With the help of a web designer, setting up a professional business website is pretty straightforward but getting it noticed, well that’s a whole other story! Unfortunately small businesses not only have to compete with businesses of the same size online, but the big players in their industry too. So how can you get one up on your competitors? Well one way is to work hard on improving your website’s search engine optimisation.
Here we will explain what SEO is and why it is so important to small businesses.
What is search engine optimisation?
Search engine optimisation is the process of improving your website’s rankings on search engines like Google. The higher you rank on relevant search results pages, the more website traffic you will receive, giving you a higher chance of making sales.
Search engines take various different factors into consideration when ranking your website, but the best thing you can do is to make sure that it meets the needs of your target audience and provides a great user experience.
Populating your website with relevant keywords, gaining links from other relevant high authority websites and creating engaging content can all help to boost your search engine rankings too.
Increase traffic to your website
There’s little point in having a business website if people don’t know it exists. A great way to get people to notice and more importantly visit your website is to get it ranking on search engine results pages. The better your website’s SEO is, the more likely you are to rank well on search results pages and the higher you rank, the more traffic you will receive, giving you a better chance of making conversions.
Build trust in your company
Small businesses often find it difficult to win people’s trust, as unlike their global competitors, they are relatively unknown. However by improving your small business website’s SEO and gaining a high ranking on relevant search results pages, you stand a good chance of winning customers over. Remember, customers trust Google, so if your website is appearing on one of their first pages, they’ll trust you too and be more willing to buy your products or services.
Improve your website’s usability
Part of improving your website’s SEO will involve making your business website more user-friendly and ensuring it offers visitors the best possible user experience. Making your website more search engine friendly will ultimately make it more user-friendly and give you a better chance of increasing your conversion rates.
Increase competitiveness
Small businesses often find it difficult to compete with their larger rivals, as they do not have huge advertising budgets, however this doesn’t mean they can’t beat them in organic searches. SEO actually helps to level the playing field between large and small businesses by making the latter’s lack of advertising budget irrelevant.
It’s cost effective
Although there are many ways you can advertise your small business e.g. radio adverts, television adverts and paid online adverts, they all cost a significant amount of money. However by improving your small business website’s SEO and ranking well on search engine results pages, you will be able to attract potential customers and drive them through to your website organically.
It is much more cost effective to work with an SEO expert on optimising your business website (both on and off site) and improving its rankings organically rather than paying for ads, as the results will last far longer.
However it is important to remember that improving your small business’s SEO is an on-going process and results won’t appear overnight. SEO success takes a good understanding of the subject, as well as hard work and dedication, but it will all pay off when you start to see increased website traffic and conversions.
Search engine optimisation gives small businesses the opportunity to increase their visibility online, attract a wider audience and win their trust, all of which are necessary to gaining sales and improving customer retention.
Please contact us if you have any questions about our SEO Services