If you are starting up your own business, you will no doubt have already run across countless articles advising you on SEO and how to optimise your website. The thing is, if you don’t know why you ought to be doing these things, you probably don’t have much motivation to do them! Here’s all you need to know about why SEO is crucial for any business these days.
Helping customers find you
Where do you get your customers? You might think that you only get them through your physical shop presence, if you have one. But if this is all that you’re focusing on, then you are definitely missing out on a whole new world of custom.
Why? Because customers these days just aren’t shopping in person as much as they used to. And when they are, they’re doing it in a much more deliberate way. They’re going online and looking up where the shops are that they want to go to, and finding local businesses that can serve their needs.
If they don’t find you when they look online via a simple search, then they will be shopping with a competitor instead. The same is true whether you have a physical shop or an online store. You can build a website presence for your business easily using our website builder; in minutes. So there’s no reason to miss out on these opportunities!
Building brand awareness
The average person now has to see a product or service seven times before they make a decision to buy. Seven times! That means if they only see your products once, through a search or on social media, then you don’t have as high a chance of making a sale.
Instead, you can bring people back time and time again through content marketing. This is the practice of publishing blog posts, infographics, videos, and any other kind of content on your website that will be found by readers because of the SEO that you use to make them easy to find. When your potential customer searches a question related to your niche, they will find your post and go ahead and read it, making them more aware of your brand – as well as making you seem like an expert.
This is why a photographer, for example, might want to target ‘photographer South London’ as an SEO keyword – but also other key words and phrases such as ‘how to find a good photographer’, ‘what to wear for a photoshoot’, and the other things your customers might be searching for.
Beating your competition
When customers search for a business or service, they often won’t go further than the first few results to find what they are looking for. This means that you need to be as high up in the search results as you can manage it, every single time!
You can bet that your rivals will be using SEO, so if you aren’t, you will be at a complete disadvantage. If you want to beat them, or at least match them, then you need SEO to be one of the tools in your arsenal.
There’s no point keeping a website if you don’t make it work for you – SEO is crucial for finding customers and making sales. Don’t neglect this area!
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