It’s hard to picture any business without SEO. To remain competitive in this digital marketplace, SEO is a highly effective way to your business’s visibility in the search results. It helps research your customers during key moments in their buying journey, build credibility, and brand awareness, and drive sales.
Modern customers are shifting towards digital interactions. From searching informational queries like “contract to hire vs direct hire” to comparing two products, they do everything online. They basically live online thanks to smartphones and the internet. If your business is not where customers are, staying competitive can become something out of your reach. Hence, having an SEO strategy is the key to survival.
Let’s go through the reasons why a small business needs an SEO strategy to stay relevant in the present time:
1: SEO Will Be Your Primary Source of Traffic
The simplest way to allow customers to find you is to appear on the first page of SERPs. This is the ultimate benefit of SEO for a small business. Once the right customer lands on your website, this increases your CTR. Once you have optimized the keywords, you will be able to generate organic traffic, which is great for your business.
2: It Reduces the Sales Cycle
SEO helps your customers find you. That is true but this isn’t the only reason why you need to invest in SEO. When a user searches for a product or service online and lands on your site, they are already interested in your offer. Now what you must do is sell your product to them.
here, you are not really selling to a customer who is not interested in doing business with you at that time. SEO basically reduces the sales cycle because it brings your customers who are already willing to buy.
Thanks to SEO, your potential customer will organically find you and have all the info they need to make the right decision and complete the purchase.
3: SEO Helps You Understand What Your Customer Needs
SEO isn’t all about selling your product/services. It is also about understanding what your target audience wants. It offers a great deal of knowledge of the user’s buying intent.
An SEO strategy that involves keyword research, data analytics, and SERP analytics can help you figure out what your customer wants. Once you are familiar with the intent of your user, you can optimize your company’s website based on that.
4: You, Will, Get a Competitive Edge
Even if you haven’t started to invest in SEO right now, your competitors must be already on it. They can easily outrank you in competition when it comes to search engine results and might as well gain market share.
Before you create an SEO strategy for your business, you must analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and create a plan based on that. Just focus on providing the best user experience to your customers and you will be just fine!
5: It Offers Real Value for Money
SEO certainly can cost you money but it’s worth every penny you spend. Experts suggest that you must not consider SEO to be a marketing cost instead, consider it a business investment. With the right strategy and the right budgeting, it can prove to be highly fruitful.
6: You Get to Rank in Local Search
did you know that 80 percent of the local searches on mobile successfully convert? Since you are considering investing in SEO, local SEO must be a part of your strategy as well. It is a highly effective approach to attract users who are almost ready to make a purchase.
Start by creating a Google my business page and collect reviews from your clients. optimize your GMB listing for voice search as well. Don’t forget to add local keywords to optimize the listing.
7: More Website Engagement
If the content on your website matches the intent of the searcher, it is obvious they will spend more time on your website browsing. This will bring more conversion and boost the ROI. it’s a fact that when a customer engages with your website longer, they are likely to connect with your brand more. This can boost engagement rates and boost revenue in the long run.
8: The Results are Lasting
By now, we all know that SEO is not something that can prove to be fruitful overnight. It takes time but there are good chances that you will see a noticeable impact within the first year and these results can last for several years!
You must keep closely following the SEO trends and changes to revise your current strategy based on what’s new. Even if you have a website on workplace investigation and haven’t heavily invested in SEO but only followed the basic best practices, you can expect to witness decent benefits.