Why Small Businesses Need SEO
SEO For Small Businesses
If you run a small business every penny counts, so it is vital to ensure that every investment you make into your business will provide a good return. Traditional marketing still plays a vital role in any marketing strategy, whether it be leaflet distribution, local newspaper features or radio adverts. However, the area where small businesses can really perform well is online marketing and SEO. Let’s take a closer look at why it works so well for small businesses.
The Permanent Effect
The biggest advantage of investing in SEO is that it can provide you with a permanent boost in leads. While advertising, whether it be through traditional channels or online, can bring in instant leads, the moment you end a campaign the leads dry up. SEO, on the other hand, provides a constant stream of new business via Google and other search engines.
SEO for Your Website
The SEO that we perform is not just building links to your business. We will also improve your web pages in two ways. First, pages will be optimised so that Google can better understand what products and services you offer – this will help potential new customers find your website. Second, we will suggest improvements (or carry out the changes ourselves if we have access to your CMS) to help funnel visitors through to your sales pages. We often see business websites that receive a reasonable amount of traffic but fail to provide a “call to action”. Again, once these changes are made, the improvements are permanent.
It does take time to see improvements in SEO, but nowhere near as long as many people think. Most of our clients start to see significant improvements in traffic to their sites within three months of starting a new SEO campaign, and often within a year we are getting first page results (often at the top) for the most important keyword searches. It is therefore recommended that an SEO campaign lasts for at least one year for the best return on your investment, but reasonable gains are possible in a shorter period.
Focus on Search Queries With Purchase Intent
Understanding how people search is vital to doing well in the search engines, your most important keywords may not be obvious. For example, for a plumber, a search phrase for “emergency plumber in Chelmsford” is a term that will send customers who are eager to purchase, whereas a search for “best plumbers in Chelmsford” might result in a high bounce rate – people are more likely to be reviewing many websites. Both terms are important, but if you have a limited budget you need to focus where you can get the most important gains in search.
Developing an Online Presence
As well as building traffic to your own website we can help you build a better presence on multiple platforms.
Nowadays, business is driven through social media platforms, business directories, review sites and forums. By building a presence in all these areas we can generate more exposure for your business. This becomes especially useful as your brand becomes better known, as a search for your brand will not only bring up your website, but also social media listings, directory pages and featured pages on other sites.
Take our company as an example: a search for “Freelance SEO Essex” brings up our website, our Facebook page, our Twitter page and also our involvement in the Essex Digital Awards. This helps to build trust in the local community, which is vital for businesses in such a competitive industry.
New small business have the most to gain from an SEO campaign as it will help grow and support the business for many years to come. Contact Freelance SEO Essex today to learn how you can start making your website work harder for your business.
