eCommerce adoption and the ultimate need for online presence have been and will continue to run in 2021. People want to mingle with brands on their terms and look for unique and streamlined online experiences to do it.
To stay competitive, small-scale businesses will need to adjust their digital presence to be more visible, valuable, and available to their customers. One crucial way to do that? Hire an SEO agency to help your small-scale business website.
Now, you may want to ask, what is the real value of hiring an SEO agency? Why is that important? Well, let’s take a look at what implementing it could do for your business and how it can become one of your most effective marketing strategies.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which improves your site to increase organic visibility for specific search queries. The goal of every expert SEO agency is to expand the quantity and quality of traffic to your site through some onsite changes. This does not mean just stuffing web pages with relevant keywords, but focusing on some core web vitals such as site mobile-friendliness, speed, interactivity, and web content.
An expert SEO agency would agree that successful optimization is just as much about serving customer needs as adhering to search engines’ strategies and best practices like Google and Bing. Antedating customer intent, understanding what type of content they’d like to see, and providing the best answers are the heart of a good SEO agency. It’s concurrently a customer research technique and sales network for your business, and it permits you to get to know your clients and their habits.
The point is being able to put the technical and tactical elements together. To simultaneously serve your client’s needs and deliver them pleasingly to search engines.
The beauty of SEO is that it’s more reachable than you think. Instead of paying for conventional print ads or funded posts, taking the effort and time to understand SEO basics and investing in some tools can lead to long-term value for your small-scale business. Here are some tangible reasons you should consider hiring an SEO agency to grow your small-scale business.
1. Brings in clients through organic search
About 53.3% of all internet traffic comes from organic search, and about 60% of marketers confirmed their highest quality leads originate from SEO-engaged clients. Why is that? Because they’re searching for a lasting solution, you fulfill a need by being one of the top results.
Staying on the first page of search engines is necessary to be seen by interested customers. Climbing to the peak can almost double your regular click-through rate over the second spot. And claiming a Featured Snippet can help you jump over the first position while potentially adding another way for customers to click into your business website. These and more are what a seasoned SEO agency will do for your business.
The volume is there, and by reaching for specific search terms, you’ll attract the right customers. And by getting your website on the front page, you make your business highly visible and showcase that you’re a trustworthy resource. Click here to read about What are the advantages and disadvantages of SEO?
2. Creates a reliable web experience for customers
Hitting the front page of search results and claiming the number one spot relies on your build authority. You can have the best solution or resource available, but without a quality experience of a brilliant SEO agency, you’ll have a very hard time getting them there at all once they click into your site.
That’s why the technical elements of SEO, such as page speed, backlinks, and other authority-building elements, are so crucial to the success of your business online. Playing with search engines’ rules forces you to keep your site in tip-top shape and makes maintaining its health a regular priority.
The benefit of hiring an SEO agency for you is that it won’t just help you rank better and get more exposure. It’ll also make it easier for your customers to trust you based on the functionality of your site. Having fast pages, security measures, and automated customer service portals are just a few ways to do this.
3. Encourages you to concentrate on user experience
Speaking of your SEO, a core aspect of SEO is optimizing user experience. Google regards user experience as a ranking factor and will leverage their Core Web Vitals alongside previous factors like the page speed to help determine if you are providing an interaction or not. Featured Snippets and other elements also leverage this idea by pulling answers, images, and other valuable pieces of information onto the search page itself.
For businesses, this means that you need to focus on the needs of your customers. What do they want to have? What could they want to do? What other resources or services can you provide them? You can only get answers to all that when an SEO agency takes over your business.
By prioritizing your customers’ needs first, you stand a better chance to rank higher, keeping them on your site and converting. The more often that occurs, the more authoritative your site will be and the more people you’ll bring in. And the cycle continues.
4. Improves brand awareness
One crucial element apart from converting users into clients when you improve your rankings is brand awareness. The more touchpoints you will generate by getting to the front page and moving closer to the top spot. Even if they don’t click into your site, just by being there, potential customers will begin to associate your brand with those solutions.
This is important if you are competing on specific search terms with other businesses. You want to be at the top when people input some questions or directly search for the service you offer. And if you are competitors own those searches, more than likely, those organic sales will go to them.
Suppose you’re starting to explore executing SEO for your business, the best step to target longer variations of a search. For example, rather than ranking for “online accounting services,” you’d go after terms like “online accounting services for small business” or “best online accounting services for small business in the northwest.”
Yes, these don’t produce as much search traffic. Nevertheless, they are easier to rank for than the briefer, more competitive term. The more of these longer differences you rank for, you will likely move up for the shorter search term. And through it all, your SEO agency will help build awareness within your target market. Visit https://digital.gov/topics/seo/ to read about News and Events on SEO.