How SEO Can Help Your Small Business

Hey there, Mr. Businessman (or Ms. Businesswoman)!

Read on to find out how SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can help your business. But first, a quick note:

I was originally going to write this up as a traditional white paper. Then, I realized that white papers are boring and it would be much more interesting and engaging in this format. So, please forgive me if I slip up and inject some personality into the otherwise bland world of business.

Anyway, on to the fun stuff: increasing your traffic, pulling in more leads, making more sales. Not fun enough? What I meant to say was make more money. Now that’s fun. And the goal we’re all after.

If you:

• Own a small, local business (restaurant, gym, retail store, law firm, medical practice….bungee jumping company, zoo,… etc)
• Are in charge of marketing for a small business and need to find more customers while achieving an excellent ROI
• Have an online business
• Own a website (of any kind)
• Or more than 1 of the above!

Then you can expand your business, reach more customers, get more leads, more traffic, and get your name out there with SEO.

Now, I don’t want to leave anyone out, so for those of you who are not yet familiar with SEO (it’s OK, you haven’t flunked yet!), here’s a quick definition (if you already know what SEO is, pat yourself on the back and move on to the next section):

What is SEO?

SEO is an acronym that stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” Right, but that could mean anything! Let’s clear that up even further:

SEO is the practice of optimizing your website so that it shows up higher in the search engines. For example, on a Google search your website might rank (show up) in position #20 for the term “tennis shoes.” By engaging in a successful SEO campaign, you could increase your rank from #20 to, for example, #3. Just to clarify, by position #3, I mean that when someone searches for that term (“tennis shoes”), your website is the third result in the list.

Which position do you think will bring you more traffic (and leads and sales)? Position #20 or position #3? Position #20 isn’t even on the first page! Obviously, position #3 will bring in more traffic than position #20. With SEO, the higher your rankings, the more traffic you will get!

That’s the point of SEO – rank your website higher in the search engines so that potential customers see your site before they see your competitors’ websites and visit your website instead of theirs. Wouldn’t you love to steal business from your competitors? Well, this is as close as you’re going to get (legally). Now, let’s take a look at the possibilities with SEO:

The Power of SEO

The New York Times reports that Google receives over 1 billion searches every day. ¹ This means there are massive amounts of people searching for information and businesses online. Are some of those people searching for your product or service? You bet your lucky underwear they are!

What if you could make your website show up at the top of the Google search results for searches that match your product or service? For example, if you sell pizza ovens, showing up at the top of the results for the search “pizza ovens” would be very valuable. It would also be very valuable to rank highly for the terms “pizza ovens for sale” and “buy pizza oven.” Why? These searches (referred to as keywords) represent buyers looking for your product. Ranking highly for these keywords means those prospective buyers will see your website more often, visit your business or website, and buy your products/services!

Here are some facts:

• As stated above, Google is searched over 1 billion times every day. ¹
• 74% of Americans use search engines to find local businesses. ²
• 61% of searches for local businesses result in a purchase. ²
• 84% of people search the internet from their mobile device for local retail store information (e.g. hours, location, phone number, etc). ³
• 82% of people search the web from their mobile device for online retailers. ³

I think you get the point: search engine traffic is very valuable and SEO is the means to getting that traffic.

What can a good SEO campaign do for you?

Without going into specifics yet (see the ‘How to Choose a SEO Company’ section below for a couple case study results), SEO can increase your traffic, sales, and leads by 100%, 200%, or more. If you don’t have much of an online presence yet, SEO can bring your website from unseen, unnoticed, and forgotten about to thriving, popular, and profitable.

Here’s an example:

Say you own an online store that sells shoes. Your website receives 30,000 visitors per month and you haven’t engaged in any SEO yet. On average, 2% of visitors make a purchase and your average sale is $90. That means your store is doing $54,000 a month in revenue.

Now, you start a SEO campaign, spending $5,000 on SEO every month. Within 6 months, your traffic has increased by 50% (45,000 visitors/month). Now, your monthly revenues are $81,000, an increase in $27,000 a month (with costs of only $5,000/month to get that extra traffic). That’s a ROI of 440%!

How to do SEO…Properly

Now, getting into the specifics of actual SEO techniques is WAY beyond the scope of this article. Those of you reading this will have greatly varying degrees of SEO knowledge. Some of you might not know the difference between a meta tag and a backlink (no need to worry if you don’t) and some of you might already have working knowledge of SEO.

But let me be quite honest: you have to do SEO right. There are many reasons why, but here are the most important:

• Search engines (especially Google, the most important one) are constantly changing, testing and tweaking their algorithms. Google has even revealed that they implement hundreds of changes every year. In fact, Google released a number of major updates last year (called “Panda”) that caused HUGE fluctuations in their rankings. Many websites were even penalized and banned from their rankings.
• There are “good” and “bad” methods of doing SEO. The “bad” methods can get your website penalized in the search engine rankings or even banned altogether (as was the case in the changes last year – see above).
• Lastly, SEO is VERY competitive. You have to do it right or you’ll get eaten by the competition.

As you can see above, SEO is a tough game. You have to learn the basics, then learn the more advanced techniques, then make sure that everything you learned is up-to-date, and finally actually do the work.

The other thing you can do is hire a GOOD professional SEO company to do the work for you. This is usually the best thing to do for a number of reasons:

1. They are experts at SEO – they have years of experience and they stay up-to-date with all the latest search engine updates and trends.
2. SEO is a LOT of work – letting an outside company handle the work is a HUGE time-saver.
3. Often times, you might also need other online services (such as web design/development, PPC marketing, copywriting, etc). Many SEO companies also provide other internet marketing services, so you can receive all the services you need from one company, which is much simpler and easier to handle.

However, fair warning here: There are good SEO companies and there are bad SEO companies. It is critical that you work with a reputable and trustworthy SEO company. In fact, if you own a website, you have probably already been spammed by a SEO company or two soliciting their services (in fact, we received one while writing this article!). These are examples of bad SEO companies, however, they’re not all as easy to spot.

How to Choose a SEO Company

So, you know that SEO is a very powerful way to generate more traffic, sales, customers, leads, and exposure. You also know (see the above section!) that you have to do SEO properly in order to obtain the best results. If you’re going the route of hiring a SEO company, then you’ll need to know how to choose a high quality company.

In order to help businesses and individuals like yourself, we at The SEO Marketplace offer a tool that greatly simplifies the process of finding and choosing a reputable SEO company that can deliver great results. We have partnered with top SEO companies to provide free no-obligation SEO quotes for your business. We have selected these companies based on their SEO practices and results with past clients.

If you’d like to go ahead and get your SEO quotes, please get started with the form at the top of this page.

What about the actual criteria that you should use to evaluate SEO companies? Short answer: we would need another article to explain that. That’s why we made a guide called How to Choose a SEO Company – read that for all the details on picking a company to work with.

In Conclusion

By now, you should know the potential impact that SEO can have for your business. Companies around the world are currently taking their share of the 1 billion+ searches done every day and turning those web searchers into customers, clients, and leads. If you think your business could benefit from more potential customers reaching your website, I encourage you to seriously consider a strong SEO campaign. There’s nothing but more money to gain!

If you do choose to do SEO, the quickest way to get started is to get your free professional SEO quotes!

May your business grow, prosper, and kick butt!

 

References:

1. The New York Times (www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/weekinreview/06lohr.html)
2. comScore (www.comscore.com)
3. Performics (http://www.performics.com/news-room/press-releases/Performics-ROI-2011-Mobile-Search-Insights-Study/1429)