What is SEO? Do I need to invest in SEO? How will SEO benefit my business? These are questions you might be asking yourself as a small business owner.
To keep it short and sweet we’ve put together a quick description of search engine optimization, simply known as SEO, while also demonstrating 5 key reasons why SEO is important for you and your small business.
What is SEO?
To keep it brief, search engine optimization is the practice of improving the quality of a website in ways that will help your website rank higher in keyword search results on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
There are two main components to building a successful SEO strategy:
- Building discovery by getting search engines to discover your website through crawling and relevance, known as indexing. This is achieved by creating lots of high-quality, valuable, keyword rich content on the topics you want to be known for.
- Building domain and page authority through ranking by getting lots of high-quality backlinks to your website.
SEO is a crucial part of any successful web marketing strategy. As an extremely important marketing tool for businesses of all sizes, it has also become increasingly more competitive.
Why is SEO important for my business?
Every day, millions of people are using search engines, most notably Google, to get answers to the questions they might have. In fact, about 3.8 million Google searches are made every minute. It may even be how you found this article.
Think about your own use of search engines. When you have a question that you want to be answered, you often reach for your phone or computer and type in what you’re looking for into Google or another search engine. Results then pop up from a variety of sources, and most of the time, they fit what you’re looking for quite accurately. It’s not luck or a random draw that brought these search results to you. In fact, these results were determined based on what search engines like Google think will be the most helpful information to you. Their algorithms will evaluate the search query keywords that you entered into their search box and find pages that best match what they think you are looking for.
Now, how often do you scroll through more than just the first page or two of your search results? Rarely or maybe even never. In fact, 75% of users do not move on to page two of search results.
The websites you see ranking on the first page didn’t get there by accident, they completed extensive research and used successful SEO tactics to help Google understand what their content is about and over time, they became a top search result for the associated keywords. If you want your website to be featured at the top of your target audience’s search results, you need to do the same.
SEO is ongoing and cumulative. It is not a short-term tactic, it is a long-term strategy. Ranking organically within search engine results pages (SERPs) takes time and effort, so it’s important to start as soon as you can. SEO has many benefits, not only is it more cost-effective than other strategies like paid advertising, it has a progressive snowball effect. As you invest over time by regularly creating and optimizing content, your site becomes larger and more authoritative and therefore more likely to rank higher in search engine results.
Still not sure about investing in SEO? Let’s get into 5 Key benefits of SEO for your small business.
5 Key Benefits of SEO
1. Attracts more visitors
A key benefit to implementing SEO to your website is that ultimately (if done correctly) your website will bring in more visitors and, therefore, more customers through conversion.
Unlike traditional outbound marketing methods like advertising, where you’re reaching out to potential consumers whether they want to hear from you or not, with effective inbound marketing like SEO, your website will be reaching your target audiences directly when they are already searching for information related to your industry, products, and services. Although advertising is still a great way to reach potential customers, with a website that has effective SEO strategies in place, you will be able to reach your target audience directly while they’re actively searching online, looking to make a purchase of a product or use a service, like yours.
Ultimately, the hope is that eventually, through optimizing your website with cumulative SEO tactics, you will increase the chances that your web marketing strategies will translate into a much higher number of website visitors, and therefore leads and sales through conversion.
2. Builds brand awareness & credibility
When your business’s website ranks highly within SERPs, it often comes with the added benefit of brand awareness and perceived credibility. Prospective customers who see your brand listed on the first page of their search results will perceive your website as a leading and credible source for the topic they are currently searching for.
Making this perception, especially as a first impression, is an incredible step towards building brand salience, through credible noticeability and trust.
3. Creates a more user-friendly experience
SEO is no longer just about optimizing keywords for search engines, it also includes optimizing the user experience (UX) of your website. UX has become a significant factor in search engine rankings and therefore it is now also a critical component of SEO.
By improving the UX of your website with SEO in mind, it will help create a faster, smoother, and more user-friendly website that will entice your potential customers to revisit, stay longer and be much more likely to convert into leads and sales. Contrarily, if your website is not optimized with UX in mind, visitors might access your website and not be able to easily find what they were looking for, prompting them to leave quickly, which would increase your website’s bounce rate.
When your website is optimized for user experience, your visitors will be much more engaged and, in turn, will also indicate to search engines that the information on your website is of a high value and quality for their users, which quality and relevance is what search engines aim to provide best.
4. Long-term results
Implementing an effective SEO strategy and mastering Google’s algorithm takes dedicated time, effort, and investment. However, unlike traditional advertising, the results of your SEO efforts don’t cease once the budget runs out or slows down. With reasonable maintenance, your achieved rankings through SEO will continue to promote your website 24/7, and therefore, the efforts you make will be organically ongoing. With quality SEO, you can expect to see significant business impacts within the first 6-12 months. However, over time, continued SEO efforts will compound and lead to increased results for several years to come.
5. Helps surpass the competition
Last but not least, today, SEO is increasingly becoming considered a staple of any web marketing strategy; however, it has not yet been adopted by all businesses, especially smaller ones. So, to get ahead of your competitors now is the time to capitalize and optimize your website with an SEO strategy so that you can continue growing your organic web traffic and surpass your competition.
If your competitors are already implementing SEO marketing strategies, it’s even more important to ask yourself why you haven’t started yet. If it’s a question of not knowing how or not having enough time, then this can be easily solved with an experienced SEO agency that can help you and your business work towards increasing your website’s search engine results.
Full Service SEO Agency
Admiral Creative is a full-service SEO agency that can help you position your business for success and get found online through organic search engine results.
Search Engine Optimization can be confusing and time-consuming. Allow our SEO agency experts to save you time and money while improving your website’s search engine results that will put you ahead of the competition.
Let us know if you would like to learn more about the benefits of incorporating SEO strategies into your small business web marketing plans.
