In today’s world, no matter small or large every business needs to thrive online to reach out to their customers constantly. The higher you rank, the better the chances of being found by your potential customers. There is a good chance that more than half of your current traffic is from the people who are searching for products or services that are similar to yours. According to a study conducted by BrightEdge, over 40% of revenue is captured through organic search traffic, social only accounts for merely 10% of web traffic, and paid search just 10%! Let’s take a look at few reasons Why Small Businesses Should Invest in SEO
1.Organic Search- The Primary Source of Traffic
Organic searches play a huge role in business website performance. It is also a very crucial component of the buyers funnel. Organic traffic is important because it is targeted traffic. Users that visit your website through search engines have a very specific intent. All you need to do is to serve them with the right solution and you’ll be able to convert them into a paying customer.
Here are few facts that show the importance of organic traffic:
- The #1 result in Google gets approximately 32% of all clicks.
- 53% of US consumers say that they research products using a search engine before deciding whether or not to buy.
- Google organic search is responsible for 59.2% of the world’s web traffic.
- After searching on a smartphone for something nearby, 76% of people end up visiting the business within 1 day.
- 28% of local searches result in a purchase.
With SEO you can increase your website’s organic traffic. Remember it’s not all about mindless SEO and costly PPC campaigns, you’ll need to do plenty of things on your own to increase organic traffic, here are a few things to remember while optimizing your website.
- Your content is there to help someone. Optimize it for your reader, not the search engine.
- Develop a large catalog of helpful, persona-optimized content centered on your market niche.
- Utilize the long-tail keywords.
- Not all backlinks are the same, focus on the quality of backlinks rather than the quantity.
- Use social media. Build your brand presence on various social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and many more.
- Measure your website performance and act accordingly.
2.SEO Best Practices Are Always Being Updated
SEO is not a one-done practice, you need to keep your website. SEO is never constant; it keeps changing constantly. What used to work a few years back, are now irrelevant. For example, a decade ago keyword stuffing was a widely used practice, marketers used to stuff their website with targeted content unnaturally. Crawlers used to find more and more keywords and used to rank the page higher. But this practice was caught by search engines and they started to penalize the website that used this practice.
What marketers should remember that Google alone uses 200+ ranking factors to ensure that the users are getting the best content possible? You need to update your SEO strategies accordingly to stay clear of any penalties.
3.SEO Builds Trust & Credibility
There is no shortcut in building trust and credibility, you need to be consistent. You need to follow the process to achieve trust and credibility. And SEO is the best way to achieve that, yeah it takes time as you need to stick to the complex combination of content marketing, social media, guest blogging, listings, and much more. The important thing to remember is to maintain the quality of your content and to be frequent.
4. SEO Is Relatively Cheap
SEO drives more than half of all your website traffic, and SEO does most of it without breaking your bank! You need no or a very small amount of money for SEO all you need is time.
In recent times, many techniques have evolved but SEO remains indispensable. For SEO you don’t need a huge budget, unlike PPC campaigns, you only need a small budget for SEO that goes mainly for tools, paid guest posts, paid listings, and similar things. You can opt to avoid them if you don’t want to invest at that time.
5.Good SEO Also Means a Better User Experience
Many people think that SEO and UX are not and can’t be interconnected, well they are wrong. Search engines like Google always want to provide the best experience to their users and to do so they are continuously updating their algorithm. SEO is about more than just strengthening links and keywords. It’s a complete process, a plethora of tools that focus on improving the user’s experience.
A better user experience can be achieved by having a user-friendly and clean design, various photos and videos inter-linked with the content, etc. All of these are also a part of SEO and if a website employs optimum SEO, then it can easily enhance its user experience.
6.Understand the Environment of the Web with SEO
The world we live in is ever-changing that is why you must have heard the phrase “Change is the only constant”. With SEO you can always be in the loop of the major changes that occur in the web environment.
7.Local SEO Means Increased Engagement, Traffic.
With the ever-growing domination of mobile traffic, local search has become an integral part of small and medium-sized businesses. Local SEO is designed to optimize your digital properties for a specific neighbourhood, so people can find you quickly and easily, bringing them closer to a transaction.
8.SEO Impacts the Buying Cycle
SEO sets up a company on the web platform and consolidates its position with good page and ad ranking, but that’s not all, SEO is a super powerful tool that influences the buying cycle too. When you apply SEO, you optimize your website to rank it higher on the SERP making it in compliance with the algorithms and ranking factors applied by the search engine.
The major part of this whole process is to use the words and phrases (keywords) on your website that best describe the service you sell and how you can solve your customer’s problems. When potential clients type these phrases in search engines to solve their problem, you’ll have your website optimized for that. When a customer finds your website on the top of the SERP they visit your website hoping to resolve the issue. This increases the chance of sales impacting the buying cycle.
9.Be on Page 1 to win the Clicks
In the real estate market, there is a saying that the 3 most critical things to consider while buying a property are position, position, and position. In this sense real estate and the digital universe are identical as 3 important things for your online presence are ranking, ranking, and ranking!
When your potential client types in a keyword or phrase in the search bar of the search engine, his motive is to resolve an issue. Their intent is mostly commercial, and if they find your website on the first few results, he is most likely to click that as 42.25% clicks are to receive by the website ranking 1st in the SERP, the 2nd one receives 11.94% and this percentage drops gradually as we move down to the SERP. The first 10 results received 89.71% of all click-through traffic and all other pages of results received less than 1% of total search traffic clicks.
These stats surely enlighten the importance of ranking high in the SERP.
10.Mobile Makes SEO Even More Important for Small Businesses.
With the rise in the use of mobile devices, SEO becomes essential for the success of small and medium-sized businesses. With SEO you can optimize your website and increase the chance of being found when your prospect looks for the product or service online. This increases the chance of sales.
11.Traffic Generated through SEO Converts Well
40% of your website traffic comes from the search query. This traffic is pretty well converted as well so much that according to Eric Siu for Search Engine Journal, leads obtained from inbound activities have a much higher closing or conversion rate than their outbound counterparts: SEO leads have a 14.6% conversion rate, while outbound leads have a 1.7% conversion rate.
12.Proper SEO delivers a high ROI
SEO is among the top digital marketing practices that deliver the highest ROI. Data from Statista shows that 32 % of the marketers worldwide say that SEO offers the highest ROI making it one of the best digital marketing methods even today. The main reason behind this is that SEO is relatively cheap but when done properly can yield huge long-term benefits. Search Engine Journal ran a survey and found that 49% of people claimed that search engines like Google and Bing offer the best return on investment.
13.SEO is Quantifiable
With SEO you can pull in a lot of data, tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics can be used to track the performance of your website. You might find yourself in a fix while pulling this data and it might be tricky to understand the data but all this data will help you to define and improve your SEO strategy and achieve maximum benefits for your investments.
Conclusion
Implementing strong, quality SEO comes with a lot of benefits for your brand. SEO also improves your marketing efforts.
SEO is critical for your small business online presence in this day and age. The reasons we mentioned above are just the tip of the needle as reasons for implementing SEO are never-ending. If you haven’t done that yet don’t waste any more of your time and start preparing a solid SEO strategy right now. Remember it is never too late and you can always start from somewhere.