How Can My Business Benefit from SEO?

Tools that Help Drive a Business’ Online Presence

Search engines have made it possible for businesses to reach a lot of their customers online. This has been a turning point for small and medium sized companies, which do not have the means to invest in expensive television and radio advertising as their bigger counterparts.

Whereas in the past running a small business was one of the most difficult things to do, it is now not only common, but also successful, thanks to the appearance and help of the affordable digital marketing, Search Engine Optimization (or SEO, for short), e-mail marketing and social media.

Undoubtedly, SEO is the best of all abovementioned tools. Since, however, it does take some time to yield observable results, it is often neither properly understood, nor fully appreciated. And it is really important to both understand and be able to take advantage of it, because there is no other tool that will cost you less and less with time, while simultaneously bringing you increased web presence and profit. 

Difficulties that Small Businesses usually Encounter

When you start a business of any size, you immediately find yourself in a market full of competition. And this competition has poured all their efforts and resources into winning over the niche customers.

The question is how to beat that without substantial funds and the advantage of long-term presence. Because, let’s face it, you are going to start with no resources, no online auditorium, and no customer base and a die-hard, competition, already established on the market.

What Can SEO Do for you?

Every business which operates through a web site knows the importance of putting up relevant data and optimizing online content so that this content shows up as close to the top search results in any search engine as possible. Because this is the way to reach a bigger auditorium and win over new customers.

In order to do this search optimization, you need good and relevant keywords, user-friendly design, and last but not least, as many quality links as possible leading to your website.

There are countless SEO techniques that experts apply in order to boost a ranking score. Most of them seem really technical and complicated to the small business owner. Sticking to a few basic principles though can make things simple and provide a straightforward plan to follow so that you can see some real results.

Why start with UX/UI?

It might not be immediately obvious why you would want to improve your website stricture, design and user friendliness, when it’s search terms we are talking about. Well, that is, because before a search takes place, come the search engine bots which will crawl your site pages in an attempt to evaluate and rank it. You can read about the process here.

In case your page is suffering from performance issues, structure is non-existent and your links are all over the place, the crawlers will not be able to get around in the first place, let alone estimate your page rank. Chances of the page getting indexed become close to none.

This can be resolved by Meta tags to convey what your page is about, and Silo structures for proper category alignment.

Improve Ranking by Niche and Keyword Optimization 

One of the factors which can hurt a website rank badly is bounce rate. In order to make sure your site visitors stick around when they get to your page, is to make content simple and relevant to the niche you are targeting. Engage your audience with comprehensive information, which is exhaustive, to the point and yet easy to understand.

Make your website design attractive too, so that visitors stay long enough to decide they do want to read what’s on the page.

Think about what search terms users will populate in their queries and make sure you place them in prominent places across page titles, headings, subheadings, and the content itself. Be careful with your keywords, though, because they need to be optimized, but not crammed, in order to avoid spam-like characteristics.

Local SEO

You can take advantage of local SEO by putting yourself on the map, providing your business details and contact information in local directories and business pages. One good way to get better ranking is by declaring your physical presence at a certain location in order to gain advantage over the competition for the location in question. This will draw physical customers to you in the area.

SEO Benefits

SEO has numerous benefits for businesses. More than 70% of users will not click on paid results, but rather on the ones that search pulled naturally. If your rank has lead you to appear at the top of the organic search results, this will increase traffic to your site exponentially.

SEO techniques can benefit any business, if used properly and consistently. That is why you might want to check the best list of SEO tools ever. If you consequently maintain the best SEO practices to stay on top of the Google ranking equation, you will be spending less time and money of marketing, while  at the same time growing your number of customers and retaining the already existing ones. By taking the time to optimize your online presence, you also make sure that prospective clients will be informed of the services you offer. This will weed out naturally the leads which might produce a higher bounce rate and hurt your ranking.