It is quite understandable to wonder whether SEO services for small business owners are even necessary. Choosing which would best suit your needs can be quite daunting, and the cost is always a consideration. In order to make an informed decision, you should know exactly what’s involved and what the alternatives are.
Do You Need Personalized SEO Services for Your Small Business?
What Are SEO Services for Small Business?
Basically, SEO services are anything that will make a website easier for search engines to find. For a small business, that could be making sure that the content on a website includes the best words and phrases to describe the goods or services offered by the company. Among other things, keyword research would involve discovering not only which words and phrases are searched most often, but also which have the most competition. For a local business, optimization would also be required for the location.
There are a great many other ways to optimize a website besides keywords, and a lot of them are technical. For instance, the speed at which the website pages load is far more important than most people might imagine. But even things like meta tags and alt text are often overlooked by non-professionals. What some small business owners may not realize, however, is that SEO services come in several different forms. In addition to custom services by specialized agencies, there are packaged services and even software.
Are SEO Services Affordable?
Many small business owners feel that they have to handle all of their own SEO activities simply because they can’t afford to do otherwise. But, like any other business expense, it would be wise to figure out the ROI (Return on Investment). Business owners can certainly monitor SEO activities themselves: if they know-how. Usually, though, it makes more sense to have at least a little bit of help.
Time spent on SEO is the time taken away from actually running your business. The more efficient your SEO efforts are, the more time you can spend doing what you do best. Plus, more effective SEO will bring you more customers, which will generate more revenue. Good SEO often pays for itself over and over again.
How Do SEO Services Compare to Other Forms of Marketing?
Effective SEO practices ensure that your website can be found by search engines organically, which means the website itself will draw them without you having to pay for ads. The problem with paid ads is that they improve your website’s ranking only while you are paying for the ads. Once you stop paying, the ads disappear and so does your website’s ranking. SEO has long-lasting benefits, which makes it one of the most cost-effective long-term digital marketing tools.
This is even more true when you compare the costs of SEO services to that of offline marketing materials. The expense of producing printed materials and other products can really add up over time, whereas maintaining a website can be done for very little. Adding SEO services to your marketing costs could very easily be far more profitable. That is why it is very important to compare the ROI of your various marketing strategies.
What Are the Benefits of SEO Services?
Websites that have been optimized for search engines bring more traffic, which increases brand awareness. But, in order to recognize the true value of using SEO services to create a strong digital presence, you need to understand how valuable that is to help your business grow. Here are some of the factors that will be affected.
Competitive Edge
The internet can create a level playing field for small businesses to compete with much larger ones. Having a great website that is easily found by people who are searching for the goods or services that you offer makes it just as easy for them to become customers of yours, as it is for them to patronize companies that are much larger than yours.
Mobile Reach
As more and more people continue to use their phones and other mobile devices for practically everything in their lives, mobile reach is more important than ever these days. That means it is an absolute necessity to optimize websites for mobile devices.
Another factor is that people tend to make more specific searches on mobile devices. So small businesses can use SEO on specialized content to increase the chances of acquiring better leads.
Diverse Content
A website presents far more opportunities to engage potential customers than any offline collateral. Not only can you entertain and educate your viewers with videos, recorded seminars, brochures, instructions, and much more, but you can make it possible for them to interact with your business at their convenience. They can leave all different kinds of feedback, contact you for information, or even sign up for a mailing list.
Build Relationships
Loyal customers are worth their weight in gold. When you provide them with a website that has been specifically designed to cater to their needs, not only will it rise naturally in search engine rankings to bring potential new customers, but your existing ones will return over and over again because they are so satisfied with their user experience.
Reputation
As your website begins accumulating more visitors, and those visitors continue to increase their engagement, search engines will begin to assign your content more authority. Not only will this help to raise your site in the rankings, but it will also grow your reputation in general. As you can see, this will very naturally become a positive continuous process for you.
What Are the Best Types of SEO Services Available for Small Businesses?
As companies grow over time, their needs for SEO services will probably change. So you don’t have to feel like whichever services you choose will be set in stone. For that matter, you may want to try a few different ones at each stage to discover which has the best ROI. The one thing that you should consider a must-have, though, is that any service you choose can be personalized for your business in particular.
Fully-Customized Services
It’s possible, of course, to outsource all of your SEO needs to an agency. You would pay them to do keyword research, create content, take over all of the technical aspects of your website that affect search engine rankings, and much more. Depending on the agency you choose, the cost could be prohibitive. On the other hand, though, if it leaves you with more time to spend on your business itself, the ROI may very well be acceptable.
Pre-Packaged Services
Some agencies offer a variety of packages that companies can choose from, depending on their specific needs. For instance, a business that already has people with a great deal of expertise in graphics may only want to hire out content creation for a blog or product pages. Others who lack technical knowledge may be interested in packages that offer completely optimized website frameworks which only need to be filled with content.
SEO Software
A relatively new hybrid version of SEO services is software that can intelligently and effectively perform search engine optimization on your website using your own input. This allows you to have SEO practices that are geared specifically to your own website because you are providing all of the necessary information. But it relieves you of all the technical aspects because that is what the software is designed to perform.
The advantages of this method of SEO are twofold. Since you are doing some of the work, and the software is doing the rest, you are not paying other people for their time. But also, since the software is doing so much, you don’t need to devote nearly as much time to your SEO efforts. That means you have far more time to devote to the actual business of running your company. Chances are, it could be more favorable for your ROI.
What Is the Best Way to Calculate the ROI for SEO Services?
While it can sometimes be difficult to quantify the results of marketing efforts, it is a little easier when it comes to SEO because the results are directly related to your website and only your website. So your expenses will be the cost of whichever SEO services you choose plus the cost of your time for the parts you have to do yourself. Then you simply deduct that from whatever extra revenue is generated from the website.
SEO services allow small businesses to compete with larger ones by helping them to create a powerful digital presence. If you are looking for small business SEO services and want to grow your business to its fullest potential, contact Anthem Software to find out how we can help you to achieve that dream. Not only do we believe SEO is one of the most cost-effective digital strategies over time, but we will even be happy to explain what you can do to assist in promoting your business on the web in a way that uses SEO effectively.
