5 pros of SEO for small businesses
Brand awareness
By optimising your business with SEO, you will be able to reach out to a larger and more diverse audience. How? Well, by utilising well-researched keywords, you will be able to rank on more SERPs due to the increase in keywords. If you are a local business that operates in a particular area, it is important to use the areas around you in the content on the website. Mentioning the city/town/village in titles, meta data, URLs and more will show the search engine that you are prominent in this location which hopefully means that you will be added to the SERPs or ranked higher.
User-friendly navigation
No one likes an annoying website that is hard to navigate. Therefore, by ensuring that the user journey is enjoyable, you will gain brand affinity. This can be measured by the average session duration, bounce rate and average pages visited per session. Ensure that in order to get to a specific page, there are no more than 3 steps that the user has to click on in order to get there. The website must also be fast so the user isn’t waiting for ages to access it and also because search engines penalise slow websites as part of their core web vitals which are methods used to determine the performance of web pages.
Standout from competition
Not only does good SEO for your website benefit you, it negatively impacts your competitors too because you will be usurping their outreach online. If you take over their position for a phrase on a SERP or knock them down on the GMB results page, then you will be in a better position to gain user awareness.
Increase customers
The main goal of SEO is to increase the number of customers to the business. With every client that I have worked on, they have all increased their number of customers because of SEO techniques. The methods used in SEO are designed to increase the number of customers which is why SEO is a great method to procure extra revenue.
Relatively low cost
Unlike other marketing services like PPC, display or social ads, SEO is the most cost-effective because many of the techniques don’t cost any money to perform. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are free analytical tools that are extremely useful and allow you to better understand your website and users. Costs associated with doing SEO on your own can be the use of tools like Semrush or Ahrefs which offer more analytical information, purchasing of backlinks to your business, the cost of your hours (if you value your time) and some other minor methods.
3 cons of SEO for small business
Complexity
In order to get the best out of SEO, you need to get a grasp of the whole thing. This includes the very detailed technical aspects of websites. It takes specialists years to fully get to grips with SEO so it would be a monumental task to deal with the complexities that SEO brings. There are some small SEO opportunities that can bring some quick and long-term wins that are relatively easy to implement but these won’t have as much of an impact.
Not free
There are many expenses when utilising SEO. Either the fees associated with different tools or the cost of labour. Using popular online tools like Semrush or Ahrefs will be costly, despite their usefulness. Learning about SEO will take time away from your focus on your business which means that the hours used for learning will take time away from productivity. Furthermore, if you are too busy to implement the SEO tasks, then you would likely need to get someone to do it for you. This, therefore, means expense.
Time consuming
Because SEO is made up of multiple, intricate parts, it takes a while to understand it. There may be online courses that claim to take a short time to learn SEO, but realistically, these courses will not provide you with applicable methods to help your business. It may take months or years to fully develop your SEO knowledge which is time that could be spent in developing your business.
Conclusion
As an SEO analyst, I would obviously encourage every business owner to consider SEO techniques and practices as I have seen firsthand the positive impacts that it has had. For someone who is devoted to their business, it is likely that you are willing to try your hardest to make it succeed. Therefore, SEO is a strong method of growing and developing your business in a fairly cost-effective method. Compared to other marketing options, doing effective SEO yourself is the best method to help achieve results.
Harry Buckley 