6 SEO Benefits for Small Business

Let’s be real. Running a small business can be a tough gig.

Every expense comes with huge consideration.

There’s never enough time in the day, and it seems near impossible to compete with large businesses that have seemingly limitless marketing budgets.

For these reasons and more, many small businesses owners are turning to search engine optimization (SEO).

Why?

The right SEO strategy is a cost-effective method to boost profits and revenue.

For this reason, here we’ll:

1. highlight the SEO benefits for small business
2. and how they will help your business succeed.

6 SEO Benefits for Small Business

Here are the 6 most beneficial aspects of SEO for small businesses.

Let’s do it.

1. Increase targeted traffic (to get more customers)

With the right marketing efforts, over time, your domain will receive website traffic from a wide variety of customer demographics.

And while you should welcome all site visitors with open arms, for best results, why not direct your digital marketing and SEO efforts towards targeted traffic?

Targeted traffic describes people that visit your website with intention.

They believe the content on your website or the products and services you offer will satisfy their needs. For comparison, normal search traffic (non-targeted) are visitors that don’t possess any predetermined objective.

As an example of how powerful targeted marketing can be, check out this graph pulled from HubSpot’s State of Inbound Global Report.

Here you can see hyper-targeted marketing tactics rank amongst the most effective means of securing high-quality leads.

Well above traditional marketing strategies like running TV ads.

For this reason, targeted traffic is some of your most valuable customers.

Whether that be through PPC ads, SEO, or other marketing strategies, a site owner can be sure that the people who find their website through targeted marketing are there with an intent to convert.

2. Position yourself in front of new customers

Whether you’re outsourcing your SEO efforts or honing them in-house, one of the biggest benefits of SEO is brand exposure.

For small business owners, this presents serious opportunities.

If you can climb your content to the first page of the search engine results page (SERPs), potential customers are sure to visit your website regularly.

To highlight how powerful SEO can be compared to paid advertisement, understand that the top 10 ranking positions secure some 94% of all clicks, ads capturing just 6%.

This presents small businesses with tremendous opportunities. If you get your SEO practices honed in, you will see some big wins.

But what about trust?

Do online users and local customers really trust Google and other search engines?

A survey by the seoClarity can speak to this. Their research found that 65.7% of respondents claimed they trust Google the most over other tech giants, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple.

With this in mind, if your business website can perform well on the SERPs, your business is likely to be trusted by customers far and wide – no matter if your visitors are regulars or are just discovering your brand for the very first time.

3. Build your brand awareness

The more you prioritize effective SEO practices, the greater your business website’s online presence will be.

Just by ranking your content within the top 10 positions of the Google SERPs, the greater share of the organic traffic you’ll secure, and the more touch points you’ll cultivate.

To highlight just how impactful getting your content to the top of Google Search can be, as of December 2021, Google has secured itself 85.55 percent of the market share. Bing accounts for 7 percent and Yahoo 2.85 percent.

And with Google processing some 3.5 billion searches per day, a solid SEO strategy can lead to higher rankings and some serious brand awareness.

So how important are the top ranking positions to businesses?

As you can see here, the higher a webpage appears on Google’s SERPs, the greater the share of the organic traffic a web page is likely to receive.

The top 3 SERP positions secured just shy of 70 percent of the total search traffic.

And how can you build brand awareness in this manner?

Adhering to good SEO practices, of course.

Whether that be building backlinks, producing high-quality content, or implementing a solid keyword research strategy, getting the fundamentals of SEO right and concentrating your content marketing efforts around search engine ranking factors is a must for positioning your business in front of new customers.

4. Improve your conversion rates

Google’s algorithm ranks websites on a bunch of different preconditions, user experience being one of the most heavily scrutinized. Because of this, SEO focuses heavily on optimizing and producing user-friendly websites.

In particular, page speed, site navigation, and mobile optimization are all factors that Google considers when determining whether a web page is worthy of being positioned on the first page of the SERPs.

