Search engine optimization (SEO) may not be quick or easy, but the work is absolutely worth it for a small business. Good SEO provides many long-term benefits, like increasing traffic to your website and bringing in new local customers. At New Wine Digital, we help small businesses in a wide range of industries improve their SEO marketing efforts. Continue reading to learn why SEO is so important for small businesses like yours.
How Does SEO Work?
SEO is the process of optimizing your website to help search engines better understand its contents. The easier it is for a search engine to read your website, the more valuable it will deem your content. As a result, your website will rank higher in the results when someone searches for the information that your content provides.
In order to make your website easily readable for search engines, you must target specific industry keywords and link to related internal and external content. These factors help a search engine determine exactly what your content is about, and how it relates to a web user’s query.
Keyword targeting with SEO also allows you to reach a local audience that is looking for the exact products and services you offer. Having better visibility in local searches is essential for getting your small business on Google Maps and attracting more potential local customers to your physical location.
Why Is SEO Important for Small Businesses?
A common misconception about SEO is that it is no longer relevant. However, search engine algorithms are always evolving, so small businesses must keep up with these changes by continuously optimizing their websites in order to maintain their high search rankings. Increasing organic web traffic, establishing credibility, and creating a better user experience are a few other reasons SEO is still so important for small businesses.
It Increases Organic Traffic
Implementing SEO helps your website rank higher in the organic search results and increases traffic to your website. By optimizing your content, specific pages from your website can become the top-ranking organic search results for certain keywords.
When someone searches for specific services, they’re most likely to click on the top-ranking results. The first results are ads that were purchased using pay-per-click campaigns. Ads boost visibility but quickly become expensive, because you have to pay each time someone clicks on your ad.
However, the top-most organic results (the results below the ones labeled “ads’) still receive plenty of traffic and are inexpensive to rank for. If you have a small budget, implementing a good SEO strategy will be more cost-effective than running a PPC campaign.
The organic traffic generated from SEO marketing is more likely to convert customers because they are more likely to click through to your website from organic results than from an ad. Although ads can help you reach potential customers who might need your services in the future, they might forget about your business in the meantime. SEO, on the other hand, helps you reach the people who have a need that your business can fulfill immediately.
SEO Establishes Credibility
Web users typically consider high-ranking search results to be credible sources of information. Your website can back up that assumption by providing relevant, professional, and knowledgeable content that establishes your business as an expert in its industry. Linking to relevant pages on other reputable websites also establishes credibility to both search engines and web users.
The more credible your reputation, the more often other websites will link to your web pages from their own content. This process of link building further improves your search engine rankings so you can maintain a strong reputation and trustworthy relationships with your customers.
It Creates a Better User Experience
User experience is a major factor in converting customers. Even if your website receives plenty of traffic, web visitors will not convert if they have a poor experience with your website. Poor user experiences—measured in the time someone spends on your website—can negatively impact your search engine rankings and hurt your visibility.
The point of SEO isn’t to oversaturate your content with links and keywords. Instead, you should aim to create easy to read, useful content by strategically incorporating relevant keywords and links. A well-optimized web page creates a better user experience, resulting in higher search rankings and more customer conversions.
SEO Marketing Services for Small Businesses
The marketing experts at New Wine Digital can help you reach your target audience by improving your search engine rankings. We help small businesses in a wide range of industries maintain well-optimized websites with SEO, content marketing, web design, and more. If you would like to boost your Google rankings and attract more customers to your business, give us a call at 480-516-1819 today.
Images used under creative commons license – commercial use (5/20/2022). Image by Werner Moser from Pixabay