One of the first questions that business owners raise instantly after starting a business is, “Why is SEO important for small business?”
Well, let’s take a look at some stats to gain the answer to your concern –
- Every day, 3.5 billion searches are executed on Google.
- There were 2.64 billion digital buyers in 2024. This number is estimated to increase to 2.77 billion by 2027.
- 76% of consumers search for a firm’s digital presence before making an in-person visit.
So, regardless of your industry, people will actively search for your business online. Now, the question is, “do you want your brand to appear on the internet when such searches are made?” Yes? In that case, SEO should be your priority.
That said, let’s gain an in-depth idea of how SEO outsourcing could be an excellent choice. But first, let’s get familiar with the basics!
1- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – what is it?
SEO is a process of enhancing a website’s structure. It can also include enhancing online presence and content to enhance site’s visibility and ranking in (SERPs) or search engine results pages.
The main aspects of SEO include,
- keyword research,
- on-page optimization,
- link building,
- and technical SEO
All of these help in making the website attractive to both search engines and users.
Do you want your brand to be found? Do you wish to capture the demand of the general public? It is a must that you focus on SEO. And when done right, SEO can increase site traffic and drive conversions. This will then lead to increased sales.
2- Why is SEO crucial for your business?
Are you wondering, “how to boost your business?” SEO is the answer!
SEO ultimately helps organisations attain visibility for search queries organically. This helps the website earn rankings instead of paying for them using PPC or pay-per-click ads.
When your site ranks well for queries that are similar to your product, offerings and services, you eventually gain more site traffic. This can lead to increased revenue if you can turn those prospects into paying customers. And this is often at a fraction of the cost if you were using paid search ads.
However, the importance of SEO for businesses can vary significantly.
- For instance, if you are about to launch a new product, SEO may not have a meaningful effect in getting instant reactions. For such cases, paid ads or PR works better.
- The same applies to events like limited-time courses and conferences. In such cases, email marketing may be an excellent fit, given the short-term nature of the services and products.
- For many B2B service businesses, faster results can often be achieved by leveraging platforms like LinkedIn or engaging in one-on-one sales efforts rather than solely relying on SEO (though SEO can still be valuable in the long run).
However, the practices involved in SEO are pretty beneficial. They help you gain visibility and put your brand in front of more potential customers.
3- The main elements of a successful SEO strategy
Building a thriving SEO program involves taking care of essential components. These include keyword research, link building, web development and design, and content creation.
But before we understand each of these elements in detail, let’s understand briefly how Google search works.
Google is relatively straightforward with its process. It aims to deliver relevant and useful results to the searchers. It does so by crawling websites and indexing each page. Accordingly, the best results are served to the searchers.
Google’s guide on how search works prioritises five crucial factors, including –
- Meaning
- Relevance
- Quality
- Usability
- Context
When you focus on all core elements (listed and elaborated below) of SEO, you ultimately touch on all of these factors.
3.1- Keyword research and planning
Keyword research involves researching, identifying, and prioritizing search terms. The goal behind this is to create content that ranks for the researched terms.
For example, a company focusing on eco-friendly household products could gain visibility by ranking for search terms like –
- “Sustainable home goods”
- or “environmentally-friendly household items”
Keyword research allows marketers to identify potential keywords. It also helps them assess their search volume along with other metrics.
Remember, using keyword research tools available in the market can suggest multiple keywords that fall under similar categories. As a marketer, it is your job to choose relevant terms that you can use in your content and get ranked.
Keyword research is often the first phase of content planning. It can help identify topics that can be produced.
3.2- On-page SEO and content development
Once the keywords are determined, it is time to focus on the SEO content development process. Typically, you will be required to create new content from scratch as per the keywords. Or you can even optimize your existing content accordingly. The choice is yours!
Sometimes, optimising things like title tags, internal links, and content structure can have a huge impact, too. And this is what we call on-page SEO in technical terms.
To improve your chances of being ranked for the keywords, you will require providing the best possible content – one that is aligned as per the search engine’s ranking factors.
3.3- Off-page SEO
As the name might suggest, off-page SEO actions are conducted off your website in the hopes of improving organic traffic and website rank.
Largely, off-page SEO means backlink management and link building.
Backlinks are links discovered on other sites that lead back to your own website. And since Google’s algorithm prioritises backlinks in the ranking factors, it is crucial to work on it.
When it comes to building backlinks, you or your chosen Kelowna PPC Company can do so in various ways, including –
- digital public relations
- guest blogging
- creating quality content that collects natural backlinks and more
To observe the health of your backlink profile, you can use analytics tools available in the market. And if you are working with a link-building company, you can request the report for the same.
3.4- Technical SEO
Now, when we talk about technical SEO, it could mean a lot of things within the technical infrastructure of your website.
To simplify, better rankings and more traffic are not just limited to content, keywords, and backlinks. The site’s mobile-friendliness, user experience and page speed matter, too.
Here are some technical tasks that you must work on or request your chosen SEO consulting agency to work on –
- Providing your sitemap to Google
- Identifying the mobile-friendliness of your website
- Using HTTPS and not HTTP
- Designing a website structure that is SEO-friendly and intuitive for users to navigate
- Improving core web vitals to enhance the quality of user experience on your website
- Enhancing the site’s loading speed
Working on technical SEO streamlines the process for search engines to suitably crawl and index your site. It shows that your site is usable, irrespective of the device and is organised properly.
