Over the last decade or so, more and more businesses took at least part of their operations online. Yet, many small businesses resisted that change. The pandemic made many small businesses take that step in order to survive.
Taking your business online is, of course, a different animal than succeeding online. When everyone was ordering everything online, even a so-so web presence could help you secure some local business. With most businesses open to the public again, you need more.
The most obvious step is business SEO. Not clear on the benefits of SEO? Keep reading for five of the key benefits you can get.
1. Better Search Result Ranking
The most obvious and often most important benefit for many businesses is that search engine optimization improves how your website pages rank in search results. The better your pages rank, the more traffic your website generates.
While raw traffic isn’t everything, there is something of a numbers game involved. The more people who see your site, the more likely you are to sell something to some of them.
2. Improved Customer Targeting
A good SEO service doesn’t aim solely at getting more eyeballs on your site. Yes, more visitors can mean more sales, but it’s a brute force approach.
Good SEO also aims at improving your overall content. The more focused your content is, the more targeted the visitors to your site become. The closer those visitors are to your ideal customer, the more sales you’ll make.
3. Improves User Experience
Ever visit a website and find it impossible to navigate or very difficult to locate the products or information you want. That’s a terrible user experience. Unless you need something that only that company sells, odds are good that you’ll go looking for an alternative.
SEO also helps you dial in your website for an improved user experience. A good user experience encourages people to stay and contact you or buy directly from you.
4. Improved ECommerce Results
ECommerce is its own special little corner of online business. Having a store attached to your website is a start, but good SEO also includes some specific eCommerce marketing tactics. Building those tactics into your overall online marketing strategy can boost sales.
5. More Local Business
Spend some time researching online marketing and you’ll likely end up asking, “What is local SEO?” Local SEO is a set of tactics that focus on boosting your search engine results for a very specific geographic area, often a single city or town. This helps businesses that rely on local customers, such as restaurants.
Securing the Benefits of SEO
Securing the benefits of SEO might seem overwhelming because there are so many details to manage. Many small business owners turn most or even all of those details over to an SEO company.
You can start to build the foundation yourself, though. You can work on developing better, focused content. You can look for ways of improving the user experience on your website.
You can add a store to your website. These steps all get you closer to a more optimized website.
Looking for more marketing tips? Check out the posts in our Online Marketing section.
