Invisible to Invincible: How SEO Can Help Small Businesses Compete
All business owners have one thing in common: a dream.
This dream is to make their business so strong, it becomes invincible.
And while living this dream is easier for big business owners with more resources, it can be a stretch for small business owners.
Small businesses can be invisible. They are often overshadowed by the power and prestige of their bigger, more established competitors. And for a small business owner to live their dream of transitioning their small business from invisible to invincible requires resources, something they often lack.
This is why a majority of small businesses fail in the first ten years.
But, as depressing as this sounds, it’s not all gloom and doom out there. Sure, operating with a limited budget and resources and staying afloat is hard, but it’s not impossible.
You can still make your business go from being invisible to invincible with this one secret weapon that all successful small business owners keep hidden in their arsenal.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
Does SEO Really Work for Small Business Owners?
Those big established companies have it a lot easier than small business owners. They have more money to invest in marketing and better resources to develop more optimized campaigns. As a result, they are better positioned to get all the attention and capture your entire audience base.
That is unless you build your SEO muscle and learn to flex it.
Unlike all other marketing and growth tactics, SEO does not always favor larger businesses with larger budgets and more manpower.
Search engine rankings cannot be bought. Nor can they be swayed by influence. Search engines reward any optimized website to fulfill all their ranking requirements. And you don’t have to have a million-dollar marketing budget to do that.
This is why SEO is the secret weapon that successful business owners carry in their arsenal and the online marketing approach you should prioritize to ensure your business gets the attention it deserves in the increasingly noisy and overwhelmingly crowded digital space.
How Can SEO Help Your Small Business Compete?
Competing with the bigger, more established businesses may seem intimidating. Gaining an edge over them may seem impossible. But SEO can help you not just rank above those big businesses but thrive alongside them. Here’s how:
SEO Helps Your Business Gain Exposure
Exposure is to businesses what oxygen is to humans. That’s how important it is for your business to survive.
When your business gains exposure, you get a chance to engage your potential customers, generate leads, and close more sales.
However, gaining exposure in the growing digital world is not easy.
There are hundreds of thousands of businesses out there, all vying for customer attention. In this situation, earning meaningful exposure for your business becomes harder.
SEO can help your business cut through the noise and reach its target audience more easily.
Most customers today start their search for goods and services online, on Google or other similar search engines.
Optimizing your website ensures that your business has all the factors needed to rank higher on search engine results pages or SERPs. Since most of the search engine traffic stays on the first few SERPs, ranking higher can maximize your business’s exposure and earn you more interaction opportunities with the users.
And the best part is, unlike your regular ads, SEO earns this exposure for free. Yes, optimizing your website can have a cost, but once your website gets to the top, it sits there, publicizing your business for no added cost. This makes SEO a cost-effective marketing tactic that even small business owners can invest in and hope to benefit from.
SEO Drives Relevant Traffic
So, SEO brings exposure. Great. But you can get exposure with billboards as well. What makes SEO any different?
Well, when you set up a billboard, you publicize your business to everyone who passes by it. Billboards don’t care whether anyone is looking at them. They just continue displaying your message.
SEO is different.
Search engines are built to match websites with the keywords users type into the search bar. This makes sure that your website only ranks for the keywords that are related to your business.
For example, if you are a roofing contractor and your website is optimized with relevant keywords and helpful content, search engines will rank your website when anyone searches for roofing contractors.
SEO puts your company in front of customers who are already searching for your offerings and empowers you with numerous other benefits such as:
More Leads and Lower Customer Acquisition Cost
Lead generation and new customer acquisition are perhaps one of those challenges that keep small business owners up at night. And it is understandable why.
Lead generation is hard.
But SEO can make it easier.
By helping your website rank higher and bringing the right kind of exposure, SEO helps your business pull more people into your sales funnel and get more leads.
Not just that, the leads that come to your business this way may also be less expensive than the leads you generate through other channels.
It is a slow climb to the top of the SERPs. But once your website manages to peak on those results pages, it stays there for a long time and continues gaining exposure and pulling customers into the sales funnel for you.
