If you’re a small business owner, you know the importance of reaching potential customers where they are. And when it comes to finding products and services, most people turn to Google. In fact, studies have shown that the majority of people never go past the first page of search results. So if your business website isn’t on page 1 of Google, chances are your ideal customers are never going to find you.
But how do you get your business website onto that all-important first page of Google? The answer is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the practice of improving the ranking of your website in search engine results pages (SERPs) to increase the visibility of your business.
There are heap of benefits when investing in SEO for your small business.
- Increased online visibility
One of the biggest benefits of SEO is increased visibility and traffic through to your website. Ranking in the top spots of Google is where you want to be! It’s where people and looking and clicking. When optimising your website for relevant search terms, keywords and phrases, plus improving your overall site health, you help to improve the likelihood of appearing in the top spots of search engine results for those searches. This means that when people are searching for queries related to your offering, your business is more likely to show up in the results. The higher you rank in the search results, the more traffic you can generate through to your website, which ultimately leads to more customers and revenue for your business.
2. Improving your User Experience
On top of increased online visibility for your brand, and higher website traffic, SEO also helps to improve the use experience [UX] on your website by it’s very nature. Google loves to see websites that are easy for customers to navigate and use, and it monitors the behaviour of users across websites, including time on page, bounce rate etc. Your customers are also pretty impatient, and when they’re looking for something online, they expect to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. When performing technical optimisations of your site, you help to not only improve the ability of googlebots to read and index your site, but also for your users to engage with it – which Google loves even more! Focusing on improving your UX leads to higher chances of people staying on your website and engaging with your content, which leads to big ticks from Google.
3. Building Authority in your space
So what happens when your website shows up quickly in the top of Google’s results and it has a great UX? You build trust and credibility for your business with ease! Ranking well in Google helps to give the impression that your business is an authority in your industry, a trustworthy site that must be offering value to show up first! This can help to build trust with potential customers, which acts like a form of ‘social proof’ almost, and helps to shorten the conversion window.
4. Greater potential for ROI as a small business
One of the biggest myths I hear about SEO is that it’s only suitable for big businesses with big budgets. But the truth is that SEO can be highly effective for small businesses as well, if not more so than for bigger businesses. This added benefit more from SEO compared to larger their larger competitors comes from the opportunity for small businesses to niche down even further or have a highly localised targeting. The more focused and niche your market, the easier to target specific keywords and phrases that may not be viable for larger businesses. Especially with Google’s love of serving up highly relevant and local results, this can provide a leg up in the results for many small businesses. As a result, small businesses can often see a higher return on investment (ROI) from their SEO efforts compared to larger businesses.
SEO is a long term strategy
Don’t forget though, SEO is an ongoing process, there’s no way you can set and forget. With the rapidly changing search landscape, and hundreds to thousands of algorithm updates happening each year. Not to mention competitor actions. It’s not a one-time effort, but a long term strategy. To get the most out of your SEO efforts, you need to consistently monitor and improve your website’s performance, looking for opportunities across existing and new search terms regularly. Google Analytics is the most important tool to help you with this, plus Google Search Console. Both free, but they will allow you to track your website’s performance to see what’s working and what isn’t.
In conclusion, investing in SEO can be a very smart more for many small businesses. By improving your website’s ranking in the search results, you can increase visibility and traffic to your website, improve the UX, build trust and credibility for your business, and ultimately drive more customers and revenue. So if you want your small business to succeed in today’s digital world, start investing in SEO with specialists!
