Last modified on: April 15th, 2024
There are many great benefits of SEO for small businesses such as increasing valuable local website traffic and generating more quality leads online. Check them out below!
Every day, millions of people turn to search engines seeking answers to their questions and problems, and most of these people only click on the first page of search results.
In fact, most users never get past the first search engine results page. This is why having an SEO plan in place is so important for small businesses, especially B2C.
If your business site ranks on the first page of results for relevant local searches, your business is positioned in front of more potential customers instead of your competitors.
Small business owners that invest in a sound SEO and content strategy can increase website traffic, generate more leads and sales, and reach a wider target audience.
7 Valuable SEO Benefits for Small Businesses
Let's check out the awesome benefits SEO can provide a small business in detail.
Here are 7 benefits of search engine optimization (SEO) for small businesses:
1. Promotes a User-Friendly Website Structure
Creating a user-friendly small business website ensures that existing and potential customers have a positive user experience while navigating the website. SEO can help small businesses optimize their site by creating high-quality content, improving speed, navigation, and readability, and improving conversion rates.
When people visit a user-friendly website, they’re more prone to engaging with the content for longer periods of time, clicking through to check out more pages, and becoming a lead.
In addition, this contributes to statistics such as time spent on a site and page views. Based on these statistics, search engines could potentially rank websites higher or lower.
There are numerous ways you can create user-friendly websites for SEO including:
- Integrating a responsive web design. This allows the website to become mobile-friendly and automatically scale its content to match whatever device a visitor is using, such as mobile and tablet devices.
- Using a CMS. A CMS, or a content management system, is a platform like WordPress that is optimized for creating mobile-friendly websites with built-in features for improved site speed, crawlability, and indexability.
2. Builds Brand Awareness
One valuable benefit of SEO for small businesses is that it can build brand awareness. Good SEO efforts can potentially get your website to appear at the top of search results when people search for terms relevant to your business, products, and/or services.
When a small business ranks high in the search engine result pages (SERPs), search engine users are more likely to remember the business. Even if they don’t click on the website, they’ll start to associate your business with their search query.
What’s more, most users find businesses that appear at the top of search engine results pages to be more credible and trustworthy, which can result in a feedback loop of improving online reputation and SEO results.
As a result, small businesses should invest in SEO from an experienced SEO company or expert to increase brand awareness. Then, over time, they'll rank higher for the terms relevant to their business.
3. It’s Cost-Effective
Small businesses don’t always have the luxury to invest in testing different marketing strategies. And, honestly, they don’t need to. As long as you're not in an immediate rush for business and have other sources of revenue, SEO is a very cost-effective form of marketing that works well when part of a diversified marketing plan.
One of the advantages of SEO is that you can invest in a smaller local SEO plan upfront, such as a smaller number of blog posts/pages and content optimized per month for example, and scale up your SEO budget as you see results.
If you’re creating your own SEO strategy, investing time into understanding the key SEO metrics to track is recommended. If you pay for an SEO service, as long as the provider has experience and results, you will most likely get your money’s worth within 6-12 months, depending on your niche, competition, SEO provider, and budget.
Using SEO efficiently can be an excellent digital marketing strategy. It can even put a small business in league with bigger businesses when done right.
4. Gain Targeted Traffic
Generating any kind of traffic on a website is great, to begin with. However, to guarantee that users stay and surf your website, it has to be of relevance to their search query.
SEO helps you gain better rankings in SERPs relevant to your business. This attracts the desired organic traffic and audience to your website.
What SEO does is adjust and optimize a website's content to align with what searchers are looking for, known as search intent, and highlight what your business offers. Then, users searching terms relevant to your products or services can find you among the top search engine results.
One SEO method to gain more relevant, quality traffic is utilizing keywords. After performing keyword research, incorporate relevant keywords in your meta description, title tag, headers, and naturally throughout your website content.
By implementing these SEO marketing efforts, you can increase the search engine visibility of your content for these terms and generate more traffic over time as a result.
Reputable SEO tools can help you manage SEO efforts, monitor progress, and find relevant keywords to target. Here are some of the most useful SEO tools for small businesses:
- All-in-one SEO software
- Small Business SEO software
- Rank tracking software
- Local SEO software
- SEO reporting software
- SEO auditing software
- Content writing software
Taking advantage of some of these SEO tools will help you to increase the productivity and effectiveness of SEO research and optimization activities for your small business.
5. Stay Ahead of Your Competition
At this time and age, a business that doesn’t acknowledge the power of SEO brings will remain stagnant. Applying SEO efforts to your website is a crucial step to outranking the competition.
That’s why building a formidable online presence should be part of any business’s marketing plan. It gives small local businesses an edge over their competition.
One particular local SEO method that can help small businesses boost their visibility online is creating a free Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business listing).
Small businesses that add their information to a Google listing can start collecting Google reviews, rank in Google Maps, and rank higher in local results. We see this often in the ‘near me’ searches. Google takes relevance, distance, and prominence into consideration, then recommends the best matches.
What’s more, various third-party applications accumulate business data through Google. In addition, any updates that happen on Google are automatically transferred to these applications.
This method ensures that information about your business is accurate and uniform across all platforms. See optimizing your Google Business Profile here.
6. Improve Your Understanding
SEO is a fast-paced environment. Because the rules and methods change constantly, staying up to date with the latest developments in the SEO world is essential for small businesses who have a website or market online.
Here are some of the most reputable SEO news sites to help you stay informed:
- Google Search Central blog: Official information about Google Search algorithm updates, new Google Search features, and SEO best practices.
- Search Engine Journal: Provides information about SEO news, guides, and how-tos for the SEO and marketer community.
- Search Engine Land: Provides information about SEO new, search engine marketing, search issues, and the search engine industry.
- Search Engine Roundtable: Provides information about SEO news, algorithm updates, and tips from various experts in the search engine marketing community.
Once you become aware of new or changing developments, you can use this knowledge to further optimize your business website and improve your SEO strategies. Staying ahead of the curve can help your website maintain and improve search visibility and organic traffic performance regardless of changes in the SEO landscape.
7. Achieve Long-Lasting Results
Online ads and other paid marketing campaigns are only effective as long as you’re paying for them. However, the effects of sound SEO strategies can last for years, as long as no significant SEO or algorithm changes happen.
It’s true that you’ll have to put some time, effort, and resources into your website content and local SEO, especially in the beginning.
However, once your website starts showing up on the 1st page of Google and other search engines like Bing for relevant keywords, this is a signal that search engines favor your content and will keep your content ranking prominently for quite some time.
Final Thoughts
If you're a small business owner, chances are you want more people to be aware of your products or services, which can be challenging in today’s competitive market.
While results do take time with SEO, including SEO in your marketing plan is a good idea in order to have a consistent effort focused on optimizing your local search presence for potential online researchers and shoppers in the areas you serve.
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