Small businesses benefit greatly from search engine optimisation (SEO). A small business website that utilises SEO best practices for its online presence will gain many advantages over other small businesses in the same geographic region. If that has caught your attention, then take a look at the list below of the best SEO benefits for a small business.
Benefit #1 – Your Business Is Now Open 24/7
If your small business has been following the standard 8 to 4 or 9 to 5 business schedule, you have very likely lost customers. With a website that makes proper use of SEO, you will have traffic visiting your website at all hours of the day and night. Your website keeps your business open and accessible to potential customers. With the right content, you may be able to answer some of the questions these visitors have about your business.
Benefit #2 – It Gives You Access To New Markets
Your business has been chugging along just fine, but lately you’ve noticed a lot of new customers coming from the next town down the road. It makes you think maybe expansion would be a good idea. With a website and targeted local SEO, you can reach those new customers without the expense of a new storefront and all the associated costs. SEO will help you get established in this new market and reveal others worth exploring.
Benefit #3 – You Can Build A Better, User-Friendly Website
SEO principles not only assist search engines in finding your website, but they provide you with tools and guidelines to tune up your website. These tune-ups essentially involve minor tweaks to the content people see on your website and the content search engines see on your website. By optimising your website for both, you not only help search engines better understand what your business is all about, you also help online visitors learn more about it as well.
Benefit #4 – Better Rankings, Which Increase Brand Awareness
There is a hidden advantage to improving the ranking of your website. When the ranking increases, your website becomes more visible to search engines. The search engines will begin to serve up your website in results to search queries. The more visible your small business website becomes, the better known your small business brand becomes. This can be achieved in a fraction of the time required to create brand awareness in any other medium.
Benefit #5 – Conversion Rates Improve
A website visitor who becomes a customer is said to have been converted. Conversions are typically what small businesses are seeking with a website. With SEO best practices in use, your website will load fast and be accessible from any internet-enabled device and at any time. Being able to have website visitors find you whenever they want to makes their purchase plans that much easier. It means visitors become customers without setting foot in your store.
Benefit #6 – It Helps You Find New Customers
There are going to be people who are not aware of your small business. It does not matter what form of marketing you have used and how much. Some people don’t see those things. However, a website will expose your small business to a whole new audience of potential customers. Once they become conversions, your business will start to grow. Businesses with websites tend to grow twice as fast as those without, so website optimisation is worth exploring.
Benefit #7 – Stay In Contact With Your Customers
One of the most interesting benefits of having a small business website is how it allows your customers to engage with you. Your website will likely have a contact form in it and possibly a chatbox. These tools give you instant access to customers and permit you to give them instant answers to their questions. By being accessible and communicating when possible, you give your website visitors the chance to see your business in a different light and they’ll want to be in contact with you.
Benefit #8 – It Helps You With Other Digital Marketing Plans
When your small business has a website that implements SEO best practices, you can do much more with it by using other social media platforms. For example, you can send new traffic to your website through link sharing on various social media feeds. A landing page can be added to your website that can be used for various promotions and events. You can increase the exposure of your website with digital marketing, but you need a website for this to work.
Benefit #9 – You Could Blow Away Your Competitors
Digital Authority Partners says that competition can prompt a small business to work harder and smarter. When your small business has a website and you use SEO best practices, you will be able to rank with big-name competitors – and you’ll be working a lot smarter. This helps even the playing field by putting your small business at the same level as the giants in your industry. If done right, you may even end up outranking your competition and pull some of their traffic to your business.
Benefit #10 – Blog To Connect With Followers
One of the benefits of a well-built and SEO-enriched website is that you can add a blog section to it. Through your blog posts, you will be able to connect with your audience on a more personal level. The content of your blog is entirely up to you, but you can make it personal enough that followers will keep coming back to find out more. They will begin to trust you which leads to brand loyalty. All of this comes from a website that uses correct SEO protocols.
Final Thoughts
SEO allows small businesses the opportunity to compete online with larger, corporate entities within the same industry. It also brings small businesses more exposure and that results in access to a larger audience. With more people visiting the website, higher conversions will follow which contributes to business growth. SEO is a vital component for any small business to keep up with competitors and gain more business through organic traffic. And how many small business owners say that they don’t want more business?
