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What is SEO and how can my small business benefit from it?

5 reasons for adding SEO to your business strategy

Many small businesses struggle with getting their business out there and when they do, they often struggle to convert the leads to paying customers. This is where SEO can be invaluable for a small business. SEO is cost-effective, it works and it’s here to stay. Read on to find out more about how SEO can help your business thrive. 

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s about the process of improving the content and usability of a website to help make it more visible, or “rank higher” in a search engine like Google.

When your website is optimised for SEO, it means that when a potential customer searches Google for a business or product like yours, your web page will appear at the top of the search results.

For a business, the goal is to be found by your potential customer on the world wide web – because it really is just that – a wide tangled web where it’s easy to get lost. The web presents so many opportunities and choices for your potential customer. As a business, if you want to reach a lot of people and grow, you need to stand out in the crowd.  

How does SEO work for small business?

Small businesses benefit the most from using SEO as a business strategy. When your website is properly optimised: 

  • your potential customers will find you first in your area or your niche, and
  • they are also more likely to buy from you. 

And with small businesses on a limited budget, spending money on optimising your website is a lot more cost-effective than advertising. Why pay big dollars for people to find you when you can spend less by getting your website done right so people can find you naturally (i.e. organically)? Statistics show that customers are 94% more likely to click on an organic search result than an advertised search result.

Having said all that here are 5 main ways SEO can help your business.

1. It helps you compete with larger businesses

When it comes to SEO, you are on level playing field with the big guns. You don’t need a big advertising budget or a sophisticated marketing team, but with the right content strategy you can get your business at the top of the search results and compete with big businesses. Even big companies with large budgets struggle to win the SEO game, that means you, small business boss Mama, are in with a chance to compete with the top guns.

Ads can be expensive as you’re paying per click. This means that you pay a fee every time someone clicks on your ad on a Google search results list. What’s more, sometimes the clicks you get on your ads are from bots or competitors, so you end up paying for clicks that will never convert.

But with a good SEO strategy, will get you those clicks for free. Yes, there is an initial cost up-front but the return on your investment is well worth the effort. 

2. It helps you reach your target audience

You can reach the right audience for your product or service. Why is this important? Because reaching the right audience means you have a higher chance of making a sale. There’s no use in trying to reach every man and his dog, because chances are, not every one of them will be interested in buying what you’ve got to offer. The more refined your strategy is and the more targeted it is to a particular audience, the higher your chance of making a sale. 

3. It helps educate your prospective clients and establish you as an authority in your niche

You can provide the relevant information to your target audience or educate prospective clients when your SEO strategy is well thought out. This will put you front of mind for when they are ready to purchase because you’ve already established the initial rapport with them and planted the seeds about who you are and what your business does.

53% of shoppers say they will research first before they buy to ensure they are making the best possible choice. This means that you’ve got a large pool of people who will potentially turn to you for the next time they need a product or service like yours, because you’ve already planted the seeds in their mind when they stumbled on your webpage through their research.

4. It helps expand your brand's reach

A good SEO strategy helps get your brand out there and educate your prospective clients about who you are and what you do, this will lead to bigger and better reach outside of your own website.

Off-page SEO refers to all the activities that happen outside of your website, such as links to your website from other sources, social media posts, customers reviewing your products and guests blogging. Using these techniques can help expand your brand’s reach and establish you as a reputable business. 

5. It helps you get valuable information on your customers

A good SEO strategy includes the use of SEO-specific tools such as Google Analytics to help you track your customer’s preferences. It helps you see what is useful or not in terms of the information you provide your customers, and what keywords your customers are using to find you. 

You can use this information to build your business even further and give you insight into customer preferences so you can tailor your products or services to your market’s needs, refine your product or service to better serve your customers and improve customer conversion.

The key take-away

SEO is important to grow your business. It helps a small business compete against big business, with very little budget. It helps your customers find you and it helps you refine your business to serve your customers better, convert casual browsers to paying customers and increase customer loyalty. 

If you’d like to get started on how you can optimise your website to better rank in search engines, contact me