Smart business owners know how important search engine optimization (SEO) is for their company’s growth. Yet, surprisingly, very few SMB’s – or small to medium sized businesses – actively utilize this amazing growth strategy.
For the uninitiated, Search Engine Optimization – or SEO – boosts a business’s visibility in search engines like Google, by using very specific strategies that hinge largely upon public relations.
But is SEO for every business owner? The truth is that it’s not. Our whole agency was built upon trust, integrity, honesty and values, hence our name, tr-in-ho-val. So we’re honest with prospects who aren’t a good fit for an SEO campaign, or where their marketing budget might be better allocated. It’s not good for companies who are just starting out, and don’t have any profits coming in yet.
But for those SMB’s who post profits and are really at the point where their ready to scale, it is one of the absolute best growth strategies for scaling and growing a business in existence.
When done correctly, a business’s website will show up in the top of SERPs (search engine results pages) when someone searches for a keyword or phrase that relates to their business, or that has products and services that can solve the problem embodied in that search term. For instance, if a person searches for “construction companies in Modesto,” if you’re a construction company in the Modesto CA area, then you obviously want to appear when someone searches for that term. This is what SEO achieves.
Smart small business owners know that SEO can bring thousands of people to their business by virtue of being where people are searching for them. Here are some of the specific benefits of SEO that you can expect to achieve with a successful SEO campaign.
Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses:
- It Increases Traffic. As your website becomes more search-optimized, over time it will begin to rank higher in the SERPs (search engines results pages) for various search terms that relate to your business’s product or service offerings. As a result, you will naturally begin to see an uptick in contact forms, phone calls, and visits, if you have a retail store. As long as your website was built correctly, this becomes essentially a way of organically turning prospects into paying customers on autopilot, at any time they are searching for these terms.
- It Boosts a Business’s Credibility. Whether it’s true or not, humans are conditioned to believe that things that others think are good, probably are good. This applies to SEO, because if Google thinks your website is good enough to be on the first page for a search term, then it probably means a lot of other people do, too. Consider it a “vote of confidence.” This is called social proof, and SEO is absolutely one of the best strategies for boosting social proof and credibility.
- SEO Results Tend To Last A Long Time. Advertising, such as social media advertising, billboards, print ads, or even PPC advertising produce results only as long as you are paying to keep the ads present. But what about once you stop? Naturally, the results go away, once the ad campaign is shut off. Not so with SEO. SEO is an investment, to be sure, but it’s an investment in your business much in the same way investing into stocks, bonds, mutual funds, or real estate are investments in your personal wealth. These things all take time, of course, but statistically lead to the best return on investment compared to other methods. SEO, your online presence increases, resulting in a more profitable return on investment (ROI).
- On-Page SEO Improves User Experience (UX). A good SEO AGENCY will run an audit on your website, finding areas that need improvement, and optimizing it not only for robots like search engines, but also for humans, too. This leads to a better experience for users navigating your site, and interacting with your brand. Aspects a good SEO company will implement include things such as improving your website’s load time, better navigation, making sure images are optimized for all devices, making sure it’s mobile responsive, among other things. By improving the user experience (UX) of your website, you will see an increase in conversions.
- SEO Helps Referrals and Physical Store Visits. Numerous studies have all shown that a good brand presence online, such as will happen as a result of a good SEO campaign, increase foot traffic for retail locations, and increase referrals. This happens because of something called Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA.) When someone searches your website and sees you at the top opf rankings, they don’t only think of you for themselves, they remember you when other people need you too, thus increasing referrals. In our Retail Store SEO Case Study, we show an example of how we were able to achieve this for a Merced-based retail location that sells spas only using On-Page SEO from a proper Web Design – not even implementing an actual SEO campaign!
- Your social media following will increase. As your search engine rankings increase, more more people will arrive at your website. If done properly, your website will link to your social media accounts. It should also incentivize people to get on your mailing list, which will also have links to you social media accounts. All of these things will naturally boost your social media presence, which is crucial for even more Top of Mind Awareness. Even if they do not immediately buy your product or service, you will be on their minds for when they, or someone they know, is ready to. This is important, because social media platforms make it really easy to share your content with their whole networks.
- SEO Boosts Your Bottom Line. At Trinhoval, we take SEO very seriously, because we realize the responsibility that comes with being able to shift market share toward one organization or another, thereby altering the commerce of local economies. As small businesses owners, there are families associated with those businesses who lose market share as a result of our efforts; especially when you consider that we guarantee results for our clients, and our ability to gobble up that market share. Your competitors who are not actively doing SEO (or are doing SEO with agencies that don’t have access to our proprietary SEO technologies and/or strategies,) will suffer, but ultimately making you win in your marketplace.
It is for this last reason that we are incredibly selective and choosy about who we decide to work with for our SEO campaigns. We believe that communities deserve the best. So we scrutinize applicants for things such as how well-liked or loved they are in their community, if reviews say positive things about them, how they treat customers etc. But at the end of the day, this is all because we know that SEO can dramatically boost your bottom line, just like it did for our pest control case study client who added over $250,000 dollars to their single-location’s bottom line in just 12 months using our services.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, smart business owners understand how important being online is. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that. If you’re an amazing company and haven’t yet began working with a reputable SEO agency on your marketing, you’re not only hurting your companies bottom line, you’re also holding your community back from discovering an awesome business that can help them solve their problems.
Have you had success with SEO? Have questions? Drop your comments below. Or, if you’d like a free consultation on your specific SEO needs or have a question, feel free to book a strategy call today using the booking calendar below.
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