What are the advantages of SEO for small business?

SEO helps small business owners to create fast, robust, and user-friendly websites that rank higher in search engines. The fact that websites rank higher on the SERPs, in turn, helps to bring more qualified potential customers to the website and eventually increases conversion rates.

SEO also assists with building brand awareness for your small business as search engine users will be more likely to have confidence in a website that is on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) as opposed to brands who are not.

If you’re the holder of a small business, you should make use of SEO in order to build a powerful web presence and bypass your competitions to gain new customers for your organisation and take it to an entirely new level.

What is SEO in marketing?

For starters, the term ‘SEO’ stands for search engine optimisation. It is the entire process of improving a website in ways which assist it rank in search results at the time users conduct searches for specific words and phrases.

If you’re not 100% sure why this matters, just think about how you would normally find the information you need during the course of your daily life:

• What would you do if you wanted to replace your TV and weren’t really sure which model to buy?
• Where would you search if you were on holiday and needed to find a restaurant for dinner?
• How would you go about exploring your options for learning a new language?

If you’re like most individuals, you’d reach for your smartphone or sit down at your computer and then type a straightforward phrase into Google. You’d probably search for:

• “best 60 inch tv”
• “restaurants near me,”
• “how to learn Italian.”

Then, you’d scroll through the results and would click on the one that seemed most appropriate for your needs. These results will be based upon what Google thinks will be the most useful information to you, based on the keywords which you entered.

However, in many cases, the websites you see ranking on the first page of the SERPs didn’t get there by accident. They used SEO to assist Google to understand what their content is about. They also likely did considerable research in order to establish how users like you word your searches for specific subjects so that they could optimise their page appropriately.

And if you would like your target audience to find your site, you need to do the same.

Search Engine Optimisation vs Search Engine Marketing

As you learn more about boosting your company’s visibility in search, you could come across a different name for the entire process: SEM. And while some digital marketers use this interchangeably with SEO, it is important to understand the difference between the two:

• The term ‘SEM’ stands for “search engine marketing,” and it alludes to anything that you do in order to earn placement in search engine results pages. This means that SEM is an umbrella term which includes both SEO and PPC.
• So while SEO is a form of SEM, it’s not the only method involved in SEM.

Keeping this distinction in mind while you discover more about search visibility  as well as SEO will make it much simpler to spot resources that focus on paid tactics — and decide whether those are resources that you would like to spend your time reading.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If you want to discover additional information about the benefits of SEO for business then you need to do our SEO and Web Analytics Course. For more information, please follow this link.