And aside from being favored by Google, do you know what else a website that prioritizes user experience is rewarded with?

High conversion rates.

Essentially, SEO and conversion rate optimization (CRO) compliment one another. A website that loads quickly, is easily navigated, and performs well on all devices, whether that be a cell phone, tablet, or computer, is sure to convert.

To show how important SEO and CRO are to conversion rates, take this example here from CloudFlare into consideration.

CloudFlare’s analysis found that a web page that loads in 2.4 seconds or less has a 1.9% chance of converting. Comparatively, a webpage that takes 5.7 seconds or more to load possesses a conversion rate of less than 0.6%.

In fact, according to HubSpot, customers expect a webpage to take no longer than 2 seconds to load.

With this in mind, when developing an SEO strategy or employing the services of an SEO company, it’s imperative that the applied SEO tactics focus heavily on user experience.

Get this right, and your conversion rates will thank you for it.

5. Out-rank your competitors

For small businesses, simply getting noticed can be a serious stretch. Thankfully, SEO presents a solution to this problem as well.

Sure, some niches are more competitive than others. The competition heating up as an industry, product, or service receives higher demand. But, with the right SEO strategy, there are always ways to outrank your competitors and position yourself at the top of the SERPs.

You just need to know which direction is best to direct your SEO efforts towards.

For small businesses, this often comes in the form of targeting local markets, establishing your website as a resource on social media forums like Facebook groups or subreddits, or by simply focusing on the fundamentals of local search SEO.

Take this visualization of a survey based upon the experience of 53 local SEO expert respondents. It found that aside from on-site optimization, practices like registering your business for Google’s business directory, known as Google My Business, is a great place to start.

Encouraging customer reviews is yet another way SEO works to boost the social proof and customer trust of your small business. And targeting local keywords is also a dominant method of out-competing your competitors and securing a greater share of the market.

Why are local keywords so important?

Well, 46% of all searches on Google are seeking local information while some 86% of customers now rely on the internet to find a local business.

So don’t dilly-dally.

The sooner you focus on the various aspects of SEO, the sooner you’ll begin outranking your competitors.

6. Sustainably grow your business (for the long term)

With organic listings capturing 94% of all the clicks on Google Search and only 6% being PPC advertising clicks, you can see how powerful SEO is compared to marketing campaigns that are based on different tactics.

Additionally, unlike other strategies, SEO carries many long-term benefits with minimal upkeep and great return on investment (ROI).

Don’t get us wrong, PPC is a legitimate strategy that can drive traffic to a website. (In fact, we believe in it so much we over our own PPC management services).

But, unless used in the right circumstance, it is sometimes more expensive than SEO.

While SEO can take longer to show results than PPC, PPC bestows quick wins while SEO is a long-term strategy that is more sustainable for small business.

As you can see here, for long-term wins, marketing strategies that target social media, PR, and SEO outperform PPC over the long run.

PPC does work in many circumstances, though. Ecommerce is one such industry that finds particular success with paid ads.

For the best results, we suggest a multi-faceted marketing approach. A strategy that focuses on quick wins and accelerated brand exposure from PPC, mid-term results fostered by social media and PR, and the long-term, sustainable growth that comes from SEO.

If you’d like to know more about the differences between PPC and SEO, check out our SEO vs PPC guide.

Is SEO worth it for small business?

SEO is an essential marketing tool for small businesses.

By optimizing a website, targeting local markets, and creating relevant content, businesses can improve their visibility online and reach a larger audience.

Best of all, SEO is a cost-effective marketing strategy that can produce tangible results. By increasing website traffic and generating leads, businesses will see a significant return on their investment.

If you think SEO is a marketing strategy that could help your small business, whether that be securing a diverse backlink portfolio, focusing on local SEO, or simply optimizing for organic search, why not check out our range of SEO services to reap the benefits of SEO today.