SEO gives you the power to be the answer to potential customers’ questions. In addition to visibility and traffic increase, SEO contributes to your authoritative voice in your field. Authority then leads to brand trust, which ultimately leads to brand loyalty. This is why it is so wise in this day and age to take the time to develop something compelling online and make the most of SEO as a sales channel. This is a time and financial investment of sorts which can really pay off in the short and long-term.
Something worth noting
SEO helps small business owners create fast, robust, and user-friendly websites that rank higher in search engines, which in turn helps bring more qualified potential customers to their sites and eventually increases conversion rates. SEO also helps build brand awareness for your business as search engine users are more likely to trust a site that are on first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) than brands who are not. If you’re a small business owner, you should utilise SEO to build a strong web presence and bypass your competitions to gain new customers for your business and take it to the next level.
Making sure you have a clean and effective website
SEO will help small business owners create a faster, smoother, and user-friendlier website. Although most people still hang on to the old definition of SEO. They think that it is only about optimising for the search engines. However, today SEO is also about improving user experience too.
Well-structured, clean, and uncluttered websites compels a casual visitor to stay longer, thereby decreasing bounce rate and increasing page views. Similarly, highly relevant content (sales pages and blog articles) keeps you readers happy as they are more likely to solves answer their questions, solve their pressing issues and helps them find exactly what they’re looking for on your site. On-page SEO, if done properly, makes your users happy, which makes search engines happy too as they love to serve high quality information to their users.
It can really make your brand
One of the benefits of getting higher rankings on the SERPs is building brand awareness. When your sites appear on the first page of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, your potential customers are more likely to trust your brand when they search for a particular term rather than other brands that don’t have a strong web presence. That is why small businesses that want to build better brand awareness (either locally or expanding nationally) must invest in SEO and start gaining top rankings for the KEY terms related with their business. We’re not in the 90s anymore; search engines now play a significant role in making or breaking your brand.
Do it right and you will reach all of the right customers
With traditional marketing channels like print, radio, billboards, and TV you aim to reach a certain target market, but no matter how much research you do, you can never be sure. Digital tools like SEO, on the other hand, allows you to target very specific customers. This is by optimizing your website to appear in very specific search queries to very specific demographics, in very specific locations. Targeting specific locations is called ‘local search’ and has proven to be a very powerful tool. It is also important to not only attract customers but also increase sales.
Just make sure you do work on this for the long-term
Unlike other forms of online marketing like ‘paid search’, results from SEO are not instant. While it is possible to see instant results, seeing significant results from SEO takes time. According to research, it takes between six to twelve months to see significant improvements in ranking results. This is even more the case if your business is new. This might not even mean you’re going to reach the #1 spot. The upside of this is that SEO increases your visibility in the long run because your business remains visible while you’re moving up the rankings. This also means that you will be able to stay in the top spot for longer. You will be able to beat the short-lived attention of things like ‘paid search’. The same too can be said also of other forms of digital marketing.
Overall
Apart from your time, SEO is free if you manage it personally, unlike other marketing techniques such as pay-per-click. Search engines monitor your site 24 hours a day, boosting helpful material and assisting you in naturally finding new consumers. To get the most of your Seo techniques, spend some time studying. Look at the material on higher-ranked sites in your category. Also aim to produce content that is superior to theirs. Then, post your work on social media.
