Tag: seo

The Increasing Importance of SEO in Non-Online Businesses

If you are one of those who think SEO is necessary or beneficial only for online businesses, you are sadly misinformed. SEO or search engine optimization may be a term and a practice in the online realm, but the entities and causes that can benefit from it extends beyond the World Wide Web.

It’s now considered old-fashioned for a businessman to eschew the chance to promote his services and products on the Web in favor of traditional marketing tactics like handing out flyers, paying for radio, paper and television ads, and hosting promotional events.

Let’s face it though: these marketing moves are already too clichéd that consumers who are instinctually leery of promotional efforts would no longer bite your proffered bait. Besides, there’s now a much more cost-efficient method of promoting one’s business, and that’s through search engine optimization.

Notice that it has become customary for a large company to hire a reliable SEO company to create its official website and promote its services over the Web. Even the owners of SMBs (small to medium businesses) are actively going online to promote their businesses too. They have lesser resources than large companies though, so they often use free platforms like Blogspot, WordPress, and social media networks.

So why do today’s businessmen and entrepreneurs turn to online channels when it comes to promoting businesses? Why should those who haven’t jumped into the bandwagon yet do the same thing?

SEO = Effective & Efficient Business Promotion

One of the first things people in marketing and promotions do is find out where they can reach a large percentage of their target market. This usually means sending people to the malls and sidewalks to distribute flyers, hand out free samples and the like—which would all work to a degree because people do frequent these public places. However, you can also capitalize on the fact that the Internet is just as widely populated—perhaps even more so.

Consider the following:

  • Almost every person in the civilized world today is using the Internet on an almost daily basis, be it for leisure or for work.
  • Customers are now researching online about the products they are interested in first before actually going to the stores to buy them.
  • Besides researching product descriptions, customers are also looking for reviews and customer feedback to reinforce their decision on buying a particular item.
  • 70.30% of Internet users in the United States have bought at least one product or paid for a service in 2011.
  • It is estimated that in 2012, the percentage of US Internet users who will end up purchasing items/services through this medium at least once will go up to 77%.

Based on these statistical data and simple analysis of consumer behavior, it is clear that the Internet is also a commercial ground where you can, metaphorically, hand out leaflets and flyers to potential customers. Now this is where SEO comes in.

business seo
SEO your business. Make your business become visible online.
Source: http://www.techwench.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Branding-Small-Businesses.jpg and http://bigideassmallbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/SEO.jpg

To define SEO, it is the process of making a website become visible to search engine users—specifically, by making their websites appear in the first results pages.

It is easy to understand how this benefits a business that’s looking to attract more customers. If your website is on the first three spots on the SERPs, you have the best chance of getting clicked on by users. There have been so many studies conducted over the years regarding this matter, and the statistical results vary. According to Chitika network, 34.35% of Google users only click on page 1 of its search engine results. 16.96% click on page 2, and 11.42% click on page three. The values continue to decrease for the succeeding pages.

traffic from google
This SERP click-through study was conducted in 2010.
Source: http://chitika.com/research/uploads/Traffic-by-Google-Result.png

It makes a lot of sense to utilize SEO, especially if your target market is of the younger age demographic. You can be certain that they will probably do some research on the Internet to satisfy their curiosity about your product/service or your niche in general. If your SEO campaign is successful, you might just be able to generate conversions. Of course, there’s also the added benefit of being able to generate a profit from your website itself by virtue of pay per click (PPC) advertisements.

What About Cost?

We’ve mentioned how efficient SEO can be in promoting a business, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be spending a buck for it. You’d be hard put to get an exact cost for SEO services though. If you’re going to ask various SEO companies or expert SEOs how much they charge for their services, the common answer would be, “It depends.” It is difficult to pin an exact value because there are many things that must be considered.

Yes, SEO will cost you money. The good part is it is also an investment that can give you excellent returns in the future. There’s this excellent article written by Trond Lyngbo at SearchEngineLand.com where he discusses the cost of SEO in conjunction with its value. He gives a perfect analogy for SEO: that it is like an iceberg whose value may appear small on the surface but its benefits are in fact 90% greater underneath. He adds that just like icebergs though, there are also huge risks involved in SEO, and it should therefore be entrusted to experienced search engine optimizers.

iceberg
There’s more to SEO than meets the eye.
Source: http://pastormojo.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/iceberg1.jpg

Concluding Statement

Using SEO alone to promote your business definitely won’t guarantee you huge sales. Its effects may not even be immediate since it takes time for SEO tactics to actually bite and be reflected in the SERPs and your website statistics. However, it doesn’t remove nor diminish the fact that consumers are becoming highly dependent on the Internet for product research. The number of online shoppers is similarly increasing, thanks to the ease and convenience that online shopping presents. It therefore makes sense to make the most out of the Internet for your business—and SEO is instrumental for that.

