The Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses
Why is SEO for Small Businesses So Essential?
Running a small business has different challenges today than ever before. While there may be more giant companies to compete against, there are also new tools that can help small businesses to grow even in the face of competition. SEO for small businesses is one of the most valuable techniques that you can utilize, but it can be overwhelming for some small business owners to consider everything that goes into SEO.
Here's what you need to know about SEO for small businesses, why you can't afford to overlook it, and how a quality professional SEO company can make the most of your advertising investment.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. While the practices involved in creating good SEO are often complicated, the purpose of SEO is simple: Attract more people to your website by getting your website to come up more often for their searches. SEO encompasses a wide range of techniques including the content of your website and blog, the way your website is structured, social media and Google business, and much more.
5 Reason Why SEO for Small Businesses is Important
SEO is important for any business, but it may be even more important for small businesses, particularly local SEO. When you consider that 97% of people learn more about local companies online than anywhere else, it becomes clear that skipping SEO is not an option. Here’s what you need to know about why SEO is important for business:
1. Good return on your investment. SEO for small businesses is a more affordable way to draw in customers than the traditional advertising that may work better for big companies. While a huge company can get ads on TV or on billboards, a smaller company has less money to invest in big efforts like these. SEO can enable your advertising dollars to pay off more than any other technique. You can track SEO investments closely and stop campaigns as soon as you decide they’re not paying off, which isn’t true for most other advertising.
2. Attract local customers. When your potential customers are looking for a product or service like yours, there's a very good chance that they start out by searching online. If your company doesn’t come up in those organic searches, you'll be losing business. Don't think that your local customers are searching for businesses online? Think again: 46% of all Google searches are people seeking out local information. 97% of people who use search engines use them to find local businesses.
3. Beat the competition. If you do local SEO right, there's a very good chance that your business will show up in searches instead of your competitor, which means that you'll likely be the one to get the customer. Done well, SEO can even beat out huge big-box competitors that you’d never be able to compete against in TV, billboard, or other traditional advertising.
4. Brand awareness. When your customers see your business in their searches, they'll not only be more likely to do business with you, but they'll also begin to recognize your brand. Seeing your business come up for related searches will gradually increase brand awareness and customer trust associating your business with these kinds of searches.
5. Always know how your advertising campaigns are paying off. It's easier to track your success in SEO than it is in most other advertising campaigns. This kind of steady awareness of your advertising efforts gives you peace of mind in knowing that your investment is paying off, but it also gives you the power to try new things and tweak your current campaigns to make them more successful.
What's Important in SEO for Small Businesses?
Small business SEO runs on a smaller budget than big businesses, and the focus is on local traffic rather than national or international attention. That means that some different things are essential for small business than are important for large business SEO. Here are a few of the most important aspects of SEO to target for small business:
Optimize Your Website
An optimized website is better for search engines and for people. Optimized sites load faster and navigating within them is easier.
Load time is directly related to SEO success because websites that load slowly are likely to have a higher bounce rate as people click away from the site before it even has a chance to load. Websites that are easy to navigate encourage people to keep exploring and make it easy for search engines to crawl pages and suggest them for search results.
Google Business Profile
Google Business is a powerful free tool for your company. It’s extremely important for local SEO for small businesses because it helps point people in your area towards your website for keywords that are relevant to your products or services.
It also means that your business will come up in Google Map results, which means that people who are searching for something specific in a particular area will ping on your business. If you don't claim your Google business profile, your business may still come up in search results and get reviews on Google, but you won't have any control over responding to negative comments, making sure your information is correct, or anything else. Therefore, it can actively hurt your business to neglect your Google Business profile.
Social Media
Social media improves local SEO, but it’s also essential for building relationships with your customers. When people search for a business like yours on social media or on search engines, having your social pages come up increases the trust that potential customers develop for your business.
It also gives your potential customers an opportunity to communicate with your business on a platform on which they’re comfortable and which they're already using. Social media is invaluable because it tells potential customers that their friends and neighbors are already patronizing your company, which makes it likely that they will as well.
SEO Help Small Business Owners
Say you have a new business and you're trying to decide where to invest advertising dollars. With a new business, the budget is tight. You know that attracting customers is imperative if you want your business to succeed, but you also know that advertising investments can be risky. Here are a few examples of how SEO can help you get your business up and running:
Make a big event of your big opening on social media. You can use social media to announce that your company is opening. Encourage potential customers to try out your company with coupons, contests, and deals. Generate excitement by rallying conversation on the page. A great opening day showing dramatically increases the chances that your business will survive.
Make your business look good on Google Business. Your first few reviews on Google Business can make a big difference in whether more people show up at your business and leave their own reviews. By answering negative reviews and thanking reviewers for positive reviews, you give anyone else who finds your business on Google business reasons to try it out themselves.
Come up for specific queries on search engines right away. It can take some time to build up enough content and optimize your pages and blog posts sufficiently to come up for big, overarching queries on Google. However, if you target lower-traffic queries where there isn't much competition, you'll begin to come up right away. An added benefit of this approach is that you're more likely to attract customers who are searching for a very specific product or service that you offer, which can make it more likely that you'll get them through the door.
Should You Handle Your Own SEO for Small Businesses or Hire an SEO Team?
You don't have a lot of advertising dollars to spare, so is it better for you to devote your own employees' time and energy to SEO or hire a team? While it may seem that you'd save money by doing it yourself, in reality, hiring a great team is probably the more financially secure option.
By hiring a professional who has improved SEO for lots of small businesses in the past, you are much more likely to see a return on your Investments. Doing it yourself will likely result in lots of effort that goes nowhere.
SEO may be simple in its goals, but it's complex in its implementation. A professional SEO company can look at your budget and your goals and create a plan that is tailored to work for you. They know how to read the results of SEO campaigns, which means they'll be able to tell you when a technique is paying off and when it may be time to try something different.
Choose Us to Help Manage the Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses
If you want the best OKC SEO company, look no further than Perfectly Optimized. We have over 20 years of combined experience managing over 300 websites and building over 735 websites, many of them for small, local businesses that are thriving and growing fast with the help of superb SEO. Trust us, your business will enjoy the benefits of SEO for small businesses!
We also have extensive experience in WordPress website design, branding, malware removal, and just about everything else you need to run a great website that turns advertising dollars into new customers. Get in touch with us today. We’d love to talk to you about your website goals and what we can do for you, whatever your budget.