Online Advertising - SEO for Small Businesses
By Peter Brittain - Managing Director of Northland Digital | Slinky Internet Marketing
More than 75% of online consumers start their quest for a desired service or product using a search engine. If you are a small business owner it makes sense that you get a wider audience to showcase your product or service. You just cannot afford to ignore such a massive audience that is out there looking for a service or product you specialize in. As a small business owner you probably have a tiny budget for marketing and advertisement. Search Engine Optimization offers small business owners the opportunity to advertise their products and services and the best part is that it is relatively inexpensive when compared to advertising on the television and the print media. So how does it work?
Whenever an individual is looking for a service or a product on the Internet with the help of a search engine he or she is faces a dilemma as multiple pages of results are displayed on the screen. The individual can only have time to look at the first few sites the rest are often ignored. Search engine optimization is a process that helps website positioning on the search engine results page. Search engine optimization (SEO) increases the possibility of the small businesses website to feature prominently on the results page, this results in increased traffic to the website and eventually leads to incremental sales.
It has been conclusively proved that customers prefer to buy a service or a product from a website that features prominently on the search engine results page. Other forms of advertisements such as in print and electronic media are not as effective in spite of being far more expensive. Of the total business that is transacted on the Internet, almost 85% is being done by the fifteen major search engines. This highlights the importance of the search engine results page as the premium medium for advertising for small and big businesses.
Traffic on the website depends on the ranking the website gets on the search engines results page and traffic is directly related to sales. If a website features lower than the first twenty on the results page it will attract very little traffic and so minimum or no sale. This has resulted in an intense keyword competition amongst websites offering similar products and services. The conversion of traffic to actual sale also varies from business to business and the keywords used to attract traffic.
Companies offering to increase search engine rankings have mushroomed all over the Internet, however most of them have turned out to be frauds and cheats. A few genuine companies do exist, and they use a methodical and scientific technique to increase search engine rankings. A company offering SEO services to a small business actually acts as marketing and sales consultant by ensuring better visibility of the businesses products and services to the online public. SEOs ensure a continuous traffic to the website using ethical and proven methods.
SEO has proved to be a big boon to small businesses worldwide, a simple act of hiring a SEO pitchforks a small business on the world stage where customers from any corner of the globe can access the business website and do business with them. Apart from getting more business the small business is also ranked higher amongst competitors in the search engine results page. SEO also recommend certain changes in the descriptions and titles that appear in search engine listings.
The cost of hiring SEO seems a little high initially but it more than pays for itself once the sales increase as a result of higher ranking in the search engine results page. No small business can afford to ignore this fact.
