Small Business SEO
Why is SEO so important to your small business? In 2008 online search surpassed Yellow Pages as the most popular method to find local services. Also, there is no marketing channel that offers the same potential to reach customers on the same global scale as the internet. So whether your customers are local or international, SEO is equally effective at placing your marketing message right in front of your customers eyes when it counts the most -- when they are actively searching for the products or services that you sell.
Small Business SEO Doesn’t Have To Be A High Risk Investment
SEO can be an expensive business, especially if you are a fresh start-up or small organization working within tight budgetary constraints. Yet the flip side of this is that a well planed SEO strategy will almost certainly return your investment time and time again. However recent change within the SEO industry has seen the adoption of Pay For Performance SEO, whereby seo cliebts only pay for SEO services once pre-agreed goals or Key Performance Indicators have been achieved. This removes the any risk from the client and puts return fairly and squarely before investment.
The Benefits Of SEO For Small Business
First let’s get some facts and figures, well this is an article about SEO so its obligatory that I throw some in. The next two tables of data show the click distribution between the first 10 search engine results.
A study on click distribution conducted by Cornell University.
Ranking in SERPs
| Clicks %
| Time spent %
|
|---|---|---|
1
| 56,36
| 28,43
|
2
| 13,45
| 25,08
|
3
| 9,82
| 14,72
|
4
| 4
| 8,7
|
5
| 4,73
| 6,02
|
6
| 3,27
| 4,01
|
7
| 0,36
| 3,01
|
8
| 2,91
| 3,68
|
9
| 1,45
| 3,01
|
10
| 5,55
| 2,34
|
Total
| 98,9%
| 99%
|
The following figures came into the public domain when AOL made a document public by mistake. They are seen as more accurate because of the scope and sheer numbers involved in the sample, however they lack any data reflecting time spent on a page.
Data From AOL
Ranking in SERPs
| Clicks %
|
|---|---|
1
| 47%
|
2
| 13%
|
3
| 9%
|
4
| 7%
|
So the first benefits of top search engine rankings are pretty obvious, more visitors spending more time reading your content. Search is driven by the needs and wants of your customers, so when a search engine refers visitors to your site there is an expectation that they will find the information they seek. If it does, and does it well, they may well become customers.
As you can see from the tables above, top search engine rankings, especially the first three, are a powerful driver of visitors, but you need to target the right keywords if you want to get right kind of visitor to your site who then goes on to be a customer. Keyword research is very important in Small Business SEO and can provide the inteligence to outperform even the best known brands. This is why the internet is often referred to as “the great leveler”.
The keywords your customers use are the result of an inner conversation and like hunter gatherers they will change and refine the keywords they use until they pick up the scent of their quarry. So good keyword research starts by understanding what your customers want and need and the language they use to express those needs. You might understand what cyanoacrylate is but your customers are more likely to search for crazy glue or super glue. A good SEO company will do all the keyword research for you, sometimes it’s easy to miss the obvious when you are too close to a product or service.
There are many other benefits to Small Business SEO and many are explained in my SEO Tutorial which can be found here on HubPages. As a professional SEO I also provide Small Business SEO Services if you would prefer to work with an experienced SEO Company.
