Small businesses are likely thinking it’s too costly and the ROI might not be worth it, but SEO is an investment. An investment that will increase your business’s visibility and presence on the internet. By increasing the traffic to your website, it will increase the number of customers. With 160,000 searches a second, it is obvious that there is a demand for information and services provided online. SEO will target your site to bring in the right customers. SEO is also a form of trackable and quantifiable marketing. This allows for the ability to track increases in rankings, traffic, and conversions. Full analytics are provided, showing demographics of people visiting your site and other engagement metrics.
SEO has been proven to be vital to business success. Statistics show that 92% of online internet users will only search the first three pages. This means that if your business is not on the first page, you are losing potential customers. The top 10 rated website listings are the most valuable as it gains 90 percent of user clicks. With a higher-ranking website, the traffic to your site will increase, bringing in more revenue. SEO is a fast and effective way to increase your business, as studies have shown that SEO spending is forecasted to increase to $80 billion by 2020. An increasing number of businesses are acknowledging the value and effectiveness of this form of marketing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most crucial factors to small business success. SEO is a unique form of online marketing that increases a business’s website and overall internet presence. Precisely targeting the right demographic in the right areas, it will bring your website more traffic, providing more potential customers to your site. Sotavento Medios will help you build your small business by consulting and teaming up with you to define the right SEO solutions for your particular industry.
Search engine optimization is the full form of SEO, as we know it by this process of making a website’s visibility increase on a search engine result page. This increased visibility could essentially mean that a business would appear higher in the organic search results, and this could result in increased traffic to the website and potentially more business for the company. SEO targets a wide range of search types including image search, local search, video search, and academic search, etc. This gives a website’s internet presence the ability to be found by a very wide audience of people looking for something related to the site. The most vital element that SEO deals with is targeting search engines on what people are searching for. For example, if a website were selling second-hand cars, then they would want to optimize their website so that when someone types in search criteria relevant to second-hand cars, then this particular website appears within the first few pages of the search engine result page. This is important because statistics show that an overwhelming majority of search engine users are only likely to click through results on the first page, and if no relevant results are found on the first page, then a different search will be conducted, and this could possibly lose the business of a consumer. This is a rough guide to how SEO works and how it could be vital to the internet presence of a business.
Why is SEO important for small businesses?
SEO is essential for small businesses because it exposes them to a much wider range of users who are searching for products or services on the internet. According to Search Engine Watch, search is the leading driver of traffic to websites, beating social media by more than 300%. Small businesses are in a fantastic position to utilise SEO to their advantage. Few businesses understand (or use) local search, so there is often minimal competition from other businesses. It is also more cost-effective, as you do not need to compete with massive corporations or websites. A small business will only need to invest a small amount of money in order to maximise a very good ROI. A Hoth Blogger wrote an article on SEO being the best option for small business marketing. He explains that SEO allows you to attract customers who are actively searching for your service/product. It is not intrusive like most outbound advertising methods, and it delivers results. This in turn can allow your business to grow. He also outlines it being a long-term marketing strategy, as the rankings and traffic for SEO are unlikely to suddenly change. This predictability can be an invaluable asset for a small business trying to budget for the future.
About Sotavento Medios
Sotavento Medios is a firm that specializes in creating internet solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. The company has extensive experience in promotion and internet marketing, with a principal focus on search engine optimization. The company is based in Singapore. They have worked with several businesses, both big and small. This has given them the ability to create very effective SEO and internet marketing solutions suitable for any type of business. Sotavento has expressed that their primary focus is on retaining customers. They achieve this through consistent and effective SEO. This strategy helps to keep the customer’s website on the front page of search engines, ensuring a steady flow of new visitors and potential customers. Sotavento’s long-term approach to SEO means that once a business has acquired a top position on search engines, it is likely to remain there. This is in contrast to paid advertising, which can become very expensive if it is a continual method of generating traffic. Sotavento believes that employing a high-quality internet marketing strategy is an essential part of any business’s budget in today’s society. After all, the internet is clearly the most effective medium in terms of generating leads and new customers. Sotavento promises to provide a clear and precise analysis of its clients’ website situation, clear objectives, a website optimization consistent with the nature of the business, and regular reports and updates on the progress of the SEO strategy.
Benefits of SEO Services
Increased visibility is great and gives us more presence on the internet. However, increased visibility alone will not automatically result in increased custom. When our website is promoted on other websites, it will gain more attention and people will begin to be aware of it. But at the increased risk of targeting the wrong demographic. This means we miss out on potential customers who could actually benefit from the product. SEO services will work toward making your website and its pages more visible in search results by using keywords to increase its presence. But it will also do this by promoting it on websites that are related to the product because it is in these websites that the right demographic will be present. This is often done by producing high-quality content and a positive user experience and will increase the website’s presence in search results while also bringing it to the attention of those who will directly benefit from the product.
