With the current model of the Internet, SEO has become a staple for small businesses. Every small business needs people to start generating revenue, but the majority of cities do not offer an extensive audience. The Internet meets this demand for a diverse audience in spades, offering more viewers and potential sales than any single company could ever hope to exhaust.
The Internet has more than enough profit to go around, making it a crucial tool for businesses of all sizes. Why would companies like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola invest heavily in online advertising if there was nothing to be gained?
Having an online connection to businesses is absolute crucial for modern customers and clients. It has effectively dampened the monopoly of location that high-budget companies have the ability to exercise on smaller communities. With an online presence, a company can not only target local views, but they may also target state, national and international customers. The Internet continues to grow each year, and as it does, the potential for profit grows with it.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the ideal route for small businesses to take in the initial stages of developing a web presence. SEO is a very easy process that doesn’t require an extensive level of knowledge for a basic proficiency. What’s more is that there are thousands of excellent sites that provide insight on how to approach SEO, as well as strategies for small businesses to maximize their gains. There’s no excuse for a small business to ignore taking the basic steps necessary to drastically grow their online presence.
When someone searches online, they tend to be looking for what they want or need. Not only this, but search engines record and measure the data of who is searching for what, how frequently they are searching for it, and in some cases, their general demographic. This level of analytic power allows companies to not only hone their online performance but their offline performance as well.
Aside from this level of analytic power, SEO is extremely diverse in its ability to generate profit. There are a variety of terms to search for that often have little to no competition because they have a small overall search volume. A word that only has 100 searches per month is less attractive to an aggressive SEO strategy because it has a relatively small potential for return. The cumulative result of this is that there are a lot of small search terms that have a huge potential for profit. For every search term that gets 10,000 searches per month, there is a sea of terms with smaller increments of search results that are largely uncontested. This is the easiest window into SEO. The biggest difference between large terms and small terms is that it can take much longer to start ranking for a large-volume keyword. The ideal strategy involves aggressively dominating low-volume keywords while beginning a long-term approach to large volume terms.
To put the power of SEO into perspective, assume that a site is getting only 1,000 views per month with 20 low-volume keywords. If this site has a single product that returns $10 of profit and they can convert only 1% of these viewers, their SEO efforts are worth $100 per month. This can often be done with under 10 hours of work, and once it’s done, it’s likely to last for a few months to a year. With a little basic maintenance, 20 hours of work could very realistically lead to $1200 in profit in a year, or about $60 per hour. It’s almost absurd that more businesses don’t pursue it.
Thanks Jennifer for the convincing us to use SEO in order to promote our business. I agree SEO is a cheap marketing technique and the results last at least for a few months.