Is SEO worth it for small businesses?

Does SEO work?

Does your target audience use the internet? If yes then there’s a high chance SEO is worth it for your business.

Google.com is the no. 1 source for traffic on the internet. Responsible for a whopping 57.8% of link referrals. That’s more than 10 times the amount of referrals from Facebook, the next biggest source of traffic.

It’s basically free advertising. Yes you can pay for ads to jump the queue and rank higher and faster, but organic traffic actually gets higher click-through rates and return on investment.

If you’re just competing against other small businesses the bar to rank can sometimes be quite low, with lots of small businesses never having done SEO before. A study by freshchalk.com found that 25% of small business website’s don’t contain an H1, which is one of the most fundamental things you need to add to a webpage to tell a search engine what it is about.

Whether you want to learn SEO yourself or hire a professional to help, SEO can provide a significant boost to your bottom line.

What does Small business SEO include?

SEO fundamentals

1. First of all check that Google can crawl and index your website. Setup Google Search Console and make sure that your pages are being indexed.
2. Do keyword research. Find out what your customers are searching. There are various tools that can help you figure this out and some of them have free accounts with daily/monthly usage limits.  Semrush is a good one to start with. You can also find this out just by talking to your customers. If multiple customers ask you a similar question, there are probably other people searching for that answer too.
3. Review your competitor’s website. What are they doing well? What keywords are they targeting?
4. Create content that targets your keywords. Consider what intent people have when they search a keyword and try and give them what they want. If someone searches “tomato sauce recipe” they probably don’t want to know the history of the tomato, they want to know how to make tomato sauce!
5. Don’t forget basic SEO optimisation. Yes Google is more sophisticated now and understands content a lot better, but it is still important to include your keyword in your page titles, your URL too and writing a good meta description will still help users understand whether the page is relevant to them and encourage them to click through to your website.
6. Make sure your website is simple to use and that all pages can be found easily by navigating around the website. Make sure your calls to action are clear and that you don’t have broken links and that the site is usable on mobile, tablet and desktop devices.
7. Link building. If you can get a few other relevant websites to link to you, it will help you rank. Relevant websites could include:

• Partner organisations
• Local or niche directories (ones you think your customers are likely to actually use)
• Publishers in your industry
• Highly respected media organisations

Local SEO

46% of searches on Google are for a local business or service, meaning SEO is still a fantastic tool for reaching your customers. Where Google thinks a search is looking for a local result, it will change ranking positions based on the searcher’s location. For small businesses, that work only in one geographic area, there are specific things you can do to help you reach a local audience.

1. Firstly, claim your Google Business Profile if you haven’t already
2. Fill in all the details you can
3. Make sure your website includes local contact details that match your Google Business Profile and mentions the areas you work
4. Ask your clients to leave you a Google review and respond when they do. There are lots of studies showing this has a significant impact on local search results.

Niche business SEO

At the other end of the spectrum if you’re in a niche market where your audience are distributed far and wide, you need somewhere where you can reach those far-flung corners of the globe, but also be hyper-targeted to a niche audience. Well, Google gives you access to a market of billions and also target people at the very moment they are searching for something relevant to your products and services. This sounds like the perfect marketplace for a niche business.

To get under the noses of the right people, you should start with the fundamentals listed above: research your audience and competitors, find out what they are searching for and provide comprehensive answers and solutions to everything they need. Providing this within an intuitive user experience, that makes it easy to find related content, will give you a great foundation for good SEO.

For a small business, especially those selling high value products or services, a few sales a month coming from SEO can have a massive impact. This means targeting some long-tail keywords can be very effective. These are keywords with three or more words in them, that usually have low competition and are easy to rank for. Plus they are often highly relevant to your ideal target audience. We’ve had clients that get regular sales from long-tail keywords that keyword research tools say get minimal searches per month.

SEO concerns for sole traders, side hustles and freelancers

Even for the smallest businesses SEO is worth considering. As mentioned above it can have a higher return on investment than most marketing channels. So what might be stopping you?

• Finances: A small business may not have a lot of cash available for marketing, and SEO budgets can be expensive. However it is possible to learn SEO yourself, which shouldn’t cost you a penny.
• Time: If you are a sole trader or small business owner you probably wear a lot of hats and the idea of adding another one to the pile may induce palpitations. In this case you don’t have to do it yourself and can outsource the work to an SEO agency.
• Knowledge: If marketing is not your area of strength and you are looking to get external help, make sure the team you work with are able to explain what they do and what they recommend in a way that you understand. If they are obscuring what they do in jargon and technical language that is a red flag that they don’t know what’s best for your business.

If you’re already at full capacity with a steady stream of enquiries coming through, first of all well done, keep doing what you’re doing. In this case SEO might not be a priority, but if you have ambitions to expand then SEO may provide new opportunities.

SEO for businesses of all shapes and sizes

Whether you are a trade or service provider, creative or technical, whether you work from an office, or from home, SEO can work for small businesses. The strategy and tactics will be different for each one, so getting an expert opinion is highly recommended. Why not get in touch withdigital today .