Why is SEO Essential for Your Small Business?
SEO is a vital part of many digital and internet marketing strategies employed by companies and individuals. However, because the term is somewhat confused and mis-sold, it isn’t always completely clear to see why you should spend money with an external agency or individual to create, work and manage an SEO campaign.
Put simply, SEO is search engine optimisation, making your website as friendly as possible so that you can be shown in Google searches. By implementing a well-thought out and clever SEO campaign, you can increase return on investment (ROI), visibility, branding, traffic and trust and insight, amongst others. There really is no reason why you shouldn’t try and implement some work on your SEO, whether you give it a go yourself or whether you hire an external agency to give you a hand.
Business visibility and branding is really important. Why do you choose to shop with Apple for example? I’m betting it has something to do with the brand dominance that Apple hold, meaning you see them as a better provider of products, quality and service. This is exactly the same thing that needs to come across with your company. By increasing business visibility and allowing customers to see your name consistently for a number of searches will increase the trust and brand dominance for yourself. When someone searches on Google, they may start with one term, but then slowly get more specific as the searches go on. If your company brand is constantly and consistently showing in the Google search results for a number of similar terms, eventually, the customer will want to see what you are about and should come over to your website.
Did you know that organic traffic is actually picked over paid traffic around 90% of the time? People are much more likely to click on organic search listings rather than anything else and as the majority of people don’t move past page 1 after making a search to look for more results, it has become more important than ever to ensure you are on page 1 and therefore, gaining the traffic from those potential leads and customers who find you through a Google search. If you achieve the number 1 spot for a certain keyword phrase, you are likely to get around 30% of the clicks. If, for example, you have chosen a word that has 6000 searches per month, you are likely to get 1800 visits to your site per month.
SEO can be cost-effective compared to PPC advertising, social media marketing and email marketing. To put it simply, advertising costs money. The only way to get yourself out there, through advertising channels is to pump money into a campaign and see what happens. Considering that paid links are only selected around 10% of the time, compared to 90% on organic links, it would be better to have a smaller piece of a bigger pie than a bigger piece of a smaller pie. This isn’t saying that PPC, email and social don’t have any place, because they definitely do and a lot of value should be placed on these also. However, if you only have a smaller budget to begin with and you aren’t sure where you want to target the money, starting with SEO is probably a good place to begin.
Although SEO has progressed and changed lots from where it was 10 years ago, the fundamentals of SEO are exactly the same. The aim is the same, to get your website linked on the first page of Google through similar techniques. No matter where search engines move to in the future, search engines will always be an essential part. This means that some form of SEO will always be needed, so long as search engines exist. You should also think about the fact that your competitors, are definitely pumping money into an SEO campaign. A great way to keep up with your competitors is to put budget into an SEO campaign and focus on some organic rankings.
Although SEO does way more than just the points listed here, this is definitely a good starting point for the reasons why you should start to turn your attention to SEO. If your competitors are doing it, can you afford not to?