11 Reasons Why SEO Should Be The Top Priority For Every Small Business

The first result on Google has a 28.5% click-through rate. By the time you get to the 10th result, the CTR has fallen to 2.5%.

Hence, you want to appear as high on Google as possible.
Because Google processes nearly 70,000 search queries every second!

Your new buyers are online.
Searching for you.

Only you are missing.

Hence, you need SEO. Especially so if you are a small business.

As a business owner, you are obviously always looking to increase your sales and presence in the market. SEO should be the one word you swear by to achieve this goal, consistently and cost effectively.

2022 has seen a massive shift from offline to online buying in consumer behaviour.

• More than 70% of every purchase begins with online search.
• 2022 is expected to see a 17.9% increase in eCommerce market share.
• 4.66 billion people use the internet every day.

Small businesses don’t have unlimited resources to spend on their digital marketing. That’s where SEO comes in. You see, SEO is a strategy that organises your content so that it can be found easily on the internet search engines because guess what – that’s where you go when you want to buy something, isn’t it? Even if you don’t plan to purchase online, you still research the business on Google first.

SEO boosts your website’s visibility and makes it easier for people to find you.

82% of marketing executives believe that SEO will become an increasingly important priority over the next 12 months.

Even the most traditional businesses have realised that it’s high time to shift to digital now. This not just includes making a website and starting selling online, but a lot more than that like

• optimising SEO,
• growing your audience,
• positive and negative feedback from the buyers and what not.

SEO is the most viable and cost effective way to understand your customers. The benefits of optimising SEO are immense and ultimately impact your online presence, searchability and visibility, thus, bringing you a barrage of new customers and don’t you want them?

The more visible you are, the more is the visibility, and therefore, SALES.

These are the 11 reasons which will make things clearer, regardless of your business’s size or age in the market, as to why SEO is the most important 24×7 lead generation tool.

1. SEO Improves Engagement And Traffic

We have seen a tremendous rise in mobile traffic in recent years making local search a fundamental part in small businesses’ success.

“Near me” searches on Google have increased by more than 500% in recent years.

Local search (or local SEO) promotes your presence in a particular vicinity which enables customers to find you quickly, putting them one step closer to making a transaction.

Local optimisations focus on specific neighbourhoods and regions. This makes the brand establish a connection on a local level.

To start with, brands should optimise their Google My Business and social media profiles to engage with more local customers.

2. Increased Conversions

More than 86% of buyers who search for a local business, visit the store in less than 24 hours.

This means increased footfall at your physical store.

And if your business is entirely online, then more contact initiations.

The best part –
These are all warm leads who came searching for YOU.

You didn’t chase them with random marketing.

SEO brought them to you. Hence, their intent to buy is multiple times higher.

3. Better The SEO, Better Is The Buyer Experience

The number one priority (for both the marketers and the consumers) is user experience. It has become a pivotal element to a website’s success.

A good SEO converts leads into customers.

Even Google monitors it now.

One clear example of a solid user experience is how Google has become more and more of an answer engine offering the sought-after data directly on the result pages.

The basic idea behind providing the best user experience is to give what consumers desire in fewer clicks.

4. SEO Helps You Understand The Voice Of Your Consumer

SEO tells us about the customers’ wants and needs from the query they search for and the pages they land on.

SEO data and formats can give you a clear signal of intent and user behaviour by:

• Search query data – This reveals what exactly the consumer searched for (the keywords) when they had a particular query.
• SERP analysis – This is the process of exploring search engine result pages in order to discover what top ranking websites are doing to be in good positions and what you can do to outrank them.
• Artificial Intelligence insights – The use of AI has become very important to discover insights, find new patterns and discover relationships in the data.

The better you understand what need and problem you solve for your buyers, the better you can position yourself compared to your competitors. And SEO gives this data to you the best.

5. Builds Trust And Credibility

The effectiveness of combining SEO, user experience, and accessibility best practices into your business may be the holy grail for creating success with search engines.

Trust is built over time – just like in real life. Best SEO practises to build trust and credibility include –

• Natural links – these are the links which occur organically.
• Positive user behaviour
• Machine-learning signals
• Optimised on-page elements and content

Establishing a brand as an authority takes patience, efforts and commitment to provide valuable product or service to the consumers so as to retain them for a longer duration of time.

6. Save Money on Ads (SEO Brings Organic Traffic)

53% of website traffic comes from organic search.

Organic search refers to the natural search (unpaid search results). Organic search results are based on relevance to the user’s search query, links and domain authority etc.

According to Google’s Economic Impact Report, organic search is 5X more valuable than Google Ads.

Google owns a significantly larger portion (around 92%) of the search market than competitors like Yahoo, Bing, etc. This shows that Google is a clear leader in terms of brand visibility and its guidelines must be followed.

Being highly visible as a trusted resource by Google (and other search engines as well) will play an important part in the brand’s success. Good quality SEO, a high quality website, best user experience take brands there.

7. Shortens The Buying Cycle

Alright, as business owners, let’s get one thing straight –
We all wanna shorten our buying cycles to their minimum.

Meaning, we want buyers to buy from us ASAP from the moment they discover us.

The shorter your buying cycle, the more sales you make in a given quarter.
And therefore, more money in your bank.

So if SEO can help shorten your business’s buying cycle, that’s clear ROI, no?

Well, good news. SEO does that.

This also contributes to real-time Google results. The faster someone buys from you, the better Google respects you because they see you as legit. Real-time is a unique data collection method that gathers information on a customer’s experience as it is happening.

8. SEO Is Cheaper And More Cost Effective Than Ads

Organic search drives over TEN times more website traffic than organic social media.

SEO Is Not An Expense But Rather An Investment.

Yes it costs money. What doesn’t?

No good thing ever comes for free.

Good SEO places you at the top of the search results which increases your traffic and ultimately your sales.

Do you know which is the safest place to hide a dead body?

It’s the third page of Google. Because nobody would go that far for their query or search.

It is estimated that less than one third (31%) of companies use comprehensive SEO tools (leading to a fractured view of SEO impact).

Don’t be among them. Investing in seo timely and making use of it will take your brand further in the long run.

9. SEO Gives You Consistent Results Over a Long Time (Unlike Ads)

You must keep up with the changes and trends of the market.

SEO takes patience, commitment and making continuous updates to your content, and meet consumer needs better for the brands to perform well in the long term.

Even if your website did not follow the tough SEO recommendations ever, following the basic SEO practices will improve user experience and traffic on the website.

Commit more time to SEO, see better results for your website and stand a chance to be a worthy contender in the market.

10. SEO Is Quantifiable

A recent study shows that the first three organic search ranking positions result in over 52% of all click-throughs, while up to 30% of all results on Page 1 and 2 don’t get clicked at all.

With proper tactics and analysing, you can measure almost everything (including ROI) just like paid search.

It is very important for the brands to know where they currently stand, and where they were and where they are going in terms of digital performance (SEO).

11. SEO Is Perennial

A great number of consumers are shifting online. That means consumers will always want the product or service at ease and delivered fast. Thus SEO has a great potential and is forever in the business.

According to Comserve.Inc, next-generation search engines powered by deep neural networks and machine learning are set to explode in market value, from $14.9 billion in 2019 to $55.7 billion in 2025.

In a nutshell

You should always look for SEO optimisation and cling to the necessary changes that the market demands to rank your brand on the top level and be a stupendous competition to others.

SEOPro NZ has been helping local businesses in New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom since years now.