.

You can also conduct a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) analysis to see what consumers are looking for and use this information to support your SEO strategy.

The granular insights SEO affords businesses are invaluable. It means brands can pivot to keep meeting the needs of their consumers in an evolving marketplace.

These insights enable brands to continuously improve their output, which is always an essential part of any marketing strategy. SEO informs us of exactly what consumers want and need.

SEO Allows You to Create Quality Content

Another important benefit of implementing an SEO strategy is that it will allow you to create quality content on your website. Google’s algorithm is constantly changing as it attempts to keep up with the evolving needs of its users, and you may have heard that it’s now placing a greater emphasis on the quality of website content, such as YMYL, in its search results.

YMYL stands for “Your Money or Your Life”. Briefly, it refers to topics that have the potential to significantly impact the health, financial security, wellbeing, or safety of the readers. These topics could be anything from medicine to finance. It’s incredibly important to have a professional behind the copy in these topics – that is providing genuine value as opposed to an opinion – because any misinformation could cause genuine harm to readers.

You can also use the aforementioned consumer behavior insights to help you create great content that will meet your consumers’ needs.

However, while having high-quality website content is essential, it won’t be enough to ensure that you rank highly in search engines. You also need to be able to convince search engines that your website contains the most relevant content on the Internet. That’s where keywords come into play.

You can make use of long-tail keywords, create an engaging tone of voice, give your images alt tags so search engines can decipher what they’re images of (and whether they’re relevant), and focus on providing your readers with the information they need.

If there’s one thing you must remember, it’s to prioritize the user, time and time again. For example, an instant positive user experience on the landing pages of your website means the customer is less likely to drop off at that point – they’ll likely want to see more. If they continue to browse beyond the landing page, your bounce rate should effectively remain low.

SEO Is Cost-Effective

SEO is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies for boosting website traffic. This makes total sense when you consider the fact that paid search ads cost money each time someone clicks on them, in addition to the cost of the time and expertise put into creating and running the campaigns, while SEO is an organic project that only costs as much as the time and expertise put into it.

SEO marketing is a great method for lead generation. Inbound strategies are the best in this regard, with SEO a vital part of this. It brings customers to you by providing them with the information they want and need at the time they’re searching for it. This generates high-quality leads and is important in increasing the chances of them becoming customers.

SEO is a much more affordable means of lead generation over time than most outbound marketing options. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is measured only as long as the campaign runs and is being paid for, whereas good SEO can provide you with leads even a long time after optimizations are made. It has more longevity, which can help your budget stretch further.

Increased revenue goes hand in hand with increased lead generation. The more relevant and quality leads, the more opportunities you have to convert potential customers into actual customers. Optimizing your digital content will generate the organic traffic you need for both of these and thus bring in more money.

Brand Awareness

SEO doesn’t just provide higher Google rankings and increased traffic. It also contributes to increased brand awareness. That means that whether a user converts or not, the value your website provided them with has not necessarily been in vain.

Every time your website appears on the first page in the SERP, you’re creating an impression on the person doing the searching. Every impression will accumulate to build stronger brand awareness, so that next time that consumer is looking for something to do with your brand, they may just go directly to your site. And better yet, they may convert into a customer. SEO ensures your brand is front of mind when it comes to relevant queries. All of your SEO efforts will contribute to making your brand or products more recognizable.

Brand awareness is one of the most important stages of the marketing funnel. It’s a way to generate leads without having to control it, and spend on it, at every moment.

What’s more, working on an SEO strategy and placing yourself on the first page of the SERP not only increases your brand’s visibility, but its trustworthiness too. The first page of the search results brings with it a sense of authority which can help with brand awareness, as consumers are more likely to take note of an authoritative brand.

Retention and Customer Experience/ UX

The digital experience your users face when they explore your website is a crucial component in Google’s ranking of your site. Google has a clever algorithm and it knows when a website offers its users a positive user experience. Luckily, if you have a solid SEO strategy in place, it’s likely that you’ve optimized your site in a way that satisfies your customers’ needs and consequently please Google too.

