You’ve likely heard that search engine optimization (SEO) is vital for your small business, but to utilize it, you need to figure out what it is and how it works. It can take a lot of time to learn about every new marketing tactic, and SEO can seem pretty confusing — especially if you don’t understand how it works.
Don’t worry. In this post, we’ll break down what SEO is, how it can help your business, and what kind of results you can expect.
What Is SEO?
Let’s start with the first question: what is SEO? In its simplest form, SEO makes your website more visible on search engine results pages (SERPs).
You may think, “I don’t need my website to be visible in SERPs. My customers find me just fine without all of that.”
But remember, most people use search engines like Google when looking for something new, like a new restaurant, product, or service.
How Does SEO Work?
SEO works by helping search engines find and index your site and by making your site more appealing to searchers. There are several ways to do this, which we’ll explore in more depth below. But first, let’s start with the basics.
Every time you perform a Google search, the search engine scours the internet for websites that match your query. Once it finds these websites, it ranks them in order of relevance. The highest-ranking websites appear at the top of the search rankings, while the lower-ranking websites appear further down the page.
The goal of SEO is to get your website to rank as high as possible in the SERP for relevancy for the most search queries that will help your business get organic search traffic and then convert those searchers into buyers.
After all, if your website doesn’t appear on the first page of results, there’s an excellent chance that potential customers will never find it. If they can’t find it, they can’t use your products or services!
Why Your Small Business Needs SEO
Now that you know what SEO is, do you even need it to succeed?
The short answer is yes.
In an increasingly digital world, small businesses compete with other brands in several ways, most crucially in search results.
Since organic traffic is cheaper than paid ads, SEO becomes a vital tool for small businesses to maximize their online visibility and have higher chances to improve their sales funnel and bottom line.
Here’s a more detailed explanation of why SEO matters for small businesses.
Drives More Traffic to Your Website
One of the main reasons you need SEO is that it drives more traffic to your website. When your website appears higher in SERPs, prospective customers are likely to click on it.
A 2020 study by Sistrix showed that the first result on Google’s SERP gets 28.5% of the search traffic. Additionally, according to BrightEdge, organic searches are responsible for 53% of all site traffic, compared to only 15% from paid ads.
That means if you want people to find your website, you need to make sure it appears as close to the top of the search engine rankings as possible — and good SEO performance can help you do that.
Attracts the Right Audience
Another reason your small business needs SEO is that it helps attract the right audience — people interested in what you offer.
You can attract the right audience by including relevant keywords in your website content. That way, when people search for those keywords, your website will appear in the search results.
For example, say you own a pet store. If you include relevant keywords like “pet supplies” and “pet food” in your website content, people who search for those terms will be directed to your website. Since they were searching for those terms in the first place, chances are they’re interested in what you have to offer!
Improves User Experience
Finally, good SEO can improve user experience — the overall experience someone has when interacting with your website.
A big part of user experience is ensuring your website loads quickly and is easy to navigate. Good SEO can help with both of those things!
For example, if someone searches for “pet supplies” and lands on a website that takes forever to load or is difficult to navigate, chances are they won’t stick around for long — and they may never return.
On the other hand, if they land on a website that loads quickly and is easy to navigate, they’re more likely to stick around and even come back in the future.
The Importance of Measuring SEO ROI
We could go on (and on and on) about how SEO provides:
- Long-term sustainable growth for your business by building equity in your website
- Growing organic traffic
- Leads and sales generation
However, we understand that sometimes you need to see some cold hard numbers to make a decision.
Here are some reasons why you should measure your SEO’s return on investment (ROI).
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