A small business owner will have a lot of responsibilities which includes arranging finances, running the company, ensuring the staff is doing their job, getting a website up and running and also marketing the company so that the business is steady.
Fulfilling all these responsibilities is so overwhelming to them that they do not make SEO a priority. But an online presence for any business is as essential as marketing it offline, a well-done SEO not only creates good online visibility for your business but also in the long-run help growing the revenue.
Why Is SEO Important For Business?
This Sacramento SEO company states that SEO is important for your business. Here’s why.
- Helps to get customers organically: SEO is not like other types of advertising where you spend a lot of money. It can directly reach the target audience and connect to your potential customers as they voluntarily visit your website.
- Improves brand awareness: By doing an SEO of the website the traffic from the search engines is attracted to your site and thus there is enhanced brand awareness. This is important for any new business that is looking to build a customer base.
- Brings more customers: Small businesses that have a good SEO done on the website will see a better customer base and grows twice as fast as other businesses who have not done one. SEO helps to attract local customers who are looking for a product or service you offer but have not heard about your business. It is the most effective, efficient and inexpensive marketing strategy which brings customers to you instead of you going to them.
- Improved conversion rates: A website that is optimized for SEO is user-friendly. It is easy to browse and has all the necessary details for the customer. Moreover, an SEO website is also mobile-friendly and is likely to hold the attention of the user and hence higher chances of conversion. It also means that there will be more subscribers and loyal customers.
- Get ahead of the competition: If there are two businesses who sell the same product at the same price but only one of them has an SEO website and the other does not, the one who has an SEO website is likely to attract more customers. SEO is a powerful marketing strategy that all businesses should invest their time and resources.
Why Is SEO Hard For Business?
SEO is getting harder for small business and it is not so for the bigger brands here are some reasons why it is challenging to succeed.
- Lack of money and time: Money is not something a small business has in good measure and that is what is needed to do an SEO. Business owners prefer to spend money on traditional marketing and advertising as they believe that it provides better ROI than digital marketing.There is a need to spend some money on SEO so that you get good returns. It is also essential to hire an expert like BearFoxMarketing.com to get good results. Another major reason for small businesses not succeeding in SEO is they lack time, most of the employees are tied for time and have to perform many tasks as part of their job responsibilities and hence have no time to spend on SEO.Search engine optimization is a time-consuming task as there are many things to do like optimizing the website, creating content, securing links, etc.
- Can’t keep updated with changes: This reason is linked to the first reason. Small businesses don’t have enough money to spend on an expert and their own resources have no time for SEO. Search engines keep updating their algorithms change every now and then and hence the person handling the SEO for the business should be updated about it. If your company marketer is busy with other things it is easy to miss the updates and that can affect the rankings.
- Big businesses have time on their side: There are very few businesses that have become a success overnight. All big brands have reached the top after many years of struggle and growth but as a small business, your company has just started out and thus it is hard for your website to get ranked high as it has been able to build the profile yet.That makes it harder for new business websites to be ranked high when it is competing with reputed brands. Bigger companies know how SEO works and hence have an advantage over your small business.
- Search engines like established brands: Search engines favor established brands as people prefer it to. The tipping point for Google to rank the established brand higher when everything is the same as the user behavior data. It shows that people like to click on well-known websites rather than little known ones. Also smaller companies have to compete for the keyword and an extra effort is needed to beat the big guns in SEO.
- Don’t have good software: A small business will not have enough money to invest in good software. A big company will have an expert SEO team and many tools that can be used to make their tasks easy. Those tools can be used to analyze, optimize and manage the results so that it results in better conversion rates. A small company will make use of a free tool or cheap software which makes it challenging for them to do proper SEO.
- You have a small website: If you have a small business it is more likely that the website will also be smaller. That means less content, fewer pages, and also the keywords will be limited and that means lesser chances for top rankings. All this means that the bigger websites will get much more traffic than smaller websites. Also, since the bigger companies have more resources to create better content and bigger websites they get more reach.
- No representation in Google: A small business will usually not have a personal relationship with search engines with no representatives dedicatedly working with them. They also tend not to spend a lot of money on paid advertising on search engines and hence they will have fewer connections. On the contrary, bigger companies will have better relationship personally with search engines as they have spent on paid advertising and thus favors are made for them.
SEO Tips For Small Business
Having a good website is the first thing in the list of things that have to be done and to make it stand out on the internet, SEO is essential. Building an optimized website, keyword optimization is some of the things that will help you get more traffic. Some of the SEO tips for small business are:
- Using the right keywords: Choosing the right keywords is the first critical thing in SEO. A small business should look at all the likely words that a client will use to search for the product and service you offer. For example, if you are selling a refrigerator then it is more likely that people search with a fridge. Make a list of keywords and then use that on Google Adwords after creating the account so that you can validate the list of keywords that you have with what is used in the searches online. These keywords can be used to help with getting a higher ranking.
- Use keywords sparingly: The web pages that are created for your website is mainly for your users and not for the search engines as per Google’s webmaster guidelines. It is thus essential not to overdo keywords and annoy users with unwanted words. Ensure that the text on the webpage is easy to read and is understandable.
- Use high-quality content: It is critical that you create content that is of high-quality so that you get good organic traffic. Have videos, images or content that is compelling and one which provides relevant information which is useful to the users. Also, there is a need to frequently update it so that it is still relevant. A good content strategy will emphasize to the reader that you have expertise in your domain.
- Make a user-friendly website: A website is a mainstay for your online presence and hence it is essential that you make it easy to navigate and is user-friendly. When the user visits the site it is essential to put the right keywords headings and also make it stand out for search engines to rank you better. Another critical thing on websites is the speed because if it is slow to load and sluggish the visitors will leave the site immediately and also ensure that it is optimized for mobile platforms. Remember that a search engine will rank your website lower of it is not displayed properly on your smartphone.
- Check the results: There are many free and inexpensive tools that can be used to measure the performance of your site. That will help you know more about the visitors, the location and the time spent on each page which will in turn help in optimizing performance.
A small business has to use limited resources to good use and ensure that you make SEO a priority as it can help in generating more revenue.