“How is SEO actually going to help my business grow?”
One of the questions that I receive every single time we pitch a client. Thereby, I decided to pen down how SEO helps business owners. Not only for our future clients, but also for entrepreneurs who’re researching about possible ways to grow their business.
I am taken back by the number of business owners I meet that aren’t focusing on SEO right now. They think, just because they obtain the majority of their sales via word of the mouth referrals, it is worthless to spend money on digital marketing. Now, without any second argument, word of the mouth is a highly effective way to bring sales and build a reputation. Nevertheless, it is not very scalable, neither you can track a lot of things in it. On the other hand, digital marketing is scalable, and you can track everything you’re doing and how it is performing.
How SEO Can Grow Your Business
| 1. Helps you in getting more traffic |
| 2. Shows that you care about your website and business |
| 3. You get noticed by other businesses |
| 4. Increases visibility and branding |
| 5. Provides the best ROI |
| 6. You can track everything |
Before we start, SEO stands for search engine optimization and it combines tricks, strategies, and experiments done by webmasters to get on the first page.
As a business, you care (or you should care) about one thing – your target audience. This means, that if you sell oil which prevents hair fall, your target audience is people who have hair fall problems. Not people who’re interested in guns, ammunition or any other random stuff, but people who have hair fall problems.
And it is highly unlikely that anyone who has hair fall problem knows about your company since you’re in the early stages. But one thing they do know is Google. So naturally, they’ll google “hair fall solutions” or something similar. A ton of results will come up and they’ll open maybe one or two out of these.
They’ll read the blog posts, and it is very likely that blog would recommend a hair oil or something similar. Depending on how optimized the website is, they’ll buy it straight away.
More or less, this can be applied to all the industries and businesses. Every business has certain search phrases which you can use to get in front of your target audience. And, SEO is what helps you achieve that.
Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses
It helps you get more traffic
As I mentioned above, when you rank for the right search phrases (keywords, as referred by SEO), it is going to bring you traffic. Not only any traffic but traffic of your potential audience. Now, I don’t need to explain again how this traffic can help you generate more sales.
The best part about digital marketing is that you aren’t making a guess. You’re shooting right at your target. In traditional marketing, you throw your advertisement to literally everyone. Some of them may not be even related to your target audience in any manner. But in digital marketing, you target the very people that are your audience. If you sell guns, you target people who love guns, if you sell coffee, you tag people like me and so on.
If your website is properly setup and you’re good in conversions, SEO will do the rest of part, i.e. bringing people to your doorstep.
SEO Shows that you care about your business
Optimizing your website for search engines is one of the most basic ways of showing that you care about your business and how it is represented online. It shows that you’re making efforts and putting together bits and pieces to get your website in front of more people.
You get noticed by other businesses
When you rank for a certain search phrase, you get the spotlight. Now, not only your potential customers but your competitors also notice you. A key marketing concept is to enter into someone’s mind.
A good part of being in touch with other businesses is that your chances of getting referrals from them get higher. In my 2 years of content writing and marketing, I’ve landed a ton of gigs from other digital marketing businesses. Now, if you take one approach, you can consider them as your rival, on the other hand, if you manage to maintain a healthy relationship, you can get a fair amount of referrals from their business.
Increased Business Visibility and Branding
Let’s take our example, if someone searches for search phrases related to content writing, I obviously would love to rank as high as I possibly can. But, it is not always because I want the people who’re searching to come and purchase something from us. There is value in simply appearing for search result itself.
Even if you can’t rank for the exact search phrases, you can rank for phrases related to the main phrase. When people look up something on google, they don’t stop their search after simply opening one or two websites, they often edit their search query, then look for more and so on.
This means that if you can’t rank on a broad search phrase like “hunting knife”, it would be easier for you to rank on “best hunting knife under $100” or something similar.
Best ROI’s in Advertising
If you put it aside traditional marketing, SEO provides a terrific ROI.
Even before starting an argument, ROI from newspaper can’t even be tracked. You simply can’t track how many people saw your ad, or how many people called you because of your ad, and not the banner you bought on the highway. Digital marketing lets you pinpoint everything and learn how it is performing.
Unlike traditional marketing, SEO is inbound marketing strategy i.e, you target the specific people that are looking for the very services or products that you’re trying to sell. And you do this without making them yell at you. Because you don’t interrupt when they’re watching a TV show or a sports match. Instead, you show up when they actually need you (how cool does that sound?)
You Can Track Everything
With SEO and the right set of tools, you can track everything which is happening on your website. From people who link to your website, to which countries do people come from to your website, From what language do they speak, up to literally watch them what they’re doing on your website in video form.
You can check which of your keywords are ranking on which positions, how much traffic do they bring in, and so on.
There is no guesswork. You know which of your campaigns are performing good and which ones aren’t. Based on the analytics, you can make decisions.
Final Words
I hope that this article would have provided some insight on how SEO helps businesses grow. If you’re an entrepreneur, head over to our free consultation page to have a chit-chat about how you can start marketing your business. I love talking about business, and online marketing. Also, you have nothing to lose in a free consultation!