What is SEO?
Small business SEO (Search Engine Optimization), is the exercise of growing the quantity and the quality of the online traffic to your website for your small business using organic search engine results. To break it down, organic traffic is traffic that you don’t have to pay for, quality traffic is people clicking through your web page that are truly interested in what you are selling, and quantity–the more visitors directed to your page directly from SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), the better.
How Does SEO Work?
Search engines use crawlers to collect data about content, which the search engine uses to build an index, which is fed into an algorithm that does its best to match all of that information with your search question. Obviously, this is a very complex system, and this is a much simplified answer. Two ways that you can employ SEO is to use keywords and have compelling, share-worthy content on your site.
Why Should I Use Small Business SEO for my Business’ Marketing?
Small business SEO will help your business flourish by streamlining your website, speeding it up, and making it more user-friendly for your customers. SEO practices also increase your website’s rank in search engines, which will increase customer traffic. Building brand awareness is another benefit to using Small Business SEO practices while advertising your small business, because potential customers are most likely to trust a site that comes up on the first page of search results. Building a strong presence on the internet can help you surpass your competitions and develop a new customer base in order to help your business grow.
1. Website User-Friendliness
Utilizing SEO practices in your small business will create a more rapid, seamless, more user-friendly website. SEO is about search engines, but it is also about improving potential customers’ experiences. Websites that are simple and easy to understand while being uncluttered invite visitors to stay longer, which increases page views.
You’ll also want to be absolutely sure that your content is as relevant as possible, so that it answers questions for the users and provides them with the results they are seeking.
2. Increasing Traffic
Most of the reason that business want to have a website is to increase new customers, and SEO practices will help you do that. In fact, businesses that use SEO grow fully twice as fast as businesses that don’t. The reason that SEO increases traffic so much to your website is because it targets users whose search engine queries closely match what you are selling. SEO may be one of the most affordable and most efficient marketing tactics there are.
3. Better Conversion Rates
Websites that employ Small Business SEO practices tend to load faster and are ready to display on a vast range of devices. This makes customer retention easier, who will then return and hopefully refer friends and family.
Build Your Brand
Brand awareness is important for small business especially, because they may not have large marketing budgets. Higher ranking on the SERPs will build brand awareness for you, giving you a leg up on a strong web presence and putting you in front of your competitors.
Surpass the Competition
Search engines and small business SEO practices have the power to make or break your small business. Chances are that your competitors are employing SEO marketing, and you should too. The goal is to optimize your website such that your small business comes up on the first page when the query is put into the search engine, because customers usually have more trust in websites that come up first.