SEO for Small Businesses

I love working with small businesses, but many owners have a difficult time seeing the value in the additional costs of a website that has been search engine optimized. I thought I would take the time to explain two perspectives on the value of SEO and how this can help the bottom line of your business – no matter how small or large.

SEO Helps Your Customers

At the core of SEO is the goal of improving your customers’ experience. The most obvious benefit of web-pages that have been optimized for search engines is that more customers will find your site. But pages that have been carefully written and have an easy to read layout also improves readability for your customers.

I also encourage blog and glossary writing to help your customers learn. I like blogs in an informal tone to add personality and a sense of “human-ness” to a website. Glossaries give your customers a powerful, easy-to-use tool to learn about your business. Both blogs and glossaries vastly improve your search engine rankings when built properly, so everyone gains.

SEO Can Improve Your ROI

Bottom line: SEO can make you money. Here’s a simple example. Sorry, there is no way around jumping into some basic math here:

Let’s say you get about 100 visitors to your website a day and 5 of those visitors make a purchase, netting you $50 each. That’s a 5% conversion rate. In theory, if you could get 200 visitors a day, you should see twice the profits.

SEO will improve not only the number of visits, but also the conversion rate. Why? Because customers will have better information and will be able to access this information more easily because your pages will be laid out better through the SEO process. Conservatively, let’s say that SEO increases your visitor count to 150 and jumps your conversion rate to only 10%.

150 visitors X .10 conversion rate X $50 net per purchase = $750
That’s a 50% gain! In our example, using only 250 days/year, you end up with a $62,500 improvement in profits. These are conservative numbers, by the way.

Wrapping it up

Hopefully I’ve demonstrated why SEO can make sense for even a small business. With numbers that are a fraction of those above, it still makes sense to have your website examined by an SEO professional.