If you’re a small business owner you have likely heard about SEO and how it can help your business online but can it?
This article will dig deeper into the reasons you may want to consider an SEO strategy for your business and how it differs from other marketing techniques such as PPC (Pay Per Click) and Social Media Marketing.
1) Organic search is often a primary source of website traffic
While social media has grown significantly over the last decade and is an integral part of most marketing efforts not all business and commerce takes place on these platforms.
For many industries search is the primary driver of website traffic and where consumers go to look for information.
An example of these industries would be Insurance, Medical and health amongst many others. If you operate in any of these spaces or others where the primary transactions occur in search then it is incredibly important to maximize your presence across search engines like Google and Bing and others like Yandex or Baidu depending on your primary market.
2) Trust and credibility
Having your brand website, social profiles and other content/brand extensions like press releases and blog mentions ranking high on search engines can help create a sense of professionalism and credibility for when users research your company.
In addition to this other elements of search like featured snippets and the Knowledge graph can help make your website stand out with rating stars, profile icons and summaries of your products/services.
3) Better user experience
When you go through and optimize your website to improve its search engine rankings or hire an SEO provider to do it for you many parts of your website can improve which will benefit both search engines and end-users.
The following aspects of website optimization will help end-users such as:
- Using shorter more readable URL’s
- Improving website speed and load times
- Improving formatting of content such as headings and table of contents
- Adding internal links to other relevant content
- Making pages mobile friendly
- Improving overall content quality
- Adding accessibility options for end-users
- Removing auto-generated pages from search engines that aren’t helpful for users (e.g. search query pages)
By implementing the above and many other things you can improve your search engine rankings and increase overall user satisfaction.
4) Opportunity to be found in more locations
Many businesses offer their services outside of their main location including surrounding towns and cities or even states if the business is larger.
With the proper use of SEO, you can help rank your website for different location related terms so you can reach potential prospects in those locations.
5) Long-term ROI
Unlike social or other platforms that typically have short-term spikes of traffic search traffic generally tends to be more consistent as people search for certain keywords each month for evergreen topics like “how to tie a tie” or “what’s the best brand for X topic”.
Implementing strong SEO along with other internet marketing techniques can give you a good return on investment along with a steady stream of visitors to your website.
6) Your competitors are probably performing SEO
Chances are that if you’re in a competitive industry your competitors are probably engaging in SEO for their websites and internet properties.
Not acting and improving your own strategy can in many ways put you at a disadvantage to be found by potential future customers and other opportunities.
7) It still works
Despite the many blog posts and claims that go out every few years that “SEO is dead” the fact is that SEO as a whole is still effective and can benefit business and other types of websites.
Whilst some techniques and practices come and go the bulk of SEO hasn’t changed very much and will still be effective in helping attract traffic to websites and other online assets.
8) Reduced user acquisition costs
Paid traffic and search advertising can become very expensive very fast, while paid advertising works very well and is beneficial SEO can in many ways equate to a reduced cost to acquire users.
A good example of this is when you are operating in a very competitive space where the average cost of paid ads are very expensive, this can become a barrier to small businesses or niche players.
In this scenario you could instead focus on questions or other niche content related to the area you operate in and rank for those terms before working on paid advertising campaigns to help build momentum and capture users in different stages of the buying cycle.
Implementing this along with other aspects of your marketing can help build up brand awareness and save you money over time as you grow.
9) The power of the long-tail
The advantage of the long-tail alone is by far one of the best way best opportunities presented by SEO.
For those that don’t know what the long-tail means it is essentially a way of describing the seemingly infinite variations of words people use to search for things online.
For example your page could be targeting the keyword: “personal injury lawyer new York” but users could be looking for a more fine-tuned variation like: “personal injury lawyer operating in Spafford NY.
The second term is very specific to that location and uses NY instead of New York which shows stronger local intent to that area.
Every user search for things differently some people prefer to add “near me” to searches while others may add videos or pictures to their search terms depending on what they are after.
By producing high quality content on your pages and optimizing them for your primary keywords and implementing other things like relevant schema code you can feed search engine bots with all the information they require to determine what your website is about.
When done correctly this will enable your pages to rank for keyword variations over time naturally without having to optimize for each and every one of them.
Conclusion
We hope you found this article to be useful and help you when deciding if you consider an SEO strategy for your business needs.