SEO can help small businesses to expand their boundaries and reach the majority of their target audience. A small business can have anywhere between 1-500 employees, along with consistent and limited revenue.
In a recent study by Clutch, they came to the conclusion that the majority of small business owners are going to follow an SEO strategy in 2019 as well as in the future. Furthermore, these SEO activities are likely to be carried out by a dedicated in-house staff of SEO executives.
Along with SEO, small businesses also tend to invest in PPC campaigns and utilize content marketing tactics at the same time to promote their business more efficiently.
The following report can be used by small businesses to improve their search engine rankings and get ahead of their competitors.
What Clutch has Found
- Of all the small businesses, more than 36% follow a dedicated SEO strategy while the remaining 23% are likely to build one in 2019.
- 63% of small businesses rely on social media marketing to promote their business. Furthermore, more than 54% of the businesses include mobile-friendliness and effective keyword research in their SEO practices.
- Approximately half, 48% to be precise, of the small businesses, include content marketing as a part of their SEO efforts.
- More than 50% of small businesses have in-house staff to take care of SEO while 28% prefer hiring an SEO firm.
- 25% of small businesses use organic traffic as the metric to determine the success of their SEO practices. Similarly, 19% look for conversions and 14% compare success with the backlinks.
- 60% of small businesses, performing SEO, also utilize PPC advertising. 17% of the businesses are expected to invest in PPC o 2019.
Small Businesses Performing SEO Activities are Likely to Increase in 2019
The number of small businesses utilizing SEO to promote their brand is significantly increasing.
One-third of the total small businesses are already following dedicated SEO strategies so far.
Furthermore, an additional 38% are likely to inherit SEO to promote their business in 2019. These figures clearly convey that small businesses have started to recognize the significance of investing in SEO.
While buying a product online, people use search engines to search it.
In today’s competitive scenario, small businesses require an effective SEO strategy to get the desired exposure in the search results, especially when they want to attract the majority of their target audience.
Social Media and Mobile-Friendly Websites are the Two Main Weapons for Small Businesses
Even though the majority of small businesses have started to invest in content marketing and voice search optimization, social media still remains the primary SEO effort for everyone.
Approximately 63% of small business rely on social media marketing for SEO, which makes complete sense, since social media and SEO are related to each other.
Social media marketing is closely followed by the mobile-friendliness of the website as the secondary SEO effort for many businesses (56%). Keyword Research is the third preferred SEO effort for 51% of the small businesses.
The mobile-friendliness of the website plays a crucial role in determining its search engine rankings, ever since Google introduce mobile-first-indexing.
If you aren’t familiar with the concept, here’s what you need to know. Mobile-first index is an indexing algorithm, launched by Google in 2018, which prefers the website’s mobile version, over the desktop version, while indexing and ranking web pages.
It means that if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it’s search engine rankings are likely to fall down.
Small businesses which optimize their website for the mobile are most likely to witness higher search engine rankings.
Content Marketing and Voice Search Optimization are the Latest Trends for Small Businesses
Of all the SEO activities, the two which remain popular among small businesses are.
- Creating high-quality content (48%)
- Optimizing their website for voice search (21%)
It is also found that the number of small businesses which use content marketing for SEO has increased by 16% in 2019.
These numbers clearly predict that small business owners have started to understand the significance of high-quality content for SEO.
Before making any purchase, customers perform in-depth research using online content to find the best products.
For instance, if someone searches for “best drone accessories”, he’s likely to go through the majority these search results for they’ll help him find the best drone accessories. It is also worth noting that Google understands the user intent, and therefore only displays informative blogs, discussing different drone accessories.
“Best drone accessories” is not a transactional search term as the customer only want to learn about the best accessories. This is the reason why websites which are selling these drone accessories will not be ranked for this search query.
It means that small businesses which create content while keeping user intent in mind are likely to witness highly convertible traffic at their website.
Small Businesses Should Understand the Importance of Voice Search
Creating content which directly answers user queries is extremely important, especially when the voice search is on the rise.
When someone performs a voice search, he most likely expects the voice assistants to understand his intent. For instance, the voice assistant should understand the difference between “Where can I find food” and “How to Cook Food?”. Both of these search terms have different user intent, and therefore voice assistant must understand the difference between them.
When we talk about optimizing content for the voice searches, user intent is the key to target. Content which is optimized as per the user intent is likely to rank for a particular search query.
Since more and more people have started to utilize voice search in their daily life, it is the right time for small businesses to optimize content for voice search.
Small Businesses Have In-House Staff for Performing SEO
Small businesses have in-house staff to effectively execute SEO strategies.