SEO provides your customers with a more positive user experience; whether that’s by making it easy for them to find the information they’re specifically looking for with the use of clear title tags and keywords, alt-tagging photos to make them accessible for all, or ensuring all of the content is strictly relevant. As a result, you’ll see a higher retention rate as customers are more likely to remain on your site and return time and again.

SEO’s emphasis on continuous improvement impacts the positive evolution of the customer experience. This rings true when it comes to localization, too. SEO insights can inform greater localization strategies so that each customer’s experience is more tailored to them, providing them with a more positive experience.

Google is often used to find the answers to all of our questions. People search for a question, and they want an answer instantly in as few clicks as possible. The SERP keeps changing according to Google’s understanding of users’ needs, and SEO provides the opportunity to try and rank among the answers displayed directly in the SERP. This can lead to new sessions, or when the user doesn’t necessarily need more information, it can lead to increased brand awareness. SEO is one of the best ways to stay on top of Google’s ongoing changes.

SEO is Measurable

It is easy to measure SEO efforts through tracking processes and analytics. Being able to measure any marketing strategy is important because brands need to know if their money is being well spent and leading to the desired results.

Some important trackable SEO KPIs that provide value for any business are:

Organic traffic, e.g. sessions, pageviews, users
Organic behavior, e.g. average session duration, bounce rate
Events, e.g. newsletter subscription, B2C and B2B landing page leads
Keywords, e.g. positions, fluctuations, impressions, clicks, CTR

SEO Ranking Factors

The primary purpose and benefit of SEO is to increase website traffic. As mentioned above, an SEO-optimized website increases the likelihood that it’ll be clicked on. When done well, SEO should increase the number of people who see your website listed in search results and click through to it.

How SEO Increases Traffic

It goes without saying that the more useful, relevant, and engaging your content is, the better it will rank in Google. That’s because more people will find it helpful and enjoy reading it, which Google’s algorithm will ultimately reward you for.

One of the main factors considered by Google’s algorithm is how valuable content is, but how do you make content valuable?

The first step is to make it useful to the target audience, whether that’s offering helpful tips or providing insightful research and statistics. It should also be relevant to the topic, so an article titled “The Value of SEO in 2023” should not go on a tangent about effective social media ads, for example.

Optimized Keywords

One of the most important factors of SEO is the use of keywords. That doesn’t mean you should create an article stuffed with keywords! It does mean you should conduct a strong keyword research, using different methods and keyword research tools, and understand how your audience prefers to search for the things that you’re offering. A keyword can be a single word or a phrase (which is referred to as a long-tail keyword) that users are entering into search engines. Google will match your content to relevant queries based on those keywords. How else are users meant to find your content without them?

The whole point of SEO is to drive organic traffic from the SERPs to your website, and the keywords you target will dictate which audiences comprise this traffic. Being selective is important – if you’re a chocolate company, you might want to promote your new “truffles”, but you need to take care to avoid attracting traffic for the mushroom kind of truffle.

To find the best and most relevant SEO keywords to target, understanding your target audience’s needs is required. What are they searching for and what type of content do they desire? Keyword research comes into play here, which is done by SEO specialists.

Backlink Profile

A website needs to have a healthy profile. Follow the website’s backlinks and make sure that nobody is using its content or links for spam. Also, understanding which content from your site is being regularly shared by other websites organically is something you can do to increase the page’s value and maximize the impact of these shares for your business. Examples include adding ways to engage with your services, lead forms, call to actions.

The process of receiving natural backlinks will give your site more authority and in turn, can help it rank higher for relevant keywords. Google considers whether other important sites link to your content when determining if your content is trustworthy. Think of backlinks as recommendations for your website.

It’s important to note that backlinks are only worthwhile if they’re coming from credible and well-respected sites. Having many links from spammy websites won’t help you increase your ranking, and they can do more damage to the health of your profile. This is why tracking your profile is important.

The Bottom Line

SEO delivers far more than website traffic. While conversions matter, the companies winning long-term use SEO to spot market gaps before competitors, understand what customers actually search for, and build products around proven demand. The businesses treating SEO purely as a traffic channel are leaving their most valuable insights on the table.