Starting SEO for a business is a thought that business owners ponder upon, when in reality it shouldn’t be an option. SEO is like clean air for your brand. Without it your brand would be drowning or gasping for air every now and then. It needs it to thrive in this competitive marketplace.
Why SEO is important for business?
Apart from bringing your site up the ranks on a search engine, SEO offers a lot more. Let us list those needs for your business..
- A beautiful website driven by SEO is key to fostering trust and credibility once your customer lands on it. When people find you on search engines that are credible, it also establishes authority. Similarly, natural links in comments, and conversations, positive user behavior towards your brand online via reviews, etc. can also help.
- Organic search is mostly the primary source of traffic towards your website which you receive via Google. Although Google is the biggest search engine, it depends on your niche. Maybe your target audience could be using Bing or YouTube more than anything else. So if you are looking for high visibility, make sure you pick the right place and the right keywords to reach there.
- SEO is important also from the point of view of finding insights about your customers. With SEO insights you will be able to understand the details, likes, dislikes, needs, wants and wishes of your customers.
- Good SEO also means great user experience. For example: If your customer can’t find what they are looking for on your website, that’s a negative point for your SEO. The intention of SEO for search engines is to help users find what they are looking for.
- SEO is cost-effective. It’s not so much of an expense but more like an investment for years to come and it gets better as it keeps getting more investment and attention.
- SEO is measurable. So you will know the ROI. But it is different from any other form of advertising. So try not to compare paid search results with SEO.
- SEO doesn’t need to be a marketing activity done in silos. It can act as a good backup. You can integrate your PR campaign with it anytime, so that news about your brand can always gain good visibility. SEO can even back or boost your advertising campaigns.
How to use SEO to build your brand?
When you decide to create a website, it is always best to involve an SEO agency or a digital marketing agency right from the beginning. User experience and user interface are needed, but at the same time SEO is equally important. All these 3 aspects will eventually impact how your audience feels about your brand. To make your users come back to your website once again, what you will need to establish are factors like – site usefulness, accessibility, credibility and desirability. So make sure you have all these factors covered when you are building your website.
Search engines do care about what your users think about your website and thus your brand. If many users visit your site just once and then never again, this tells search engines that visitors are misled to your website. Hence, the 4 factors just mentioned above are important as they are directly linked to SEO.
Here are a few easy ways to start building your brand with SEO, apart from identifying relevant keywords:
- Building backlinks: Backlinks are a way for search engines to understand how good your website is. Consider them to be votes. The more votes the better search engines will rank your site.
- Unique content: The natural way to build links and attract visitors to your site is to have unique content on it. Your content needs to be interesting, exciting, meaningful, relevant and better than your competitors. You can even maintain a blog to nail this one.
- Social Networking: The more you engage and interact with audiences via social media the better the rankings. These engagements are used by search engines to indicate how active your brand really is.
- Commenting: Commenting on other blogs also increases chances for better website ranking. Comments can do wonders. It can increase engagement on relevant content, you can build relations with other bloggers, direct traffic to your website and increase backlinks via those relations.
Importance of SEO for small businesses
Jean couldn’t go grocery shopping.
Jean was running late for her grocery shopping. She was having guests over at home for dinner that evening. So she planned to head to the supermarket after work. But since she was caught up in her meeting she realized that there was no time to shop. She slides her phone out of her pocket and orders groceries home from the local store instead so that the ingredients would reach her home the same time she would.
Life’s decisions today are made in micro-moments.
- Want-to-know moments
- Want-to-go moments
- Want-to-do moments
- Want-to-buy moments
Google calls them ‘micro-moments’ in every consumer’s journey. Which of these categories does your business fit into?
What are micro-moments?
Micro-moments are when people turn to a device- like a smartphone, to act on a need to discover something, do something, watch something or buy something. These moments are rich in intent, where consumer expectations are higher than ever. In short, the winning brands will be those that understand the consumer in terms of these ‘moment’ scenarios.
82% smartphone users say they use search to find local businesses. [Source]
So imagine. Did Jean intend to shop for groceries online that evening? No, she didn’t. Her decision was unexpected and so was her choice to purchase from a store in her locality. Jean ended up buying from her neighborhood store just through search results. Here SEO came into play for that small business. Lucky for him!
Something similar to micro-moment marketing is reactive content. Reactive content uses news itself to build content. If you are interested, here’s how you can identify the best reactive content opportunities for your audience.
If you haven’t started with SEO for your website yet, and haven’t found the right SEO agency in Mumbai you can always hire an SEO professional to work in-house for your brand. But it is crucial that you start soon. Supercharge your brand awareness efforts by targeting your audience at the right time and place with SEO.
