You can expand your business using various growth strategies, but you’ll need effective SEO to make any of them work. Whether you’re launching into a new market or appealing to a wider audience, you’ll need SEO to increase your reach, raise brand awareness and convert customers or clients.
It’s no secret that the vast majority of brand interactions begin online. In fact, 97% of people learn more about local enterprises online than anywhere else. This just goes to show that even bricks and mortar businesses must embrace SEO and enhance their online profiles if they’re going to be successful.
Of course, simply being present online isn’t enough to achieve your growth potential. Statistics show that it’s the first page of search results that users are most concerned with. What’s more – the top five organic results on Google’s first page account for more than 67% of clicks.
If you want to increase your revenue, having your links appear on the second or third page of Google search results simply isn’t going to cut it. Instead, you’ll need to increase awareness of your products and services by appearing on the first page of Google’s search results and the only way to do this is with search engine optimization.
The Benefits of SEO for Growing Businesses
As you can see, SEO is essential for any enterprise but it’s particularly important if you want to expand your business. To learn more, find out why SEO is the most powerful online marketing tool here and take a look at the benefits it can offer, such as:
1. Targeted Marketing
Traditional marketing methods enable you to target large groups of people at once. While you can aim to reach broad demographics, you can’t target a specific audience with precision. This inevitably means that your conversion rate will be relatively low. In contrast, SEO gives you the power to target a niche demographic or a very select group of users.
By understanding online behavior and learning how users search for content, you can adjust your SEO strategy accordingly. As a result, you can target your marketing with precision and invest your resources in reaching the users who are most likely to convert into customers.
2. Gain Credibility
If you want to grow your business, you’ll need to increase your influence. To do this, you’ll want to enhance your credibility and become a trusted source of industry information. Of course, consumers and clients can only grow to trust you if they’re exposed to your content. This means getting your content in front of the relevant demographic and SEO helps you to achieve this.
Furthermore, boosting your credibility in the eyes of Google will help you to secure high rankings. If you can secure a featured snippet, for example, this acts as an unofficial endorsement from Google and boosts your credibility in the minds of users too.
To achieve high rankings and secure premium spots, like featured snippets, it’s essential to focus on search engine optimization. When you develop a comprehensive strategy, you can ensure your brand becomes well-known for relevant information, products and services.
3. Engage Active Users
Ultimately, growing your business means generating more revenue. No matter how you do it, a successful growth strategy should create more profitability. For most companies, this means increasing sales.
When you use SEO to reach people, you have the opportunity to target users who are actively looking for related services and products. Instead of focusing on consumers who may be browsing for information or B2B managers who may be looking at procurement options, you can direct your marketing towards users who are on the cusp of making a purchase.
Being able to reach users who are actively looking to buy a product or service enables you to optimize your conversion rate. As you might expect, successfully growing your brand with SEO can also reduce your bounce rate and ensure that the increased website traffic you’re receiving is converting into sales.
4. Focus on Specific Locations
If you want to expand your enterprise by entering new markets or opening new locations, then SEO is a sure-fire way to achieve your goals. Local SEO allows you to target users in specific regions or geographical areas. This means you can promote a new store opening or a new delivery service within your desired location.
Furthermore, local SEO allows you to take advantage of the ‘near me’ search trend. ‘Near me’ searches have risen exponentially in recent years, particularly as fast mobile internet access has become widely available. When users search for local content, they often do so by adding ‘near me’ or ‘nearby’ to their search query, instead of entering a town, city or place name.
However, you can boost your SEO ROI by factoring this search behavior into your local SEO strategy. By doing so, you’ll be responding to evolving user behavior, providing users with meaningful content and climbing the rankings.
How to Expand Your Business with SEO
With so many benefits associated with search engine optimization, it’s clear that every expanding business needs to incorporate SEO into their growth strategies. To do this, you’ll need to set clearly defined, realistic goals, as well as implement accurate monitoring techniques, so that data can be collected and analyzed.
Similarly, you’ll need to identify cost-effective keywords that are relevant to your business, while ensuring that these key terms are in-keeping with how users search. Using the latest search trends, like ‘near me’ searching or voice-activated searches, can help you to achieve this.
A successful SEO strategy incorporates both on-page and off-page SEO, so there are numerous tools you’ll want to use to enhance your SEO performance. Furthermore, you’ll want to keep up to date with the latest changes to SEO algorithms so that you can maintain the rankings gains you’ve achieved.
Whether you choose to manage your search engine optimization in-house or outsource your needs to a third-party specialist, it’s vital to make SEO part of your growth plans. When you do, you can successfully achieve your goals, expand your business and drastically increase your profits.