Elevating Small Businesses with SEO Mastery: Conquer the Digital Landscape
Entrepreneurship is something very exciting, that becomes the breeding ground for future corporations that eventually will be the cases of success that will motivate others to do the same.
That is good and very good.
The challenge is not in the establishment of small businesses, but in placing them in positions where they can grow and become successful.
In my years as an entrepreneur, I understood that an individual with a project in the gestation stage, cannot afford the luxury of not using all tools and strategies available to help the developing of a business.
One of these tools and strategies is Optimisation for Search Engines.
Search Engine Optimization normally gets neglected or delayed to the last stage of developing a business website. This constitutes a big mistake because you cannot build a strong online presence without conditioning your website for online top performance.
This is what this article will be all about, understanding the role of SEO in small businesses and my considerations regarding the matter.
How can SEO help my small business website?
By simply making it easy to understand for Search engine crawlers so they can index it, analyse it, and after finding good helpful content in it, place it on top ranking positions on search result pages.
This is not only for Google result pages, but for all search engine result pages that are relevant to your business industry, geo, and topics.
As you can see, enhancing online search visibility plays a huge role when it comes to online exposure.
What if I decide to use paid traffic, like PPC traffic?
You can do that surely, in fact, I always recommend to my clients to start with a mix of PPC campaigns and an SEO campaign. To be precise my advice goes like this:
- Initially, we focus on SEO Techniques and Strategies at this level: Technical SEO, Content creation, and this content need to be the magnet to attract backlinks naturally.
- Simultaneously, we prepare Landing Pages (LPs) to promote the service or services that will become the flagship of their brand. By doing this we don’t have to wait months for the traffic to reach those services or products, we can, right from the start, send traffic to those LPs and bring some business in, while increasing the brand popularity, among other benefits.
But there is a catch, here that you need to read in the next section below.
You cannot depend only on paid traffic and neglect SEO relevance to your business.
If you neglect boosting website ranking through SEO importance and go only for paid traffic, you will soon find yourself spending more and more money in order to maintain a flow of leads. And if you are doing it right, then your will be converting some of those leads, which is great. But not sustainable for small businesses with small budgets.
This is where you start getting into things like Cost Per Lead (CPL), Cost per Client (CPC), and Return On Ads Spent, (ROAS), among other metrics that might make you quit.
SEO on the other hand, if taken into consideration from the start, will come like a hero to rescue your business. Why? because S.E.O is great a reducing CPL, and CPC, which turns into a better ROI or ROAS
How can then, SEO helps reduce the CPC and CPL?
First, since the investment in effective search engine optimisation tactics is normally flat, at least for some months. you can keep spending the same among on SEO and still see an increase in traffic month over month (MoM).
This will work wonders when you see that there are actually leads that come from the organic traffic, and not from your paid traffic only. This alone should motivate you enough to keep an eye on your SEO plans.
You need to monitor your SEO performance, if you see that in 3 months your site is not ranking with more keywords, or your traffic is going down, then the search performance improvement methods and strategy revision are due.
How can I know if what I am doing with SEO is the right thing?
As stated above, mastering SEO for online success needs results to be in crescendo, if not, then you need to audit all aspects of your SEO strategy, something like forensic SEO, to determine what is going wrong and how to fix it.
If you need help with this, just let us know in the comment below.
How much will it cost me to have a good SEO strategy?
There is no direct answer to this question because not every business has the same needs or resources.
If we narrow this down to these two aspects you can clearly deduct that starting businesses with fewer web pages, which means that the SEO investment might also be small.
Now, if we talk about resources, we necessarily need to talk about money as one of the most important resources. Your allocated money to maximising search engine potential will play a huge role when it comes to organic traffic growth via SEO campaigns and planning.
But don’t go crazy on this because even if we talk about a big project with lots of resources backing it up, that doesn’t mean that you need to spend a lot on it. so relax and read.
How much money do you need for a good SEO campaign?
In my experience with lots of small startups, a good amount to start is 2500 euros. I´ll explain:
with this amount, you can comfortably cover content writing, backlinks, SEO expert, and 2-3 SEO tools.
Now if you want to go BIG with your SEO plans, then you will need at least 6000 euros. I wrote “big” considering you as a startup with good funds to start with.
These funds are good to cover the same as the 2500 mentioned above, but on a bigger scale and include SEO that is more expensive and probably another SEO expert to handle other aspects of the SEO of your site.
Final words:
Even after reading this article, most people will probably doubt starting to navigate the world of search engine optimisation projects on their websites. But the longer you wait the worse the situation will be simply because search engine algorithms will not give attention to your website as a possible candidate to be used as part of any search results based on a query or keyword.
But it is time for you to complete the circle of marketing efforts toward your business.
Even if you failed before, some of us, SEOs, are well prepared to rank websites and deliver the expected online organic exposure.
Feel free to contact us to discuss your project, during our talk, you will see how flexible an SEO campaign can be and that you don’t have to break your piggy bank to get one started.
Cheers!
