Search engine optimization (SEO) is the hottest new trend in online marketing, and one that has rapidly proven its worth. SEO branding strategy essentially makes it easier for customers to find your business online. Digital marketing strategies can be highly effective and highly complex; it’s no simple matter to master these. Which is why outsourcing SEO for small businesses makes sense: you get all the benefits without having to hire a new person or to retrain your already overstretched staff.
What is SEO and how can it help your business?
Most people spend their time online checking email or doing searches. Online searches help people find local businesses, restaurants, salons, and speciality stores. SEO services fine tune your website to meet the criteria used by search engines like Google to rank sites in an online search.
Most people rarely go beyond the first page of results produced by an online search, even though total number of results may be in the hundreds or thousands. So the goal of SEO is to make sure your business shows up near the top of any search results when an Internet user does a search for relevant keywords.
That’s easier said than done, because Google and other search engines keep their criteria for ranking sites in searches a closely guarded secret. These criteria are also changed frequently. So online marketers have to do the best they can, producing natural-sounding content for your website, that is full of the relevant keywords. Their best can be surprisingly effective, as evidenced by increased sales and queries.
What are the benefits of outsourcing SEO for small businesses?
Because SEO strategies can be so esoteric they’re not easy to master and it takes specialized knowledge to use them effectively. Small businesses are, by definition, small. That means that everyone wears several hats, and that there may not be a social media marketing expert on board. By outsourcing SEO services, you get all the specialized knowledge without having to hire a new person.
Not only that, effective SEO can lead to a lot more customers walking in the door. They were looking for the products and services your business provides, and they found you by doing a local search on their iPhone.
Get them where they live
Internet users are simultaneously mobile and local. That may sound contradictory but actually it reflects the convenience and connectivity that the Internet makes possible. For instance, you may have walked or driven past the sushi place near your new apartment any number of times, without even noticing it was there. But once the craving gets hold of and you do a search for sushi in your neighborhood, you’re connected.
So in a strange way, mobile internet devices help people connect with local businesses in their neighborhood. In an average week, people view local pages 645 million times across the U.S. And as many as 70% of North American social media users use these accounts to connect to at least one neighborhood business.
Digital marketing and SEO have proven their worth quickly, incorporating as they do new trends in Internet use as well as changes in the way people shop. Outsourcing SEO for small businesses helps them to tap into this new and effective way of connecting with motivated customers.