SEO should play a strategic role in your larger digital marketing strategy. It can after all be a great way to build and grow your business in a very fast and easy way. Good SEO means better traffic from more qualified leads, increased engagement, and more conversions. It is able to help in no end of ways for businesses of all sizes. At the startup and small business level, an investment in SEO is best once a product market fit has been determined. You need to know and grasp to some degree what it is you want to sell.
You can be very sure of more web traffic
People do everything via search engines. From this Google is by far the biggest with over 90% of the search engine market share. If you a need a tradesman, you ask Google. When you’re looking for a new washing machine, you ask Google. If you want to book a hotel, you ask Google. Google is our faithful friend, who we trust to help solve most of our everyday problems.
As a business without investing in SEO, Google may not even know you exist – which means potential customers won’t be able to find you. The second largest search engine is YouTube, which brings in a whole new area for optimisation. It’s not enough just to post a video and hope that it ranks. Compelling video content with a strong SEO foundation and strategic distribution strategy helps bring your brand to life and opens up another significant avenue to capture traffic. Any marketing agency in Swindon will vouch for this.
Good SEO will also bring you much better traffic
Optimisation isn’t about tricking search engines into displaying your site. It’s about letting search engines know exactly what your content is about so that it appears in front of the right people – people that are looking for businesses like yours. And you have a much better chance of selling to someone who is already interested. What’s more, because 78% of people now own a smartphone, there’s been a significant rise in mobile searches.
Google has responded to this by providing people with more localised results, which is great news for small businesses. This localisation will allow them to compete with much larger players, providing they have the right SEO in place to be found. Optimising your site and content for a specific area (town, city or region), together with local citations, quality backlinks, and a strong Google My Business listing are critical if you want to be found at a local level. And by ensuring users find relevant local businesses, search engines are ensuring you find relevant, local, and most importantly, interested customers.
Overall
Appearing on the all-important first page of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) is highly competitive. Research suggests that the top 3 listings get as much as 75% of all click-throughs. From this very point then it pays to be on top. SEO isn’t a new concept and some players are very well established online, meaning they top the ranks. Competing with these guys in the SERP can be tricky, and it gets harder every day. If you’re improving your ranking with SEO, the gap between them and you can only get wider. Even at a local level, if you’re not investing in SEO, many of your competitors will be. As they climb the list, you’ll fall and you’ll have less chance of catching the click.