Is SEO worth it for small businesses? Yes. SEO can bring long-term advantages to small businesses if owners do not want instant returns. The yearly SEO statistics show that over 50% of internet users are discovering new companies using search engines. Surprisingly, a large portion of those businesses are startups. But the searchers can find them easily and take services due to SEO. In this article, we will find out how SEO works for small businesses and what the benefits and costs will be. So, you can figure out why SEO is important for small businesses in this new digital landscape.
Key Points:
Absolutely! SEO is the practice of modifying your website and content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). When Google ranks a page, it won’t see how large your workspace is; it will examine how authentic your page information is regarding the context or niche.
In fact, the page ranking factors depend on the content relevancy and website authority. So, if your website is new, you can gain authority and publish content so that search engines can verify you as a professional in this field. This approach reinforces that SEO is not dead; it remains a vital strategy for online visibility. In this way, 64% of local businesses have shined from local SEO.
SEO is important for small businesses because it takes a one-time investment and provides long-term results, unlike traditional marketing. Moreover, a large company's yearly advertisement expense is 13%, which must be maintained repeatedly yearly. But, proper SEO techniques can keep a webpage ranked for a decade without the frequent expense.
Furthermore, after solving the on-page and technical issues, small businesses can post high-quality blogs on different niches to rank higher automatically. Google always tries to show users authentic information, so small businesses with positive reviews can rule on the SERP over large business websites.
Organic traffic is the live business lead. Serpstat's latest business statistics listed that many small marketing teams acquire 10% of traffic to lead a conversion, where 5% conversion was the usual amount of ‘traffic to lead conversion’ for large and medium-sized companies. That implies that SEO for SMEs can overcome the lead conversion ratio of r large companies.
The best SEO practices contain structured web pages with relevant links, images, metas, headings, page loading speed, etc. So the page context becomes human-friendly as well as crawling friendly. When a small business practices this formula, the visitors get satisfaction and they do return back for new purchases. Hence, the business gets more customer retention, and their sales can multiply.
Strong SEO builds trust with search engines and users. Ranking high positions you as an authority. SEO services like ours add schema markup, including positive reviews, to your website, further boosting your credibility and expertise to the top level. Combining creative content and SEO will result in a long-lasting ranking position, which is beneficial to small businesses to stay on top of the board.
The Shopify eCommerce stats claimed that 82% of customers make a purchase decision based on their trust in the brand. It’s a common psychology that if people see something every day, they build trust subconsciously. So, when your website ranks most of the service or product pages, it creates a huge brand influence on people, eventually creating brand awareness free of the additional cost.
When any small company creates strong, rich text and snippets through SEO, they can be featured on Google as the main information provider. Ultimately, this can beat their competitors by having the permanent position on the knowledge panel. Similarly, small companies can come up with local pack results to give users authentic directions to any service.
SEO is worth it for small businesses. With advantages like traffic-to-lead conversion, brand awareness, rich text features, and credibility-building opportunities, SEO pushes small businesses to the top of the search engine result page. Moreover, people searching for any local business online are around 97%. 85% of them go to the location using Google Maps. More reviews can show small businesses on Google maps as a reliable source.
Again, the minimum indexing duration of a 500-page website on Google is 3 to 4 weeks if all the SEO criteria are met successfully. If, by luck, you can complete the optimization process in this period, you can start sales even before having an offline store or office. While a startup company does not know the business strategy, they can use this hack to earn revenue faster.
SEO costs can vary depending on the complexity of your project and the experience level of the SEO professional you hire. However, there are ways to implement basic SEO practices yourself or partner with an SEO agency that offers affordable packages. Regular SEO packages start from 300 USD to 2000 USD. If you are surprised, this price plan includes everything in the world to rank a website, from auditing to optimization
Well, there are both positive and negative aspects to hiring SEO agencies. Good agencies will always favor you, but bad agencies can impact your business website through bad SEO practices.
VISER X wants their clients to return again and again, so they do not use cheap tricks for short-term results. Instead, we find permanent solutions for small businesses so that we can work with them on a large scale once they grow and get larger.
VISER X has 9 years of extensive experience in digital marketing and software development. Digital marketing is a core service of the company, we have mastered the early days of Google’s SEO policy to the latest, alongside building websites with full stack development expertise. We analyzed each content update and its features to keep our clients updated with the latest trends.
Apart from that, we structured different price plans in our service, including the list of all the essential SEO services a standard agency provides so that businesses of all sizes can take services without compromising a single part of the campaign. Our SEO service has multiple approaches to give a full-fleshed journey to the top-ranking position:
We conduct SEO audits to find out the right keywords according to the demographics. It helps us get high-quality web traffic with the maximum rate of conversion. We have little teams for each task, such as content creation, backlinking, and keyword research. There is a dedicated web development support team to fix any website issues for the best optimization. So our work process can get faster results, making small businesses get their brand awareness and traffic from search engines within a short period.
If you are a business website owner, you can follow some guidelines so that the SEO agencies can work for you seamlessly. Otherwise, they have to start from scratch and bring less effective results. But a decorated workflow, along with effective SEO benchmarking, provides a good head start to ease the next phases.
There was a time when it was not mandatory to follow workflow, but now the competition just got bigger than before. In our record, we had to do SEOs for two similar companies, but one of them had a few drawbacks and took thrice the time we needed for basic results. It’s because one of them took the wrong website theme.
Is SEO worth the investment? A large SEO team can work for thousands of business websites around the world in 9 years. Our recent case studies proved that we ranked pages within 3 months for many companies and created a reputation for them. There were both small and large businesses among our clients. Even the large businesses had a minimum online presence like small ones, yet we worked for them and established their ranking position successfully, beating hundreds of competitors.
Look for agencies with experience in your industry. They will understand your niche's keywords and best practices. Research their case studies for results, and don't be afraid to ask about pricing and services offered. There is always an opportunity to create a custom package containing your demands. For example, we introduce ourselves as the pioneering SEO agency in Bangladesh that serves small businesses. We came across a vast way from a small agency to the number 1 familiar face in the IT industry in Bangladesh.
SEO is an investment, not a quick fix. With consistent effort, you should expect sustainable results within 6-12 months. The timeline depends on your competition and goals. For faster results, target less competitive and long-tail keywords and focus on on-page optimization. To fix broken links, schema markups, and robot.txt, you need to assign your SEO projects to a reputed SEO agency like VISER X.
At VISER X, we start with a deep dive into your business, target audience, and industry. This includes in-depth keyword research, focusing on high-intent and long-tail options to target your niche. We then optimize your website from the inside out, including structure, content, and technical aspects for peak search engine visibility. Finally, we create top-level backlinks through ethical strategies and content outreach. Typical SEO agencies will not follow these steps; they just fix the missing part but do not update the existing parts.