How SEO Benefits Small Businesses
Search engine optimization(SEO) is a method that helps your website get the top slots in the search results of popular search engines. This makes your website more visible to customers when they look for services or products online. This is done by using specific keywords related to your business and to your products. Today I will be discussing how SEO benefits Small Businesses, they are :
Increases traffic to your website:
SEO increases your ranking on search engine result pages. If you make it to the top results, then more customers will find your website. This increases the chance of directing traffic to your website as customers do not search beyond the first two or three pages of search engine results. SEO helps by improving your place on search engine results pages, getting you closer to the top. This will eventually increase traffic to your site, which will, in turn, increase your sales.
Can focus on customer targets in your geographical location:
SEO find customers who can conduct business with you. If you work at a given location, then it is more suitable to find customers located in and around that area than living far away. SEO places you at higher positions for search results that are specific to your location and looking for services provided by your business. A website that caters to local search is prompted first by search engines and yields very good results as compared to others.
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Faster ROI:
When SEO is used, the ROI is higher compared to that achieved by other conventional methods. SEO is a more superior process and hence generates a higher ROI. Search engines list relevant results when customers look for certain information or data. The customers follow up on the data and help in the sales process further. The measures of ROI are your rankings in search engines, revenue gained and traffic to a website.
Round the clock visibility:
SEO gives you 24×7 visibility by displaying results for searches. When products related to your website are searched for, irrespective of the place or time, your website will make it to the results. Transactions can be done at any hour of the day as per the will of the customer, increasing his interest in your business. Even though your office or workplace may be closed, you will still be available to customers through your website.
Competition with large-scale businesses:
What separated small businesses from large-scale ones is lack of funds and capital. This makes competition between the two difficult. Small businesses will not be able to fund large advertisement strategies, unlike large ones. In these cases, they can capture a large audience in a given area using SEO, bringing themselves on a level with the large-scale businesses in the area. Thus, small scale businesses can compete with large scale ones.
Inexpensive promotion of website :
SEO requires a very small investment and is based on results. The profit generated by it is very large compared to the small investment made. The costs incurred in assessing other factors such as traffic direction and trends followed by customers is also very little. At the same time, SEO promotes your website among potential customers better than most other conventional methods.
A business generally has numerous keywords to select from when setting up a campaign. These businesses can choose and select keywords that fall within their budget, making sure that the investment they make in SEO will positively affect their revenue generation. Other advertisement media such as TV, radio, newspapers, etc can be very expensive. SEO is a cost-effective and sure-shot way of increasing your sales through advertisements in search engines.
Image Credit: by GianinaSEO.
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About Saad Naeem
Hello Saad,
Your all points are worthy and really helpful to grow business with less effort. Your writing style is more practical effective, i love to read your content.
SEO is the Super Key to get success in online business, without SEO it is nothing.
Thank you for sharing knowledge with us. 🙂
Hey Avinash , you right about seo , that it is super key to success but be careful as penguin and panda are on the run.
thanks for dropping your comments here and at seoallrounder , really glad you like my writing. 🙂
You know bro, i am caring about Panda and Penguin but bro, it is algorithm so there is solution of every algorithm. :p
thanks for reply
you are certainly right that there is a solution to every algorithm but me and other seo guru’s have been trying to test out various stuff on our demo websites to see how to overcome this algorithm , i will surely give you a shout out when there’s some new , i hope you stick around for a while.
I think bloggers should use Google+ more effectively in order to boost their SEO, remember this Google+ is the top priority of Google.
Well for that you need to be more socially active on google+ , but if you play your cards well then yea you will be recommended by 100 of them on google+
hello seed,
that’s really great post , your post are really helpful grow small business. SEO important part of business
thanks for sharing with me
Regards
Pulkit Gupta
Hey Punkit , its Saad not seed :p ,
i am sharing it with all readers to enjoy this post and make use of it.
Appreciate for your time to read and comment =D
Nice Post Saad
Well I am A well Advance SEO Expert and i must say everything you said here is correctly intact , Therefore if you are willing to be successful in in online business SEO should come on your way. Thanks once more for this post…. 😛
Thats great allseotech :S , you should stick around , lot of updates are happening these days on google. Webmasters are waiting for panda and penguin to die =D
Small businesses need to have a foot in SEO, I have seen so many small businesses hire freelancers to guest post on different sites with their links on them.I have started to consider these as sponsored posts and accept guest posts only from true bloggers…..is anyone else seeing the same trend?
exactly , thats a very good strategy , many blogger have stopped accepting guest posts from companies and accepting only from good genuine bloggers.
Thanks for adding in Gautham , see you soon again.
Well I am not much good in SEO. But your post seems to be really simple and honest. You have mentioned ROI. What that means?
Return on Investment. It means, in simple words that benefit of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment. The better ROI, the better your investition 🙂
Thanks Chris. Now I got it. 🙂
The biggest benefit of SEO for small businesses is that they use this online marketing tactic to reach out to their target audience. But it’s important to target the right kind of keywords, those that customers are actually using in a particular niche. It’s also advisable to work with a SEO professional to avoid making mistakes and achieve one’s business goals.
Thanks for these tips!
yea keywords are the main elements in seo , the only free way to get targeted audience for long term is seo. About hiring a seo professionally , i cannot disagree with you , seo professional like me , I have been doing seo for around 3years for clients and i know how google has changed and how difficulty it is to rank now than before , before you could guarantee to give rankings but now you can not.
SEO is really helpful for small and established business. Nice article thanks for sharing it…………
glad you liked its Prakash , hope you learned something new 🙂
Hi Saad,
If you ever wanted to make a “KILLING” offline all you need to do is start to mentor small offline businesses. Helping them build an online presence, why not take your knowledge and bank hard?
Like Gautham said, some one these business are pretty hopeless and need all the help they can get, just having a website would be a step-up for them.
I totally agree with all of what you’ve shared with us. Although content is the king, SEO shouldn’t be taken lightly.
many people dont take their content serious but the thing is , if your content have a king element in them then you dont really have to worry about seo.
An online business without SEO is like a graveyard. It cannot ever be avoided when it comes to any online project.