Search engine optimization is a branch of digital marketing in which businesses enhance their websites’ appearance, content quality, and responsiveness to gain more customers and create awareness. It usually involves the creation of keyword-optimized content, the design of a mobile-friendly website, and backlinking.
It’s more like putting your site’s technical and textual elements in order, to give visitors a pleasant web experience and a compelling buying experience. SEO also include page loading speed optimization, site interactivity and linking to other websites in the same niche. All to ensure that visitors find your site on the web and feel encouraged to whip their wallets and do business with your brand.
SEO is one of the powerful tools for attracting potential buyers and clients on the web for your business. However, it seems the small companies are taking it with levity. Perhaps, they don’t understand the authority they could wield when their website is fully SEO-optimized.
In this article, we’ll answer the most frequently asked question about SEO: What are the benefits of SEO for small businesses? Read on and be awed.
Attracts more customers through organic search
The main goal of SEO is to improve the visibility of your website. And when it’s done well, your website stands the chance of ranking on the Google first page for relevant searches. Your pages can be ranked at the top of the first page with further improvements.
Taking your website to these positions will bring in more traffic and more customers. Your content will be suggested for their organic searches. Data analysis revealed that 53.3% of all traffic received by a website is from organic searches. Meanwhile, 60% of marketers claimed through a survey that the highest quality leads usually emerge from SEO-engaged customers.
These data show that SEO is working and should never be underestimated, especially when seeking new buyers or clients. It’s a long-lasting solution for attracting customers on the web.
Create a trustworthy shopping experience for site visitors
Before anyone would pay for a product online or hire a service business for a task, they must have developed a certain level of trust for the company. The cause of the faith could be recommendations and reviews from past customers/clients or the authority the business commands on the internet platforms, Google in particular.
Search engine optimization is the way to gain internet users’ trust. Seeing your website ranked in the first five positions for every organic search related to your niche would create a sense of reliability in them. They would consider your brand a professional in the niche and want to buy your products or hire you for a service.
Moreover, you can also mesmerize them with a fast page loading speed, awesome content, and a mobile-friendly website that can be achieved using SEO. And having other websites referencing your site as the source for rich and quality would do a lot in convincing the internet users.
Search engine optimization will not only give your business exposure. It will also help you garner the trust and respect needed to gain more customers.
Direct your focus to user experience
Most times, businesses always lose focus of the importance. They are usually blinded by the desire to sell and make more profits rather than focusing on creating a better experience for their customers product-wise and even in advertisements. SEO will help you focus on creating a better user experience for your customers.
Search engine optimization will force businesses to make content that provides value to their site visitors. Companies will focus on answering FAQs about their products and services. They will also strive to design a responsive website that loads quickly and mobile-friendly. And provide a downloadable manual that contains all the information about products and services.
Google prioritize user experience, and it’s one of their criteria for ranking sites. They rank websites with vast resources and fast loading speeds higher on SERPs. SEO is the solution to provide a better user experience to customers.
Improve brand awareness
Aside from gaining more customers, SEO will automatically give your business brand awareness. To continue to climb the ladder in SERPs and remain in the top position for a more extended period will make people know your brand. Moreover, you can target people in a particular region or area using localized keywords.
Localized keywords are words or phrase that includes the names of the area or region a business covers or is located. Examples are “best plumbing service in Manhattan” or “affordable digital marketing agency in Newark.” Including similar words in your content will rank your business only for search queries in those locations.
SEO is the simplest way to create awareness for your business on the internet. And unlike other methods, like television adverts or billboard adverts, it only targets the right audience.
Stay informed about recent updates
The little challenge about search engine marketing is that ranking criteria usually change. It could be a result of an upgrade in algorithm or search engine update.
These changes sometimes make businesses drop from top positions on Google search engine result pages (SERPs). Therefore, a company must stay in sync with the latest developments.
Although this may seem like extra work, it’s very useful because SEO is generally tied to digital marketing.
By staying informed, you will catch the latest trends in internet advertisement and new marketing strategies and understand your competition better. It implies that no opportunities will pass by you unnoticed.
SEO is cheap and budget-friendly
Search engine optimization might take a long time to mature, but it’s very cheap compared to other forms of digital marketing. You can run an SEO campaign for your business with little or no amount. It’s nice to hire a specialist, but you can also get things done yourself if you have the time. And you can also add an SEO worker to your IT department.
What makes it the best for small businesses is that it produces a long-lasting result. And it only requires a small amount of maintenance. An update might come up, but the fundamentals will remain the same for years.
Results are trackable
You can always measure the performance of your SEO campaign. With the appropriate tools, you can track your website loading speed and rankings on different platforms and even compare your site performance with competitors.
This will enable you to discover what they are doing right and what you’re doing wrong. You can also utilize content research tools to figure out powerful keywords and article suggestions for your website.
SEO keeps your business open 24/7
Small businesses might not have what it takes to run 24/7. However, SEO will put you in a position to receive orders and jobs even during your closing hours.
Where to start with an SEO campaign for your small business
SEO is broad and has no end, and for this reason, a small business may find it hard to decide on where to begin. The first place is keyword researching. Sign up for a paid keyword research tool or use the free Google keyword planner to find powerful, ranking words relevant to your niche and business.
Then, create content and add these keywords to them. Ensure the density is less than 3% of the entire content to prevent unfair practices punishable by Google. After this, you can proceed to improve your site’s loading speed which may demand image optimization and deletion of cache and other heavy useless files.
You could make your third phase competitors analysis. With the aid of the right tools, you can sneak on your competitors and learn how they are doing better and what you can also do to improve your website performance.
For more tips, check our article on using SEO to improve your website ranking.
If it seems like a big job, Premlall Consulting is here for you. We run the best SEO services. A trial will surely convince you!
