5 Reasons Why Small Businesses Should Be Investing in SEO.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, plays a vital role in your business’ online success. High organic (unpaid) rankings go a long way towards maximizing your website’s visibility and your brand’s awareness on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Many small businesses hear the word SEO and feel that only larger businesses are able to afford it. That’s not that case at all. If done correctly, an effective SEO campaign can place your business on an equal playing field against your larger competitors, and dominate your smaller local competitors.

Spend Money to Make Money

SEO is a cost effective way to increase traffic to your website. It doesn’t require an enormous expense, but you can’t expect results without making an investment that is equivalent to your ambitions. Figure out how many conversions (lead generations / online sales) your SEO campaign would have to acquire, assign a dollar amount to those conversions, and then determine how many conversions must take place to make your campaign a success. Even the result of breaking even can be considered a good thing as long as it ultimately grows your brand’s reputation, leading to more sales down the road.

Lead Conversations about You

Somewhere in the online realm, people are talking about your business. A sea of review-based websites are out there, loaded with comments from users or former employees on a mission to “troll” or devalue a business with false reviews. That’s why it’s crucial that your website ranks before those low-quality websites in search results. Your official website containing your official, accurate information needs to be the first thing that customers see, not a review from a former employee “voicing their dissatisfaction.” A solid SEO strategy should boost your website past those dangerous websites and into the arms of the customer.

Build Trust

People trust Google, which is why it’s the most highly used search engine on the planet. Properly structuring your website and filling it with relevant content shows Google that your website is both educational and trustworthy. This will ultimately lead to Google awarding you with legitimacy and higher rankings versus untrustworthy websites with poor structuring and content. Legitimacy = Higher rankings. Higher rankings = Higher website visitor numbers.

SEO brings the clicks. Design does not.

You can have a website on par with the Sistine Chapel in terms of visuals, but that doesn’t matter if your website’s code is a disaster and struggling in the rankings. SEO tactics such as on-page optimization, correctly structuring your website and filling it with valuable relevant content, holds much more weight in the ranking factors versus a “cool-looking” website. Healthy website = higher rankings. Higher rankings = Higher website visitor numbers.

Get the jump on your competitors

If you are familiar with SEO and your competition isn’t, then you are missing out on a huge advantage of dominating searches geared towards your business. Launching a SEO campaign weeks before your competition is the equivalent of getting a 5-mile head start in a 10-mile race. You’ll be so far out in front o

f your competition that it will be difficult for them to catch up. On the other hand, maybe your competition is putting together their SEO plan this very moment. Maybe they’re reading this article right now (scary, right?). Can you afford for your competition to launch a SEO campaign and gain the upper hand? We think not!

Conclusion

SEO gives your business a great deal of website traffic potential, while remaining an affordable option for small businesses. If you are interested in creating a SEO plan to help grow your business’ online presence, then give Bell Online a call. You’ll work directly with our online marketing experts to create an effective SEO campaign which will put you well on your way to climbing the rankings.