SEO is a very important tool that can help increase the amount of traffic your business receives. But some business owners seem afraid to use SEO to increase traffic to their website. This is understandable as a small business owner, it’s hard to invest in something that you don’t really know about or that doesn’t give you immediate results. Still, SEO is worth investing in as a long-term strategy to increase traffic to your website.
According to a new study by Clutch, less than half of businesses are claiming to invest in SEO. This probably comes from several things such as lack of knowledge as to what SEO is, budgetary reasons or businesses being satisfied with their current marketing efforts. Even more so a US-based survey of more than 500 digital marketers found that just 44% claim to invest in any kind of SEO strategy.
These reasons and statistics show an increasing pattern of businesses not investing in SEO. Another reason businesses may not see SEO as a priority is due to the most popular strategies being social media marketing, a website, and email marketing. Still, SEO is a useful tool that businesses should use in conjunction with the other strategies to effectively market their business.
There are major benefits to your business taking advantage of SEO. In today’s world, word of mouth is vital to the success of your small to medium sized business. One major benefit to investing in SEO is that it is more likely to convert than most of the other sources. The more effective your keywords and tags are, the higher the likelihood of getting larger amounts of converts to your website.
Another advantage is the cost effectiveness that SEO provides. Budget restrictions are a very understandable reason to not invest in SEO. However, your SEO can be optimized within your budgetary constraints by targeting keywords, tags etc. towards users who are actively searching for products and services like yours. This in turn leads to more cost-effective marketing than through other sources.
The other major benefit of SEO is increasing brand awareness of your business. The amount of traffic moving through your website is just more and more people becoming aware that you exist. Even if some customers don’t take immediate advantage of what your business is offering, it’ll stay in the back of their minds. This in turn leads to future customers down the line on top of what you’re already getting from current marketing avenues. What this means is that SEO is a long-term ROI (return of investment). Don’t be discouraged when you aren’t getting immediate results from your SEO efforts.
The objective of any business is long-term sustainability; therefore, you should always have the long game in the back of your mind. Focusing on the short term is by no means a hindrance, just keep in mind that these continuing strategies will pay off and continue to grow your business. The balance between long-term and short-term goals is key.
SEO is an effective method that shocking scores of business are not taking advantage of. Don’t be one of the ones that restricts the amount of strategies that are being utilized. SEO is a long-term strategy that can and will reward your efforts to growing your business.