So, you only pay for the SEO services, either with your time or money, and then your website can attract new customers for free! This lowers your cost of customer acquisition as well.
SEO Builds Credibility
Building credibility and coming off as reliable is another challenge small businesses struggle with. It is easy for the customer to trust a bigger more popular business, but how do you get the customer to trust your smaller, less well-known start-up?
SEO can help you do that as well. How? It’s simple.
When you search for something, what do you trust more? A website that ranks among the top ten on the first SERP or one that you find further down after digging through a handful of pages? The former of course.
That’s because search engine users consider websites that rank higher more reliable and worthy of their time and attention.
Therefore, your SEO efforts don’t just get your website a place at the top of the SERPs. They can also help you reinforce your reputation online. Once your business becomes a name customers can trust, you will see the results of your SEO efforts manifest through increased sales as well.
Improves User Experience
Customers today are spoiled for choice. There are way too many businesses offering the same services as yours. And so, customers have set a high standard that businesses have to maintain to woo them into purchasing. One small friction, a slow-loading website, a bad-looking interface, a confusing web design, and your business falls from grace.
This is why improving the experience you deliver online is vital to make sure your business can continue to impress and attract modern customers and survive in this relentless business landscape.
Since website user experience is a ranking factor as well – something Google looks at when deciding your website’s rank – SEO prioritizes optimizing UX as well.
This ensures that your website does not only attract leads but also offers a pleasant experience to foster a strong brand image and help your business get more customers.
Getting Started with SEO
SEO can help your business compete in a challenging market and come out at the top, even in the presence of those industry bigshots. It is one of the most powerful weapons that can pull your business out of the depths of invisibility and take it to the heights of invincibility.
But you need to understand and implement SEO best practices before you can get there.
Here are a few things you can get started with:
Claim your Google Business Profile
Google Business Profile helps your business appear in the SERPs when someone searches for what you offer locally. Claiming your Google Business Profile helps you deliver pertinent business information to people who come looking for it more easily.
On-page optimization
On-page optimization involves improving web page elements like title tags, meta description, and content. You can perform on-page optimization once you have completed your keyword research and know what keywords you want your business to rank for. And while you are at it, also make sure your content has good readability. You can do this by structuring it into headings, dividing the text into paragraphs, and varying the length of those paragraphs (try making sure no paragraph exceeds 5 lines!)
Build Backlinks
A backlink lives on websites other than your own and links back to your webpage.
Your backlink profile is a key ranking factor. Building backlinks, however, is tough and may take time. But that doesn’t mean you should cut corners and buy links or go the easy route and place your website’s link on low-authority websites.
You can start with guest posting on various, relevant blogs and make your content so valuable and irresistible that people cannot help but reshare it on their website and give you a nice backlink.
Local SEO
Local SEO helps you rank for location-specific searches. For example, if you have an internet marketing company NJ, local SEO will help you rank when someone searches for “NJ SEO company”.
This will help you break into your local market and engage people who are closer to you.
Continue Tracking and Optimizing
SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing. You cannot do it once and hope to enjoy the benefits forever.
Yes, your website continues to stay at the top once it gets there, but you have to work behind the scenes to make sure it maintains those ranks.
Therefore, once you implement any of the SEO techniques, make sure to track relevant metrics repeat the strategies that seem to work, and change the ones that don’t.
Overwhelmed? Of course. DIYing SEO can be a lot and can overwhelm a small business owner like you who may already have a lot on their plate.
Therefore, it may be best to let experts do the job for you.
Hiring SEO experts or a NJ SEO company if you are in New Jersey, helps you ensure that your website stays updated with the latest SEO best practices and is fit to climb higher in the search results all year round.
At Landau Consulting, an internet marketing company NJ, we have a team of SEO experts ready to help your business find exposure in the online world. From technical SEO to content, tracking, and optimization, we offer end-to-end SEO services to make sure your business has a website that can help it go from being invisible to invincible.
You can learn more about our SEO services at https://landauconsulting.com/seo-internet-marketing/ or contact us directly at https://landauconsulting.com/contact/.