Small Business Owners, Fix Your SEO Before You Budget For Marketing
Let me start by saying that marketing is certainly valuable, and might I even say essential in today’s digital world, for a small business to truly separate itself from the pack of local startups, into regional status.
What many business owners don’t know is that without a proper SEO setup, the majority of your marketing efforts could be for naught. In other words, the thousands of dollars you’re throwing at paid ads aren’t a total waste — though in this case, slowing down on those efforts could cause your business to lose out on hundreds of thousands in conversion opportunities, giving you the false impression that you were inherently gaining exposure.
SEO in a nutshell is the metric of organic visibility — in this case, for your business. This metric is measured in many forms and dictates where you rank when potential consumers are searching for products or services you might offer. Since 45% of search results are organic, you’ll want to key in on the internal SEO factors that will ultimately give you similar exposure as a paid advertising campaign would.
There are over 200 factors that contribute to your search engine position rank, and it’d be nearly impossible to finetune your website or social profiles in a way that hits on all 200 notes. Even with the expertise, it’s generally not needed. What you’ll need to do instead is focus on the few that are easy fixes, and make a huge difference in determining your search rank. Obtaining a website audit is a great way to dig deep into these reports, and eliminate some of the obvious website errors like invalid links, slow processing speeds, spelling errors, and titles that aren’t SEO-friendly. The reason this is so much more crucial to your business than marketing is, is because you need to be discoverable by your prospects before you decide to throw money on sponsored visibility. That way the campaign targets prospects that are most likely to buy, rather than a sea of uninterested searchers.
Simple changes to your product descriptions and website functionality can position you with the demographic most likely in need of your services. In addition, specifying keywords with lots of volume and less competition creates opportunities for higher conversion rates.
Studies by Google showed that 4/5 local prospects will use a search engine to meet a need they have, and 18% of local searches lead to a purchase within the first 24 hours.
Take this example for reference:
Imagine you own a coffee shop and your website addresses the exponential variety of flavors. In this case, you might not rank as highly as a local competitor who routinely addresses their local connection to the community. Despite your shop’s product appeal, search engines rely heavily on search intent to accurately place your position ranking.
If the keyword search in reference was ‘coffee shops near me’, I’m more likely to hit on the website addressing my location on all of their pages, rather than the one with a broad menu list.
What does this look like in practice?
It can be as simple as a page title, or a ‘meta tag’ stating something like, ‘Ocean City’s Premier Coffee Destination’, or as complex as HTML coding with phrases from that exact keyword. One reliable alternative is FAQs or blogs, which make up nearly 82% of all search engine results.
Let’s take this one step further and assume that the keyword ‘coffee shops near me’ has a ton of volume, but is highly competitive. Instead of getting lost in the ruble amongst nationally recognized brands that will outrank you in multiple categories, try something more niche, but still highly searchable like, ‘coffee shops with vegan options’. This keyword might have a ton of volume, but little to no local competitors — thus lies your opportunity. Adjust your website as needed and repeat this across all social profiles and paid ad campaigns for any keywords you want to rank for.
Since less than 1% of users make it to Google’s second page, you must do everything you can as a small business to rank as highly as possible, since this is what will lead to an increased conversion rate without needing to increase your marketing budget. SEO-based companies are extremely inexpensive in comparison to digital marketing agencies, and in unison, can be uber effective in marketing your brand’s visibility. If you’re a business owner looking for simple and effective traits for expanding your brand outside of paid digital campaigns, feel free to contact us at Modern Sense Marketing where we can craft opportunities arising from your website audit that will better position you in front of consumers.
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*All metrics provided by Forbes Advisor
