In many instances small and mid sized business owners are not 100% sure that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the right solution for the online marketing needs, when in fact, there are very few instances where SEO is not a crucial and central part of an online marketing strategy.
The point of SEO since “day one” is to increase sales by obtaining qualified business leads from Internet search engines. Achieving this goal is possible with almost any business of any size. And, while SEO is a complex, evolving issue and requires tons and tons of work, every business Owner, President, CEO or CMO must recognize that without an organized SEO campaign in place, you will fade off the map, lose sales to competitors and bleed the value of your brand over time. You will spend tons of money on traditional media buys and find it ever so difficult to track and tie sales to those sources. To ignore SEO in its traditional and new evolving forms is to deny your company and its employees the opportunity to succeed online in the long-term.
So what are some of the basic reasons for which business owners and senior managers should take a closer look at SEO?
Obtain Increased and Higher Quality Sales just as you begin to optimize your website, long tail search volumes will improve. Over the long term, with a lot of hard work, you can achieve significant positions on the major search engines leading to positive, bottom line results:
• Your website will perform better and receive more traffic shortly after you begin to implement standard optimization tactics. This is not to say that if you sell mortgages (a competitive area), you can optimize for “mortgages” and on day #2 of your work going live on your site, you’ll have more traffic. BUT, if you begin to work on your niche and provide more and more relevant information to your users and to the search engines in a clear, concise manner, you’ll grow your traffic from the outset of your program. • A lot of businesses are locally based and rely on foot traffic for customers to be within a short drive of their office or retail location. Search engines offer a plethora of local search features, and strategies for local search abound. If you leverage these local search tools and local search strategies properly, you are sure to increase your sales. Increased Search Engine Visibility Spread your wings! • With a solid SEO program in place, you will cater to all major crawler-based search engines. So, not only will you receive exposure on Google (at some point) but also on Yahoo and MSN and several other outlets. Once you optimize your site for organic search, the 3 major engines will pick up your site and run with it over time. • As opposed to Push marketing SEO is “PULL Marketing” The quality of a lead that find you through search is very high. When someone searches your keywords and finds you, there is a darn good chance that they are going to be a solid new business lead. When a searcher finds you, they have INTENT. They pulled themselves right to you for a reason; they are looking for what you have. This is just the opposite of PUSH marketing “ direct mail, outdoor advertising, TV, radio and other media mediums. Brand Recognition “ small businesses may not have large budgets for major branding. However, strong niche oriented organic search results can lead to your brand being associated with that niche over time. Your brand awareness and brand recall strength will increase as time goes on. • Your company’s name becomes associated with specific keywords that are embedded in a customer’s mind. • Control the terms that you associate with your products, services and brands. • Impression on customers over your competitors control your messaging with your landing pages. • The impression that you make on search results in crucial. To correlate this to a more human level let me ask this: If you went to a business networking event (Search Engine) where you might see a prospective client (Searcher), would you arrive at the event in tattered clothing, hide under a table or hang out in the bathroom for the entire event? Probably not. I’d suggest you’d opt for the former and likely network, move around the room, show your face and be found. This is the same as a search engine.