Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential tool for digital marketing. Essentially, improving your SEO involves making your website more user-friendly and offering quality content integrated with keywords in order to increase your ranking on search engines’ results pages. Simply put, it’s the process of tailoring your website to be as useful as possible for your target audience—which, in turn, will show search engines that your website is providing value and boost your ranking. Below, we’ll take a look at why SEO is important for small businesses so you can get the best leads possible.
Why is SEO Important for Small Businesses?
If your core customers already know how to find you or your business has a unique name, you may be wondering why you would put the effort into getting noticed with other search terms—but for small businesses especially, SEO is something that can no longer afford to be ignored. Not only will increasing your SEO make your site more helpful for your current users, but it will also attract new business to your site and showcase the credibility of your brand. Here’s how:
1. Good SEO Leads to Increased Website Traffic. Helping potential customers find your business is an essential part of gaining new leads, and ranking high on search results can help you achieve that. About 50% of websites’ online traffic comes from organic search on Google—and considering that most people use Google every day to look up information, that is a large portion of the market share that good SEO can help you tap into.
2. Investment in SEO is Quantifiable. One of the best things about investing in SEO is that you will easily be able to quantify the impact it has on your business. By tracking link clicks, bounce rate, conversions, and other valuable metrics that an SEO strategy provides, you can easily quantify your efforts and make sure you are utilizing the most effective strategies.
3. SEO-Boosting Content Shows Your Audience You Have Something to Offer. When researching SEO, you’ll notice that establishing authority is an important part of the process. Whether you are introducing keywords through helpful copy or building backlinks through educational blogs, you are first showing search engines and then showing users that your brand is a trusted authority that is providing value to those that visit your site.
4. Good User Experience is Intrinsic to Good SEO. Creating a website that is easy for users to navigate, both on desktop and on mobile, is an important part of the SEO-boosting process. On-page SEO will improve your site’s usability and keep customers from bouncing off quickly—and considering that 50% of users expect a load time of fewer than two seconds, slow load times can dramatically impact your site’s user experience. Creating a website that your customers want to spend time on will keep them around and let search engines know that other people might be interested, too.
If you’re ready to improve your website’s SEO ranking, let us help! We have a variety of SEO and copywriting services to meet your needs. Contact us today to learn more.
