Benefits of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO helps small business owners create fast, robust, and user-friendly websites that rank higher in search engines, which in turn helps bring more qualified potential customers to their sites and eventually increases conversion rates. SEO also helps build brand awareness for your business as search engine users are more likely to trust a site that are on first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) than brands who are not.
If you’re a small business owner, you should utilize SEO to build a strong web presence and bypass your competitions to gain new customers for your business and take it to the next level.Proper SEO helps organize your website and makes it easier for your visitors to navigate and transact. Marketing works best when all channels are aligned on the same message – including organic search. Multiple channel alignment improves results in all channels.
Benefits of SEO for small businesses:
User-Friendly Websites
SEO will help small business owners create a faster, smoother, and user-friendlier website. Although most people still hang on to the old definition of SEO, thinking that it is only about optimizing for the search engines, however, today SEO is also about improving user experience too. Well-structured, clean, and uncluttered websites compels a casual visitor to stay longer, thereby decreasing bounce rate and increasing page views. Similarly, highly relevant content (sales pages and blog articles) keeps you readers happy as they are more likely to solves answer their questions, solve their pressing issues and helps them find exactly what they’re looking for on your site.
On-page SEO, if done properly, makes your users happy, which makes search engines happy too as they love to serve high quality information to their users.
Bring in More Customers
One of the main reasons for having a website is to stand out from your competition and increase your customer base. Businesses that have a SEO optimized website bring MORE customers and grow as twice as fast than businesses who do not have one. SEO is probably the most efficient and affordable marketing strategy that exists today. Moreover, it will only bring in customers who are actively seeking to find your product or service!
If you’re willing to spend few hours of time, energy, and small amount of money, SEO will help brings “targeted” traffic to your website, and eventually more customers to your business than any other marketing tactics you’ll ever use.
Better Conversion Rates
SEO-optimized websites loads faster, are easy to read and surf, and will display properly in almost all types of devices, including mobile and tablets. Websites that are easy to read and navigate are more likely to grab and hold attention from your readers or visitors – i.e. they’re more likely to become your loyal customers, subscribers, and returning visitors.
Build Brand Awareness
One of the benefits of getting higher rankings on the SERPs is building brand awareness. When your sites appear on the first page of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, your potential customers are more likely to trust your brand when they search for a particular term rather than other brands that don’t have a strong web presence. That is why small businesses that want to build better brand awareness (either locally or expanding nationally) must invest in SEO and start gaining top rankings for the KEY terms related with their business. We’re not in the 90s anymore; search engines now play a significant role in making or breaking your brand.
Bypass Competition
Let’s take an example of two businesses that are in the same industry, selling similar products, at similar prices. One of them has an optimized website while the other has a non-optimized website. Considering everything is else is equal, which company do you think will attract more customers to their website from local searches? Which company will likely grow faster and become more successful? Search engines and SEO are very powerful. If your competitors are doing SEO marketing, simply you must ask yourself why you haven’t invested in such a strategy yet too.