SEO helps small business owners create fast, robust, and mobile-friendly websites that rank higher in search engines, which in turn helps bring more qualified potential customers or clients to their websites and eventually increases conversion rates.
SEO also helps build brand awareness for your business as search engine users are more likely to trust a site that is on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) than brands that are not.
If you’re a small business owner, you should utilize SEO to build a strong web presence and bypass your competition to gain new customers for your business and take it to the next level.
Here are 5 benefits of SEO for small businesses:
1. User-Friendly Websites
SEO will help small business owners create a faster, smoother, and mobile-friendlier website. Although most people still hang on to the old definition of SEO, thinking that it is only about optimizing for the search engines, however, today SEO is also about improving user experience too.
Well-structured, clean, and uncluttered websites compel casual visitors to stay longer, thereby decreasing bounce rate (people leaving the website fast) and increasing page views. Similarly, highly relevant content (sales pages and blog articles) keeps your readers happy as they are more likely to answer their questions, solve their pressing issues, and help them find exactly what they’re looking for on your site.
2. Brings More Customers
One of the main reasons for having a website is to stand out from your competition and increase your customer base. Otherwise, why invest 1,000s of dollars on marketing, right? Businesses that have an SEO-optimized website bring MORE customers and grow as twice as fast as businesses that do not have one.
SEO is probably the most efficient and affordable marketing strategy that exists today. Moreover, it will only bring in customers who are actively seeking to find your product or service!
If you’re willing to spend a few hours of time, energy, and a small amount of money, SEO will help bring in “targeted” customers to your website, and eventually more customers to your business than any other marketing tactics you’ll ever use.
3. Better Conversion Rates
Seo-optimized websites loads faster, are easy to read and will display properly on almost all types of devices, including mobile and tablets. Websites that are easy to read and navigate are more likely to grab and hold the attention of your readers or visitors that are more likely to become your loyal customers, subscribers, and returning visitors.
4. Build Brand Awareness
One of the benefits of getting higher rankings on the SERPs is building brand awareness. When your sites appear on the first page of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, your potential customers are more likely to trust your brand when they search for particular keyword terms rather than other brands that don’t have a strong web presence.
That is why small businesses that want to build better brand awareness must invest in SEO and start gaining first page rankings for the key terms related to their business.
5. Bypass Competition
Let’s take an example of two businesses that are in the same industry, selling similar products, at similar prices. One of them has an optimized website while the other has a non-optimized website. Considering everything else is equal, which company do you think will attract more customers to their website from local searches? Which company will likely grow faster and become more successful?
Search engines are very powerful. If your competitors are doing SEO marketing, you must ask yourself why you haven’t invested in such a strategy yet too.