While half of the small businesses hire in-house SEO teams, other half use SEO software such as SEMRush and Ahrefs.
We found that only a few small businesses hire SEO expert to plan, validate, and execute the SEO strategies to achieve desired results (in terms of rankings as well as organic traffic). Among these few businesses, 42% prefer hiring SEO freelancers or SEO consultants while 28% have the tendency to hire professional SEO agencies.
The majority of the small businesses have limited budget, and that’s why they tend to make the best out of their in-house team of SEO executives.
Hiring an SEO company usually includes additional charges, which often is a headache for small businesses, especially when they have a limited budget to spend on SEO.
However, if you consider professionalism, hiring an SEO firm is much better than relying on an in-house team, mainly due to extensive expertise. A professional SEO company can easily achieve the expected results by utilizing the best strategies as per the business requirements.
In-House Staff Can only Handle Some Small Business SEO Services
In-house team of SEO executives can only hire a couple of SEO services for small businesses. These services include:
- Social media marketing
- Earning links
- Conducting keyword research
Even though in-house SEO executives can perform these tasks, they are less likely to achieve expected goals in a given time limit. Professional SEO firms, on the other hand, know the best practices to follow so that the website climbs to the top of the search engine in no time. The inexpensive, low cost and affordable seo services for small business by seoexpertscompanyindia.com can help you achieve your top rankings goal in Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other major search engines
Furthermore, agencies have years of experiences, serving clients from different niches, which gives them a slight edge over in-house team.
It’s important for small businesses to choose between an SEO Company and in-house staff. We recommend hiring an SEO firm as it worth every penny that one spends on the services.
Small Businesses keep Track of Traffic and Revenue to Identify SEO Success
While determining the success rate of SEO practices, most of the small businesses analyze the website traffic and earned revenue.
Organic traffic is the primary metric for small businesses (25%) to determine SEO success, closely followed by leads (19%) and backlinks (14%).
SEO is directly related to revenue. However, many people still consider website traffic as the only metric to check whether their SEO practices are bringing them business opportunities or not.
It is also important to check what type of people are visiting the website. This is when leads and conversions come into the picture as they help in determining the quality of the traffic.
3 SEO Metrics Small Businesses Must Use to Determine Success
Of course the amount of traffic matters, small businesses should also focus on the quality of the traffic while determining the SEO success.
Having a lot of traffic is not important. The thing that actually matters is how relevant the traffic actually is.
So, small businesses should utilize the following three metrics to keep a track of their SEO efforts.
Bounce Rate – How many visitors are bouncing back and going back to SERP to look for other results.
Conversion Rate – How many visitors are actually converting, i.e., buying a service or product at the end.
Backlink Quality – The number of backlinks being acquired from high authority domains.
These three metrics will help small businesses to identify whether their SEO efforts are worth the money being spent or not.
Majority of Small Businesses Rely on PPC
Pay-per-click (PPC) can help small businesses to get exposure on Search Engine Result Page (SERP). This is the reason why majority of small businesses have started to invest in PPC campaigns.
Our study shows that 60% of small businesses, which follow SEO strategy, also invest in PPC advertising.
Furthermore, an additional 17% of small businesses are expected to invest in PPC advertising in 2019.
Running PPC ads help small businesses gain visibility in search results.
PPC helps in Attaining Visibility in “Above the Fold” Results
Running PPC ads helps businesses to attain visibility in the “above the fold” results for mobile search. It means that whenever a user searches with the target keyword, your ad will appear at the top. This eventually increases the odds for the customers to click on the link, thereby allowing you to acquire high organic traffic.
PPC is Better for Search Engine Visibility
Google has divided to organic search results into a number of different sections. Some of these sections include:
- Answer boxes
- Local 3-packs
- News and video scrolls
It means that attaining a position in the organic results is quite challenging, especially when the business is starting out from scratch. However, Google has a habit of displaying PPC ads on the top of the page. It means that if you run Google ads for your business, you’re more likely to grab customer’s attention.
It is also worth noting that PPC is more transactional than SEO, mainly because it offers a better return on investment (ROI).
Balancing PPC and SEO is the Key to Optimize Small Business Website
While PPC can help small businesses to gain visibility at the top of the SERP, it is quite expensive, especially when you have to run consistent PPC campaigns. Therefore, it is always advised for small businesses to utilize both PPC as well as SEO and maintain a proper balance. When SEO and PPC are run side-by-side, they are more likely to drive highly convertible traffic to the website. So, make sure to use both SEO and PPC to rank higher in SERP but make sure that you should hire SEO Expert or an SEO Company from India SEO Experts Company India to get the techniques executed in the right way.
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