SEO is integral to the growth of any small business with an online presence. We have included our top benefits of SEO for you and your small business. Your website isn’t just a web address. It’s the digital storefront of your business. Without it, you’re missing out on a significant portion of your potential customer base.
This is why SEO is so important to your online success, it gets you in front of customers so that you can convince them to do business with you.
Top Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses
User-Friendly Site
One of the big benefits of SEO is simple: creating a better experience for your customers.
You see, despite the name, search engine optimization isn’t just about search engines. At its heart, SEO is about users.
One good example of this is page speed.
Often confused with site speed, page speed refers to the amount of time necessary for a page to load. It’s a ranking factor in Google’s search algorithm, but more importantly, it’s a major consideration for your users.
Let’s say you have a landing page. The average mobile landing page loads in about 22 seconds. The problem is, more than half of users will leave a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
And if your site loads in 2.9 seconds, it’s faster than 50% of the web. Faster than 1.7 seconds, and you’re faster than 75% of the web.
If your page loads faster, customers are more inclined to stay there—especially if they’re mobile users.
And that’s just one small element of SEO.
First Impressions
This ties into the second major benefit of SEO: making a better first impression.
Or, from another angle, the chance to make a first impression at all.
There’s an old joke that page two of Google search results is the best place to hide a dead body. It’s crude but accurate–the first page of search results enjoys a whopping 95% of all search traffic.
Plus, the first organic result sees about 32.5% of overall search traffic, almost double that of the second result (17.6%).
Let’s say that you get customers on your site. You only have about 0.05 seconds (or 1/10th of a second) for users to form a first impression of your site and decide whether they’ll stay or leave.
This is where SEO can help.
Not only does SEO help you get in a position to make first impressions, but it also gives you the tools to create a website that makes use of those 0.05 seconds. SEO is an all-encompassing practice–it addresses site design, page speed, content, and behind-the-scenes technical details, to name a few.
When your site is properly optimized, it becomes a powerful marketing asset, showing your website visitors why it’s worthwhile to stick around.
Target Quality Traffic
Better still, SEO doesn’t just target traffic. It attracts quality traffic.
That’s because, unlike many marketing techniques, SEO is an inbound marketing strategy.
Outbound marketing strategies get your content in front of consumers whether they want it or not. For most consumers, this is an annoyance at best–they have little or no interest in your product and few will gain anything from seeing your content.
SEO and other inbound marketing techniques work differently.
Instead of targeting everyone, SEO focuses on only targeting users who are interested in the content on your site. Rather than trying to convince customers to buy something, you’re providing them with something they want—and are actively seeking out.
Can you see the advantage in the difference?
Statistics say that many of us see up to 4,000 ads a day! People aren’t going to remember another ad. They’re going to remember something that solved a problem for them.
SEO is all about using your site to do what search engines were made for: providing answers to users’ most pressing questions. When a customer sees that you’re providing genuinely useful content, they’re more likely to come back in the future, refer a friend or coworker, and they are more inclined to buy from you at a later date.
Building Credibility
This is part of why SEO is so good at building credibility.
Search engines consider a wide array of factors in deciding how to rank websites, but one of their big considerations is domain authority. Authority doesn’t just fall out of the sky–it’s something that a website accrues over time due to elements like:
- Quality content
- Quality backlink profiles
- User-friendly site design
- Positive user behavior
Just like a real-life relationship, trust and credibility between a website and site visitors take time. It requires you to keep showing up and providing quality for your customers.
SEO is the art and science of creating a website that is genuinely helpful to customers (while also nudging them in the direction of doing business with you).