One of the key benefits of SEO services is that it will increase your online visibility by taking advantage of certain keywords. When these keywords are typed into a search engine, a high-ranking website will be amongst the first results to be seen. They can be challenging to get right, and often it is best to hire a professional to conduct market research into which keywords will be most effective for your business. However, when done right, your website and the pages will rank much higher than it did before. Additionally, SEO services work toward promoting a website to other search engines via the use of social media platforms – another effective strategy for increasing online visibility.
Increased online visibility
Search engine optimization (SEO) can increase your site’s presence and visibility on search engines such as Google and Bing. A better optimised site has a greater chance of attracting more traffic, as search engines rank the sites higher that have quality content, are easy to use, and are relevant to what the user is looking for. SEO is an effective way to increase online visibility in an organic way, building up to sustained long-term results, rather than the need for ongoing paid advertising. Paid advertising methods can help to increase visibility and traffic to your site, but businesses can gain more from long-term results that SEO provides. A high search engine ranking will help to increase your brand’s credibility and trust in the eyes of the user, as companies that appear on the first page of a search engine are generally considered to be more trustworthy. According to a study carried out on the native behavior of search engine users, it shows that a vast percentage of users will only click on the top three results. A further study on the relationship between search result position and click-through rate shows a stark increase from the first to second position, with a smaller increase from the second to third position. This demonstrates how high rankings can have a significant impact on traffic and click-through rates to your site.
Targeted organic traffic
Once a website has been optimized for search engines, it can stay at the top for long periods of time. The beauty of SEO is that it is the gift that keeps on giving. A PPC campaign can be set up in minutes and appear in Google within 24 hours. However, there are several drawbacks to this. First off, a PPC campaign needs to be set up by someone who is well versed in how to set one up. This may sound easy, but doing it properly takes time and quite a bit of research. Secondly, if you run a PPC campaign, you are only paying for your listings. More importantly, you need to keep paying for your traffic. What the majority of people don’t realize is that money is not traffic. It’s only paid. This is not the same with organic traffic you will see from SEO. With organic traffic, SEO services that result in organic traffic, search rankings have now stuck and this will continue resulting in consistent traffic. For some PPC campaigns, even the ones that have a rating 10 score in the keyword phrase, the moment they stop paying for that rate term, there goes their listings. For small businesses out there on tight budgets, this is a luxury they cannot afford. With paying for clicks ranging from $1-$20 on a PPC campaign, it very easily can be advertising money spent disastrously. Also, setting up a PPC campaign is much more expensive than SEO operations. Over recent years, search engines have even more clamped down on all forms of paid advertising in their results. While this is a good thing in terms of quality at the top search results, the websites still fell as PPC has become more pricey and very competitive in rates for their targeted terms. This has been a turning point for businesses to invest in SEO services and shift from PPC to increase traffic.
Cost-effective marketing strategy
As compared to paid ads, SEO is a very cost-effective strategy. The strategic nature of SEO and the self-run aspect of the service makes it a very attractive option for many small business owners who are looking to maximize revenues. Using cost-effective strategies to maximize revenues is on the mind of every business owner; SEO can assist in this by a high search engine ranking, targeted traffic, and high sales. In comparison to online advertising, the traffic which is the result of SEO is much more qualified. The traffic that SEO provides is considered organic because it is using the search engines to put your business in front of potential customers. This is a more effective way to get your site in front of prospective customers and has been proven to be a more suitable means. This kind of traffic provides a higher percentage of click-through rates for your site, thus producing better results. An additional benefit to this is that you won’t have to get in front of your prospects and interrupt them from what they’re doing. You can attract business simply by showing up in places where they already go.
Improved user experience
When it comes to small businesses, the importance of SEO service is ultimately realized in improving the user experience. One of the reasons for this is because it will be the focus of an effective SEO campaign. Your small business can definitely gain new customers because the phone will ring off the hook, believe it or not! When user experience improvements are implemented, visitors will access the website in a more convenient manner, especially when the website appears on top search engines. This, in turn, attracts more customers to your business. Who doesn’t want more customers? We stated earlier that an effective SEO campaign implements user experience improvements to your website. These consist of making it easier for customers to find information on your website and rounding everything out in a neat package. By “neat package” we mean, making the website easier to navigate and easier on the eyes. Plus, what it all boils down to is providing something useful for your visitors. If a customer can find what they are looking for on your website in a quick and efficient manner, they are most likely to return back in the future.
How SEO Services Help Small Businesses
By knowing and understanding the most appropriate key phrases, a small business can then optimize their site using on-page SEO and through link building in a more focused manner. Focused optimization around the correct key phrases will bring fast results and prove the value for money for this kind of SEO activity.
Keyword research and optimization is seen as a very valuable activity to small businesses. This is because keyword research provides an understanding of the market that they are entering, by learning what consumers are searching for they gain a better understanding of their wants and needs. Keyword research helps to narrow down target audiences, which is crucial for small businesses looking to increase sales of a particular product or service. This in turn increases return on investment as having identified exactly what the consumer wants they will be more likely to buy from the website.
Reference to each of the activities is made from the section above, the final aim for all small businesses is the same: to get more for their investment.
This is the section that will explain how every SEO activity helps small businesses. Small businesses need to concentrate on the right activities in order to see the most return on investment, so helping a better understanding of the effects of SEO is an important task.
