Small Businesses have always been a rear wheel of a four-wheeler cart of the world’s economy. Every month over 543,000 new businesses rolls their sleeves to join the business industry. Disappointingly, more than the above number shut down their business each month.
The detailed reasons for failure are beyond the scope of this post. However, we can certainly throw down few specifics. The major reason behind the failure is said to be the capital management.
While money is the major source, there are certain criteria that fall back on small businesses.
The most overlooked option is the need of web presence. In the US alone, 52% of small businesses don’t have a website. And over 26.1% businesses don’t have any social media presence what so ever. Even the business that has website has it up for general enquiry purposes. It’s like a dad’s generation website that doesn’t have any soul.
Although SEO and digital marketing has changed the landscape of the web, small businesses have found it difficult to adapt to it. So what can the problem be? Before diving into the SEO benefits of small businesses, let’s shed some ideas on the reasoning.
They consider website and SEO as bogus
If you tell a non-tech guy that you can earn money online, they will probably laugh at you. Why? Because they believe the idea about earning income online is all scam. This logic implies to every small business owners. The mysterious term of SEO gets over their head as they don’t have any basic knowledge about it. They just think it will be added up to their tally of additional expenses.
Lack of money and time
Let’s be real. Small businesses don’t have money or time to invest. The tale of investing one year of their time scares many owners. They don’t have the time to manage their SEO campaigns. As SEO is more than just being updated with the algorithm and advanced mechanism, many business owners feel reluctant to even give it a shot.
Got screwed previously
If a person is deceived previously, he/she will feel reluctant to give the same thing another go. This is what happens most of the times to business owners. Many spammy outsourcing agencies sell cheap SEO services that throw empty hands. They promise you the moon but ends up with nothing but dust. Lack of results is one primary reason why business owners don’t trust SEOs.
With an agency like Nirmal, you can rest assure of quality results for your business. These are the benefits that our SEO clients see after our SEO campaign.
Long term & higher return on investment
In comparison to traditional marketing and another form of paid marketing, SEO delivers a higher return on investment. Now we aren’t pointing down any sort of marketing tactics. But, SEO gathers more saturated and targeted traffic on a longer term than any of its counterparts.
Traditional marketing and PPC runs only to the duration where you can handle the cost. Yes, we include PPC tactics to our marketing genre because it’s great for generating quick ROI. However, SEO is all about free traffic. You earn them, you have them.
Reach out to targeted traffic
SEO comes with a filtration module in it. No, it’s not a technology but surely the targeted traffic is more precise than the traditional marketing. With the old form of marketing, the traffic is rather generic. It attracts people in mass. But, with SEO the traffic comes from the people who need you. They are the ones who are searching for your help to rectify their problem.
SEO is all about pull marketing whereas traditional marketing is about push marketing. And, in many scenario pull marketing does the trick. Just look at some stats of so-called traditional form of marketing. 86% skip television ads. 44% never open direct mail. These percentages are really high compared to conversions from SEO.
Create a website that user loves
SEO is all about optimising a website for user and search engines. It’s most likely that your website was built a while back where you didn’t take the time to think about the website.
When you work on SEO of your website, you play with every element like content copy and CRO which enhances the productivity of a website. You might be amazed to see that even a dead looking website increases its lead by 75% by just moving up the CTA buttons.
Build a Brand
While branding is a whole different fish in the ocean, SEO is definitely an integral part of recognising a website as a brand. An SEO optimised website has more potential to grab the heads of a user rather than a non-optimised site. When your website continuously pops up on Google for your industry related keywords, your audience is more likely to remember your site’s name. I won’t go into details of how the brain works, but if something comes frequently, the brain is functioned to remember it.
Overtake the Competition
I’ll put up this straight. Most small businesses don’t optimise their website. That’s the bitter truth. Most websites are there for the sake of information only. They don’t care much about generating traffic or leads from their website. They only live their lives within the 4 walls of their brick and mortar company.
So how can you bypass them? By simply doing thing different than your competitors.
If you can pull off a better optimised site that Google loves, you raise your chance to climb up the search ranking ladder. This is where SEO plays its part.
Opens gate for more customers
Your brick and Mortar Company may be just doing well to pay your bills. But what if you can bring in more leads to your business through your website? Won’t you love it? Absolutely, you would kill for it.
This is what SEO does for your business. It opens up the flood of qualified traffic to your business through various medium. It’s not just organic traffic that you get from SEO. You often get leads from different citation sources and communities that shed the same market like yours. Even free social media marketing grabs you leads that a brick and mortar company can only dream of.
Better conversion rate
If you ask me what’s the major difference between an SEO optimised website and one without it. My answer usually ends up with the conversion. SEO is way much bigger than just placing keywords on your website. You need to have the analytical skill to see from the glasses of users.
If your users don’t convert into leads, then having a website is of no use. This is where SEO comes into action. A properly conversion rate optimised site has a bigger potential of converting than one without it.
Wrapping Up
SEO and online marketing is a powerful toolkit to have in your arsenal. So, if you have still missed it, I recommend you to give it at least one try one. I would like you to decide on what’s best for your business. Over to you.