The market can be a very difficult place to operate. Pretty much any small business can tell you that. The thing is, competition is only going to increase. There will always be competition out there ready to undercut you with prices. Likewise, there are always going to be more and more businesses with a bigger budget than yours.
One of the best ways to fight back as a small business with a limited marketing budget is through organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Having an effective SEO strategy in place can effectively allow you to maximise your outreach and boost traffic to your site.
The Benefits Of SEO For Smaller Businesses
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the overall process of designing your site and content. You need effective SEO with your site if you want your site to get high rankings. Anytime someone searches for a keyword or key phrase using a search engine, your website gets ranked using the search engine’s algorithm. Optimising your site to get higher rankings for various keywords and phrases is the entire premise of SEO.
An effective SEO strategy involves having good keyword research. You need to research the various keywords that your prospective customers are using to identify the product or service you offer. You can utilise various mediums including your site, social media platforms, and more. The key is using these to strengthen the ranking of your site.
The majority of small businesses do use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. This includes various paid advertising platforms offered by the likes of Google and Microsoft. However, PPC can get very expensive. Unfortunately, when your budget runs out, so does your traffic. That is if you are primarily relying on paid traffic.
Leveraging PPC can be advantageous. However, it’s a short-term fix. It’s something that only works when you have the funds for it. It’s not a viable long-term solution because no business has unlimited funds. Instead, you want a solution that is much more sustainable and practical like SEO. SEO is a much more beneficial long-term strategy and it can yield great long-term results. For instance, a quality “evergreen” blog post is something that can drive very engaged traffic to your site long after you publish it.
Still not convinced? Here are some of the benefits of SEO for small business owners.
1. Brand Awareness
One of the most significant benefits of SEO for a small business is the kind of brand awareness it can bring. After all, no one can become your customer if they don’t even know you exist.
Along with this, you need to develop trust with your prospective customers. A lot of customers won’t do business with a website they don’t trust. They rely on search engines to provide them with this information (by ranking them high).
You can leverage SEO for small businesses to create brand awareness and generate more trust by offering high-quality answers to questions. For instance, say you are looking to purchase a diamond ring but you don’t want to purchase one from a retailer or site that’s not reputable. Therefore, you might want to Google “how to tell if a diamond is real?”
If you create and publish content as a diamond business and you help prospective customers differentiate real from fake, you can gain much more trust with your audience. This will increase your conversions.
2. More Customers
The fact is, the more traffic you bring, the more customers you convert. Solely relying on paid advertising can get exorbitantly expensive. This is especially true if you are competing with businesses with significant budgets. A quality long-term Search Engine Optimisation strategy will be more focused on getting your pages to rank as high as possible within the search engine rankings.
Luckily, you can unleash the benefits of an SEO company in Basingstoke in various ways. There’s plenty you can do including targeting the right keywords, optimising your website so it loads quickly, and optimising your headers and tags. You also need your website to load quickly and be optimised for viewing on mobile devices.
The best way to strategise and to get your website ranking well, you want to look at your site from Google’s perspective. What’s Google trying to achieve? They want to drive their users to relevant sites. They want their users to have a good experience themselves. Thus, they will rank your website according to whether or not they think your website helps them achieve that.
All you need to do is make your website for your users and your prospective and current customers. People will engage with an optimised and high-quality site that is relevant to their searches. When you get your site ranking high, you can expect more traffic. More traffic means more conversions for your business.