About the author: Emma-Julie Fox writes for Pitstop Media Inc, a top rated Vancouver SEO company that provides services to businesses across North America. If you would like to invite the author to guest post on your blog please contact www.pitstopmedia.com

How SEO Can Help Your Small Business

When running a business website, you want your site to get as much traffic as possible to increase the chances of making sales. Since traffic is ultimately the life blood of your online business, figuring out how to increase this traffic should be priority number one for your business. By engaging in some good SEO practices, you may be able to increase your site’s traffic without spending a lot of extra money along the way.

Search Engine Traffic

When you use leading SEO services or methods to improve your site’s rankings in the search engines, you may be able to increase your traffic substantially. The nice thing about using this method is that the traffic can keep coming for months or years without having to pay for it again and again. By comparison, if you use paid traffic methods like pay-per-click marketing, you’ll have to pay for each visitor that makes his way to your site. This means that there is a lot of pressure to convert each visitor that comes to your site. Otherwise, you’ll be throwing away a lot of money every day on this type of Internet marketing.

With search engine traffic, it keeps coming again and again without a lot of expenses on your part. You may have to occasionally pay for more search engine optimization work until your site gets up a certain level of traffic. This is usually much cheaper than having to pay for each individual visitor that comes to your site.

Converting More Sales

When you work with a good search engine optimization service, you may also be able to convert more sales on your site. When visitors come to your site, they want to find what they’re looking for. If your site ranks highly for a given search term and then you sell something related to that search term on your site, this will increase the odds of a sale when the visitor arrives. If your site is not optimized properly, visitors might find it for terms that are not really that relevant to what you offer. This leads to customers finding your site when they’re actually looking for something else. When this happens, they will be much less likely to make a purchase or fill in the form that you have to capture their contact information.

Considerations

If you want to take your small business website to the next level, engaging in some search engine optimization can make a big difference. It might seem costly on the front end, but you’re making a long-term investment in the success of your business overall. By the time you’re done, your site may be receiving loads of free traffic from the search engines and your sales may be much better off overall.

Reasons Why People Don’t Buy From a Website

Even if you have a lot of traffic coming to your site, these visitors might not be doing what you want them to on your site. Whether that’s buying a product or filling in an enquiry form, these visitors aren’t converting. Often, website owners will look at this problem and decide what they need is more visitors coming to the site, rather than making the most of the potential customers that are leaving. This can be expensive, especially when you’ve got the potential customers visiting already – you just have to appeal to them a bit more.

This is all about conversion rate optimisation, which can help you get the most out of the potential customers already coming your way. Below are some tips to consider when looking to optimise your site.

Can you find items easily?

If you look at your site as a customer would, can you find things easily? Finding a certain page should be easy and straightforward. Easy to read sign posts that direct people are necessary. If people can’t find exactly what they’re looking for straight away, they’ll look somewhere else.

However, trying to get every link on every page may make the site look a mess and cause more problems than it solves. As long as the directions are there, it should make sense.

Is the information there?

When potential customers have found the page they’re looking on, they’re going to need some information on what they’re looking at. Whether it’s a product or service, the attached description could decide whether they buy from you or someone else.

The description should contain enough information so that a potential customer can decide if it’s right for them, as well as being written in high quality, detailed enough to cover everything and completely unique.

Online, you don’t have the ability to hold an item like you do in a store. The description needs to replace and recreate that feeling, or you won’t give your customers the confidence to buy from you. High resolution images that customers can zoom on to see the items in detail and technical specifications are really good things that should be included on the page too.

Customers need confidence

When it comes to conversion rate optimisation the first thing you need to assess is if customers have enough confidence in your site. Customers will not part with their credit card details on to a site they can’t completely trust, and they’re quite right too as well. With this in mind, it’s important to make sure that you and your site are doing everything you can to gain the customers trust.

Making your website look professional is the first step. The more professional the site looks, the more trustworthy it’ll come across as. It’s also a good idea to make your contact details as open as possible and to not hide them away or refuse to put them on the site at all. Customers will gain confidence if they know you’re approachable and they’re able to contact you should anything not go according to plan.

This post was written on behalf of Boom Online Marketing the conversion rate optimisation experts