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Being a small fish in a big pond is far from fun – you will often have to overcome challenges that bigger competitors will never face.
Business expenses can be particularly jarring for a small company and chances are that you’re reducing unnecessary spending. As a result, your marketing budget could suffer.
What if it were possible to carry out effective, targeted marketing that doesn’t cost a fortune? Search engine optimisation (SEO) provides such opportunities. One of the most powerful online marketing techniques, SEO can easily create a level playing field for everyone regardless of size.
From this article, you’ll learn:
- What Is SEO and Why Is It Important for Your Business?
- The Top 6 Advantages of SEO
- What Does SEO Cost and When Does It Deliver Results?
What Is SEO and Why Is It Important for Your Business?
Search engine optimisation refers to various techniques employed to help your business website reach the top of the search engine results page for keywords of preference. So, if you create handmade leather bags and you try to sell those in Brisbane, for example, a suitable keyword to target would be “handmade leather handbags in Brisbane.”
SEO is very important for every business. If people can’t find you online, it’s almost as if you don’t really exist. According to research from Think with Google, over 60 per cent of shopping experiences start online. And this is equally true for B2C and B2B experiences according to the data from the article on Harvard Business Review.
The Top 6 Advantages of SEO
1. Many Other Online Promotional Strategies Are Based on It
Small business SEO is the heart and soul of various other kinds of promotion. Content marketing is heavily dependent on good SEO. To ensure a good experience via a mobile device (something that’s become critical in this day and age), you need a website that follows some of the key optimisation principles. SEO can also help you establish partnerships and collaborations (when key influencers get to find your website) that can deliver excellent results.
2. Organic Online Reputation And Brand Establishment
This is one of the biggest advantages of SEO according to Jonas Muthoni from the Forbes Agency Council. When done correctly, it doesn’t scream marketing. Rather, it helps you establish your niche reputation in the online realm. When people come across useful content you’ve created and they can count on your website for unique, relevant information, they’re likely to start trusting your brand. Once brand credibility is established, you can easily start driving more sales.
3. Long-Term, Excellent Return and Measurable Results
SEO is one of the most cost-efficient online promotional strategies. When done correctly, SEO isn’t going to deliver results just for a few weeks. Rather, your website will continue dominating the top of the search engine results page for a longer period of time. You reach a targeted audience and you get results for a long time, especially if your optimisation efforts are ongoing. SEO is much more affordable than outbound advertising, but it usually delivers much more notable results. Moreover, when doing SEO, you can easily track performance. Tools like Google Analytics give you a good idea of the keywords you rank for, your top sources of traffic and the most popular pages on your website. Such analytical reports give you proof of SEO effectiveness.
4. Reaching A Targeted Audience and Local Customers
Even if your business isn’t online-based, it will benefit from SEO. Local searches are the ones carried out by people seeking products and services in their community. Doing local SEO will bring actual clients in your brick and mortar venue. Google Business Profile accounts for a big part of local SEO. It gives local businesses an opportunity to acquire the customers in their service areas by providing detailed and accurate local information.
If you recently launched a new product line or are trying to target a brand new demographic profile of customers, you can easily expand your SEO approach to account for the changes and start driving new leads. The problem with traditional advertising like TV or print promotion is that you’ll often reach lots of people who simply aren’t interested in your message. SEO helps you generate targeted traffic to your website. You will reach people who are looking for specific keywords, which means that they want to find out more about a specific topic. Such people can be converted into customers fairly easily.
5. Going National or International
On the other hand, if you’re an international brand or planning to expand the business, when employing SEO, you don’t have to limit yourself to local clients. In fact, if you want to grow nationally or even internationally, there are multiple professional tools for digital marketers to collect search and online behaviour data based on the countries and design the localised SEO campaigns for the different service areas.
6. It Creates Your Niche in A Highly Competitive Field
This is the beauty of SEO. It doesn’t matter how many other companies are trying to compete for the attention of a limited number of clients. Doing SEO successfully will help you top the SERP, no matter how big or well-established your business is. As a result, you’ll often get to perform much better marketing-wise than bigger and more “popular” brands.
What Does SEO Cost and When Does It Deliver Results?
How much does SEO cost? We’ve already mentioned the fact it’s more affordable than other marketing approaches but what’s the actual price tag? Is SEO affordable for small businesses?
The cost of SEO depends on several things – your website, the content you already have, your online performance and the audience you’re reaching. These are elements of the so-called digital maturity that we discuss in detail in the article linked above.
Finally, we need to discuss the speed at which SEO is going to work. If completed professionally, small business SEO can start generating results in just a few months. And if the efforts are ongoing, those results will last for years to come.
SEO is one of the approaches that can drive the most personalised and cost-efficient marketing results. It doesn’t really matter how big your business is or what field you operate in. As long as you’re approaching optimisation professionally and comprehensively, you’ll benefit from its power.
Even if you don’t know how to get started, there are experts out there who’ll guide you through the essentials. Contact the Digilari team today to learn more about the SEO services and how they’re going to work for your small business.
