How Small Businesses Can Ace SEO?
Digital marketing needs no introduction and if your business is looking to leverage the true power of digital marketing you must embrace SEO. SEO for small businesses is no longer optional but a must-adopt strategy to survive in the extremely competitive world. Today’s digital marketing strategies are way different from what they used to be a decade back when just having a web presence offered your business an added incentive. With the majority of businesses having their own websites, you must invest in small business SEO to stay ahead of the competition.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the lynchpin of digital marketing services that improves your website’s ranking on the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages). It is a set of strategies that helps increase the visibility of your website on search results and puts you ahead of your competitors. The increased visibility can drive more potential customers to your website and open new opportunities for sales and success. To draw an analogy, it is like having your business card appear on the very first leaf of a cardholder!
While there are several strategies used in digital marketing, SEO marketing services sit at the core of such marketing campaigns. Meticulously planned and executed SEO strategies can produce long-lasting results that add to your brand equity while increasing your sales and revenues. It improves brand recognition and allows you to create your space in the competitive market.
Why Local SEO for Small Businesses is important?
Imagine yourself managing a stall at a flea market where you are competing against hundreds of others for the same customers. What are your odds of attracting the majority of the customers to your stall? Now imagine having a banner or a glow sign at the entrance of the street that directs customers to your stall. In the world of digital marketing small business SEO services work like these glow signs and other types of advertisement that attract users to your website.
When you are searching for information on products and services on Google or other search engines, you’d care less to go beyond the first few results appearing on the search results. Let alone browse to the second page or beyond. Your business needs to rank at the top of the search results to attract maximum traffic to the website. This is what a well-executed SEO campaign assures.
How does SEO work?
SEO is a set of creative and technical strategies that improve your site’s opportunity of ranking high for targeted keywords. Search Engine Optimization strategies can be divided into two sets of activities that play a complementary role in improving the rank and visibility of your website –
On-Page SEO
These are sets of SEO strategies that happen on your website hence the name. The strategies in On-Page SEO include optimizing your content with target keywords, optimizing the URL structure of the website, making the Title and Meta Tags more search engine friendly, etc. The primary goal of these activities is to align your website as per the latest algorithms of Google and other search engines to boost traffic and rankings.
Off-Page SEO
As the name suggests these are the SEO activities that happen outside your website and these activities include adding your business details on local business directories such as Google My Business, Social Bookmarking, Influencer Marketing, Guest Blogs, Press Release, Link Building, etc. The goal behind these SEO strategies is to drive traffic to the different landing pages on your website from external sources and increase brand mentions in the most visited web platforms.
A perfect synergy between On-Page and Off-Page SEO activities is important for the success of your campaign. Several factors go into improving the ranking of your website. The best SEO companies for small businesses would carry out a detailed audit of your website to identify its weaknesses and opportunities to improve its rankings. They would focus on the key elements of your website that determine its SEO score and work on them. These factors include –
- Uniqueness, quality, and relevance of the content
- Meta Data (including Title, Header Tags, and Descriptions)
- Attributes of the images and graphics used on the website
- Quality of the inbound and outbound links
- Structure of the website and page load speed
- Mobile responsiveness of the site
- Site structure and URL structure
Small Business SEO is a creative process where these and a few other factors determine the ranking and traffic to your website. This requires skills and out-of-the-box thinking and is best left to the experts.
Scope of SEO for Small Businesses
Digital Marketing is a multi-billion-dollar industry and SEO sits at its core. There are tons of benefits of SEO, especially for small businesses and startups. It can help your business in many ways, whether you are planning to launch a new brand or wish to revitalize your decades-old business, SEO offers you the most cost-effective at the same time wide-reaching means of promoting your brand. Here are the benefits of small business SEO services.
- Improved Discoverability – All small business SEO tips will talk about the importance of discoverability. With most businesses competing beyond their geography in a globalized world, the visibility of the brand in the digital sphere defines success. A well-managed SEO campaign can improve your brand’s discoverability for searches on products and services related to it.
- Lead Generation – It is often said that “money is on the list” and your business can broaden the list of potential customers by focusing on SEO. It is estimated that businesses that have an active SEO campaign generate more than 50% of their leads through online form filling and most of this traffic is generated through SEO.
- Brand Equity –Customers like to get associated with brands that have more visibility than obscure ones. SEO helps in improving Brand Identification and Brand Recall and this boosts brand equity. It puts your business in front of your potential customers.
- Trust –Though other digital marketing strategies such as Pay Per Click marketing and Social Media Marketing pay you rich dividends, organic traffic is high on the trust quotient. Studies on Internet user behavior suggests that more than 60% of Internet users trust organic search results more than ads appearing on search results and social media feed.
Final Words on how SEO helps the Small Businesses
Search Engine Optimization is the amalgamation of creativity, technical know-how, and marketing acumen. While you may come across dozens of small business SEO tips online, it doesn’t offer quick results. This is a strategy that requires patience, persistence, and most importantly skills. This is what we at Adly Media bring to the table. Ranked among the best SEO companies for small businesses, we have worked with clients across the board and delivered results.
Our team uses White Hat SEO strategies to offer steady growth of organic traffic to your website and improve its rankings on SERP. As a full-service digital marketing agency, our team stays abreast with the latest trends in Search Engine Optimization and implements these on your website. Get in touch with us today and let’s work the magic.
Summary –
In this write-up, we discuss the importance of Search Engine Optimization for small businesses and why small businesses need to invest in SEO. If you need help to rank your website on the first page of the search engines, you can schedule a free consultation with us.