All of these results in better SEO outcomes, better site performance, and more conversions. Consider working with a reliable company of PPC Management Kelowna for help with technical SEO.
3.5- Local SEO
“Why local SEO is important for small business?” is one of the many common questions that most business owners have. Well, your business, especially if it is an SME, needs to be visible among the local buyers. And that is how it starts, right? You first target the local audience, win them over, and then broaden your audience group, perhaps national and international ones.
Local SEO is all about optimising your website for local searches, visibility and traffic. There are several factors that need to be taken care of, including –
- adding local business schema
- optimizing your Google Business Profile
- NAP (name, address, and phone number) citations
- researching and targeting local keywords and more
SEO is vital for local businesses. Your directory listings play a key role in being discovered. But it’s equally important to monitor and ensure their accuracy and effectiveness. This ensures that motivated customers can easily find and engage with your business.
Note: Focusing on these elements allows for creating strategies to increase business growth.
4- The many perks of investing in SEO
Now that you comprehend the worth of SEO for small businesses and start-ups, let’s steer towards the many benefits you might experience with your investment in Victoria PPC Company for SEO.
4.1- Organic search serves as a valuable source of website traffic
Organic search frequently stands out as one of the top sources of traffic for companies. In some cases, SEO traffic even becomes the primary source.
The volume of search queries relevant to your business on a daily basis is likely much greater than the number of clicks you can generate through channels like social media. And reaching the same number of clicks through paid ads would require a significant investment.
Hence, focusing on organic search is crucial. It gives you the chance of attracting more traffic if you end up increasing your rankings on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
4.2- SEO is an affordable choice
When compared with other paid channels, SEO is often a very cost-effective choice.
Paid advertising involves significant spending on various aspects such as –
- creative work
- design
- copywriting
- landing pages
- experimentation, in addition to the actual cost of running the ads.
With SEO, you invest in your website and content production. However, unlike paid advertising, you don’t need to purchase ad placements.
Once you start seeing results from SEO, they will continue to come in even if you reduce or stop spending. But the same cannot be said about paid ads.
And this is why companies that invest in SEO tend to maintain or even grow their outcomes with time. On the other hand, firms investing in PPC Management Victoria need to continue spending to maintain competitiveness.
4.3- SEO works hand-in-hand with paid marketing efforts
Not many marketers realise this, but SEO and PPC are very much interconnected. One of the reasons could be your brand acquiring more real estate on the SERPs.
The more your brand is visible on the search engines, the better its chances become of being clicked. Plus, the increased brand visibility can have a positive impact. Thanks to the mere-exposure effect, people tend to develop preferences for things simply because they’re familiar with them.
4.4- SEO assists in establishing trust, credibility, and brand recognition
Frequent appearances in search results create the perception that your brand is a plausible and trusted source of information.
Here is a simplification. Think of the SERPs as a highway, with the ranking pages acting as billboards along the route. The more your company appears in search results, the more brand awareness you’ll build. This increased awareness boosts the likelihood of your business being chosen by customers instead of lesser-known competitors.
Google also prioritizes experience and expertise. They both are significant components of E-E-A-T, as outlined in Google’s search quality rater guidelines.
4.5- SEO facilitates connections with customers
You can engage with potential customers at various stages of their journey as their search needs evolve over time.
Imagine a marketing executive planning next year’s strategy. They start exploring influencer marketing by searching for “what is influencer marketing?” and “successful influencer marketing campaigns.” Later on, they begin evaluating solutions with searches like “top influencer marketing platforms” and “[brand] reviews.”
You can easily find such keywords that your potential audience might be using by conducting keyword research. Or even use relevant tools to identify which keywords your competitors are targeting.
You can guide customers who are conducting those searches towards your solution by showing up in those search results.
4.6- SEO serves as a scalable growth channel for businesses
SEO is one of the few customer acquisition channels that can be scaled effectively.
Consider SEO as an ongoing cycle where your efforts, such as creating content, lead to outcomes like improved rankings, increased traffic, and customer acquisition. The revenue generated from these efforts can be reinvested into producing more content, which in turn generates additional rankings, traffic, and customers.
And this is what we call a growth loop.
Scalable channels typically generate additional output that you can reinvest back into the channel.
SEO works similarly but with a key advantage. For instance, even when you stop investing, the returns often continue (at least for a while, until algorithm changes or competition comes into play).
4.7- SEO best practices contribute to overall marketing performance
SEO best practices, including –
- high-quality content,
- website UX,
- and aligning with search intent
All these assist in enhancing the general marketing performance of your brand. Even without organic traffic from search results, having a website with excellent user experience and plenty of valuable content would still be beneficial.
Besides, great content can enhance conversion rates, leading to more sales, irrespective of where the traffic is coming from.
5- Ending note
SEO is no longer just a facet of a web presence strategy. It serves as the foundation upon which your entire business rests. This is why building a website without a proper SEO foundation is very similar to building a skyscraper on unstable ground. It is bound to collapse.
So, instead of questioning the integrity of SEO, embrace it. Also, ensure that you work only with experts like SEO Resellers Canada. This is because SEO is a complex subject that varies for every firm, no matter how similar they are. A reliable white-label SEO company will help establish a solid strategy and even leverage the right tools.
