Marketing yourself is one of the most pivotal steps one uses to convey their ideologies to the general public. It is meant to maintain an organization’s profile as active as possible to its interested parties. Marketing is the reason clients would choose to go into business with you over your competitors, despite running a much smaller operation than them.
Evidently, the introduction of more accessible means of advertising has brought forth a myriad of opportunities for small and medium businesses. One of these newfound mediums for customer acquisition is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It is the act of optimizing your online profile or integrating it with the various search engines that people use to search for their general queries.
This is why you should definitely learn the basics of SEO as it is considered to be one of businesses’ strongest weapons. The more you learn about basic SEO, the more you can utilize it to your business advantage and gain more customers in the future.
Being Recommended by Google
Let’s just say you’re looking for a handyman to set up a new cabin or something, you go to Google, Yahoo or Bing and search for handymen, or more accurately handymen servicing your neighborhood. Whichever keyword you use, Google will always put your location into account when listing their results. You glance at the first five results and you click on one and alternate between them until you find your best fit. You don’t even bother to go to the second result because of Google’s reliable first page results.
That is why many businesses strive to ensure that their name isn’t left out among the top list results that appear users. SEO is technically a simple guideline to follow that is written by the search engines. This will drive more traffic to your website and will confirm to users and Google that the business is real. The customers find these businesses on Google and subconsciously have a sense of trust towards them, given how Google practically gives them the answers to their most simplistic and complex thoughts. Business professionals view it as one of the most effective means of acquiring business because of how much of a trusted household name Google, Yahoo, and Bing are.
Long-Term Investment
Unlike some other online and search engine-based forms of marketing, SEO doesn’t produce instant results. It is a long-term yet highly rewarding plan. You invest in SEO now with a small amount, in order to see organic growth many months after. By linking in SEO to your web analytics information, you will be able to pinpoint certain keywords with high conversion rates. You may be using words that don’t have high conversion rates that place you only on Google's page # 2 and realize you're losing a lot of opportunities to grow your business and make money. The goal is to upgrade your rank to the top 3 positions on the first search page, where most users will clicks, that will produce a massive return on your small investment in SEO. Its why SEO has been compared to investing in real estate when you get it done the right way, the returns can be truly amazing.
Not an Ad, but a Result
Your business’s profile appears to the customer beneath the ad section, so the client knows that your business didn’t pay to get to the first page, but they are actually popular. This makes your business appear to be more trustworthy than ad options, which will in turn increase traffic to your business page.
Remaining Ahead
The more you appreciate SEO and the online resources that are available, the more you are prepared to be more efficient for your company in a dynamic, fast-paced environment. Should you have a well-established SEO plan that gets you on top, chances are you’ll remain there for a while.
To Cut Costs
Knowing SEO helps you to keep your marketing spending responsible. When you have the basics down and implement them yourself, you can create a successful traffic generation through SEO alone that won’t require you to spend elsewhere on marketing. In fact, you can make the website work as well as if any SEO professional was doing it for you.
In the end, SEO is definitely something to consider for next year’s marketing plan. It will cost you a fraction of what you’re currently paying, and when it is completed, it will have a lasting effect. You could definitely use the marketing Google can provide you for as low as a couple of hundreds of dollars.