Keyword research and optimization
Targeting on the right keywords can make the difference between success and failure of an SEO project. Often small businesses lack the in-house expertise to identify and target valuable keywords. This results in a scenario where the business is not targeting the terms which will bring in the most relevant traffic. The keyword research process will involve interaction with the business owners to find out as much as possible about the terms and phrases they would use to describe their products or services. At this stage a significant amount of competitor intelligence will also be gathered to make sure we are targeting the right keywords. A combination of head, body, long tail and local keywords will be targeted throughout the campaign, generally starting with the more competitive head terms in the early stages. This approach has achieved great results for many of our clients and had a big impact early on in the campaign.
On-page and off-page optimization
On-page optimization involves all of the measures taken directly within the website in order to improve its position in the search rankings. Examples of this include keyword optimization, meta-tag description and keyword optimization, and reliable internal linking. It also involves ensuring that each web page has the right title tags. Keyword optimization is the act of researching, analyzing and selecting the best words or keywords to target in order to drive qualified traffic. This is seen as the most fundamental factor to an SEO campaign’s success. When choosing keywords, there are a few things that should be taken into consideration. Firstly, we should aim to find the keywords which are relevant to our content. This will involve brainstorming and creating a list of potential keywords, however, there are a few tools which we can use to make this process easier. It’s important to know that we don’t always have to target keywords with the highest search volumes. These keywords can often be very generic and competitive. Instead, it may be more beneficial to target long tail, specific keywords. These will have a lower search volume, but they will be less competitive. This means that although they won’t generate as much traffic, the traffic will be more qualified and thus more likely to convert. After selecting which keywords to target, the next step is to implement them into the website. This will involve making changes to the website’s HTML code and content. The aim here is to increase the keyword’s relevance and density so as to best match the services or product being offered. This may require some textual changes to the body copy. In more extreme cases, structural design changes may be required.
Local SEO and Google My Business optimization
The next step is Google Places optimization. Google Places is an excellent tool for local businesses. It provides an easy way for local businesses to get found. Nowadays, most customers are searching for businesses through search engines instead of opening a phone book. Creating a Places page helps put your business on the map, so to speak. After creating a Places page, your business information will appear if your business is searched for by name. It also has a map of your location and your contact information. This is a free service that is strongly recommended for any local business.
On-page local keyword optimization is essential. Once you have found your local keywords, it is important to incorporate them into your website. This can be done by editing your HTML tags and content. Notice in the search results there are two blue links under the description of the website. The first link is called the title tag, and the second link is the description tag. Both tags need to reflect the content on the page. This is what users and search engine crawlers read to determine what the page is about.
Local SEO is very important for small businesses. Local SEO optimization helps small businesses target local consumers, which is vital. Your website should target local keywords. If you are running a cleaning company, you don’t want national traffic, you want local traffic. You can optimize local keywords by incorporating keywords with location, such as “Cleaning company in Vancouver”. Local keyword research is the best way to find what terms users are using to find your service. Typically, these keywords are different from what you would think.
Content creation and optimization
Content creation and optimization is an important process for any website. It involves creating content that is related to the products or services being offered by the website. It is the most basic and important step in search engine ranking. Many small businesses may not realize the importance of this step. Creating content does not mean you can write anything about your products or services. You need to write content that can attract readers or visitors to stay on your website for some time. If you have succeeded in getting visitors to stay on your website, there is a chance they may end up buying something from your website. This is why it is crucial to have high-quality content. High-quality content will also be recognized by search engines and this can increase the chance for your website to get a higher ranking. Remember that content is king! An in-depth research about the company’s product is required to produce relevant content for the business. Keywords are very important in content as they reflect what the content is all about and also the keywords used are the search queries made by users to search for information. This might sound easy for some but to be able to create very good content that is search engine friendly is not an easy task. SEO companies usually have content writers who are very skilled in writing and also mastering the art of SEO content writing. High-quality content is also a part of on-page optimization. This is why content creation is an important step in SEO for small businesses. An optimized content can increase the chance for potential customers to find your products and services.
Monitoring and reporting
One of the best things about the internet is that the performance of nearly everything can be measured, and it’s no different with SEO. Using a variety of tools (Google Analytics, SEMrush, SEO Moz), you will be able to see the amount of traffic coming to your site and from what sources. If you have e-commerce capabilities on your site, you can see the number of transactions and revenue from organic search engine traffic. Post tracking the data, if you notice an increase in traffic but a decrease in the revenue from organic search, you’ll know that you need to work on the conversion rate of the page. All of this data is incredibly useful for your business, as it gives you a clear understanding of what kind of results your SEO investment is providing. There are no qualms about your ROI, or wondering if your money could be spent more effectively. Finally, as the internet continuously evolves, SEO is not a one-time job, it is an ongoing process. This means that the initial optimization is only the beginning. There will constantly be changes in the market and conditions, and it’s important to keep your site current. Regular monitoring and reporting will ensure that the changes are made with careful consideration and that the best possible results are achieved.
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