SEO For Small Business Websites Is A Free Gift

Think ranking on Google for top SEO keywords is impossible for small businesses? I’m here to set you straight, cause that’s absolutely not true.

No, you don’t have to be a Fortune 500, regional powerhouse, or startup with millions of investor dollars to play with to rank on Google’s first page and receive free traffic from your target audience.

That’s why SEO for small business websites is a free gift of the Internet.

Any company can show up for searches related to their products or services. Then drive customer acquisition cost to zero while capturing market share.

Now you will have to work a little smarter and harder than the big boys, though that’s often the fun in it. Here’s why achieving free traffic should be a focus of yours.

Your Customers Search Daily For Their Needs

Get this. As the world keeps spinning, people naturally come in need of a business like yours.

So, the best part is… You don’t have to create situations to generate their needs or desires. Those come to them on their own with the passing of each day.

You just need to show up on Google — using content creation and backlink building — for the profitable keywords that your target audience will search when looking for a business like yours.

Here are common examples:

• A digital marketer stuck on branding will search for a “local copywriter” to improve their internal messaging.
• A man going to a wedding next weekend will search “menswear near me” to find a suit he needs.
• A party host whose night got out of hand will search for “carpet cleaning company” to get rid of the mess and stains.
• A housewife whose kitchen is leaking will search “local plumber” to get the piping fixed as soon as possible.

Again, you’re not persuading the marketer of needing a copywriter, the husband of flowers, the hostess of carpet cleaning, or the housewife of plumbing.

These problems and needs already exist. And they will continue to exist and actively search for businesses like yours as long as your niche doesn’t become obsolete (see Blockbuster).

Simply show up for searches like these and instantly land new customers.

That’s the power of using search engine optimization to appear on the first page of Google, ideally the top three results in Maps or Search.

Once you get SEO working for you, it can be become a wildfire for your company’s lead pipeline.

How Organic Search Traffic Compares To Paid Traffic

The key difference between something like a Facebook ad and receiving organic traffic from Google is you’ll always have to pay Facebook to get results.

Now if you know how to convert traffic and your ROI is significantly higher than your ad spend, keep on keeping on with your paid traffic. This isn’t a post knocking paid ads.

Where SEO is superior here is it can produce dividends for an entrepreneur who is flush with time but has little money. You can’t run well-performing ads with only a few hundred dollars to your name.

With that said, what if you’re already running paid ads? Great, keep going. I love ads and SEO for growing a business.

Having a two-faced approach where paid ads are persuading people who may not be actively searching for a service like yours to buy, as your SEO investment helps you capture the people who are actively in need, or browsing, for your services is incredibly powerful.

Your leads pipeline and new customer rate will spike with double the marketing efforts compared to sticking to one.

SEO: A Lean Marketing Strategy

In my advertising agency, I always tell customers and students: SEO for small businesses is a free gift from God that you’d be smart to capitalize on and foolish to ignore.

So, any business who is in it for the long haul should start putting weekly “investments” into their Google presence and organic traffic.

This is a blog post on why to do SEO, not how to write blog posts for SEO, so I’ll briefly touch on what these “investments” look like.

• Writing one long-form blog post a week
• Optimizing the company’s Google My Business listing and ensuring accurate information
• Asking satisfied customers for Google reviews (Amazon, Yelp, Facebook reviews down the road)
• Publishing new social media content and linking to your website in the profile bio
• Executing a few of the 20 different ways to generate backlinks

If you like free traffic from your target audience and converting them on your website, then SEO will be a hero for your company. The traffic also compounds, meaning the more you put into your online presence, the more traffic, customer acquisition, and profits you’ll generate year after year.

Talk about a gift far too kind. Remember, SEO is 100% free of charge.

Just be sure to give Google a Christmas present after it brings you thousands or maybe millions of dollars of business.

Related blog post: 20 Tips To Increase SEO Traffic