Starting your own business is one of the biggest accomplishments for which one can strive. There is so much competition in the business world that merely starting a business is an achievement in and of itself. It takes a lot of courage to start a business when you know you’ll be starting as a small fish in a large pond.
If you’re a beginner at running a business, marketing is probably the one area of running a business that’s the hardest to master. If you don’t have a large marketing budget, which most new businesses don’t, it can be difficult to increase your brand awareness and visibility, but search engine optimization (SEO) can help you become efficient and effective at digital marketing. Continue reading to learn more about how SEO can help your fledgling business prosper.
What is SEO?
Wouldn’t it be nice if all you had to do to generate online traffic was create a website and wait for web surfers to happen upon your website? Unfortunately, that’s not even close to how it works. If you want to take your business to the next level, you need a strategy that will build your online presence, and that’s the goal of SEO.
Search engine optimization is a set of practices that aim to make your small business more visible and credible to search engines. Once you learn SEO best practices, you can use it to optimize everything from your social media pages to your website and bring in organic traffic.
SEO levels the playing field for small businesses.
It’s natural for entrepreneurs to want to grow a national customer base, especially with the prevalence of online shopping. However, you have a competitive advantage over national brands in your local area, and SEO helps local businesses to exploit their advantage.
These days, when people are looking for a particular type of business or service, let’s say a dance studio, the first thing they do is go online and Google “dance studios near me.” People who don’t use SEO tend to cast too broad of a net, and they miss the potential customers in their own backyard. If you run a dance center in Hillsboro, OR, SEO can help you narrow down your marketing campaigns to the most likely customers in your local area.
Part of search engine optimization is tying your business to a local area and a specific type of customer. Once you know your average customer’s persona and location, you can optimize your online presence to target them specifically. Even though digital marketing allows you to grow a customer base that spans from Hillsboro, OR to Miami Beach, FL, it’s much more effective to target your local area and market.
SEO can increase your company’s authority and credibility in its industry.
Building credibility is one of the hardest things for startup companies to achieve. Before the days of digital marketing and social media, you had to put forth a herculean effort to establish your company as an industry expert and leader.
With search engine optimization, there are several ways you can improve your online credibility with the search engines that deliver search results to consumers. The more online authority your company has, the closer to the top you’ll rank in search engine results related to your business.
SEO makes your website more navigable for potential customers.
Have you ever visited a website only to realize that you couldn’t find the information, solutions, products, or services you were seeking? If potential customers don’t know the purpose of a page on your website when they land on it, you can bet that they’re going to leave your website in short order and find an easier-to-use website
One of the best things about SEO is that it’s a customer-centered digital marketing strategy. Most SEO tactics push for ease of use and readability for potential customers. The easier your website is to navigate and the more readable your content is, the more effective your website and digital marketing campaigns will be at driving organic traffic.
