For a small business, this is a harder time than they’re used to. Indeed, as we’ve recently written about, some former employees are now going into business for themselves. Perhaps even a few are using skills learned on the job to now compete in the same industry on a smaller scale.
As a result, smaller companies are seeking ways to do business while cutting the cost of running the company. One way to do this is by focusing more on search engine optimization (SEO) and away from paying for daily advertising budgets.
In this article, we focus on why SEO is important and how to get up to speed quickly.
How SEO Brings in Eyeballs and Sales
The idea with SEO is to rank higher in the search engines to drive fresh traffic to the website.
The organic search traffic is effectively “free” in the sense that it isn’t driven through an expensive advertising campaign.
While it’s true that ad rates have recently tumbled due to a slowdown in demand, they’re still by far the costliest way to get potential new customers.
Content Marketing is Effective
Content marketing pursues the idea of publishing content on your site (and sometimes other ones too) that provides a useful resource to potential customers. It’s also useful to current customers who may be sufficiently persuaded to increase their order.
Brand Reputation Gets a Boost
For brand recognition and reputation, persuasive copy is convincing for readers. When they learn important information or find a solution to a pressing problem, the brand gets the equivalent of a gold star. This adds weight to becoming a customer of the business in the same way that positive word of mouth does.
Guest Posting Helps to Increase Rankings for Search Terms
At the same time, when guest posting on other websites, these include links back to your business website. This significantly increases the number of backlinks pointing to product or sales pages, which acts as a kind of rudimentary voting/popularity system.
When the site publishing the guest-post has a strong reputation with the search engine, this is conferred to your business site too. Subsequently, this “recommendation” often positively contributes to future rankings for relevant business search terms. The “link love” can rub-off, leading to more organic traffic and the chance to get new customers.
Using the Right SEO Software
To know what search terms are worth targeting, it’s important to use the best SEO software.
Otherwise, you risk writing articles for publication that target search terms that your site is either unlikely to ever rank for because they’re too competitive or will never offer enough benefit even when ranking highly for them.
The best-seo-software.com site reviews different software used to find these search terms. Reading their reviews, it’s easier to narrow down the right tool to use. These software tools estimate the monthly searches for different terms in different countries providing the clearest indication about which search terms are worth targeting in the articles.
For small companies needing to cut back on marketing expenses but wanting a solution that will bring in new business over the next year, then SEO is worth ramping up. It won’t deliver immediate results – a few months is required to gain a positive ranking position. However, the sooner the process is started, the quicker new visitors (and ultimately, customers) will be secured.