Have you ever made an investment that yields a return of at least 50%? Few such investments exist, with one notable exception: SEO. The ROI of SEO for small businesses is incalculable. Many businesses, especially small businesses, make the critical mistake of neglecting to their own detriment.
The fact of the matter is that if your business is not utilizing it, your competitors certainly are. It’s tempting to ignore it because you have so many responsibilities as a business owner, ranging from accounting to sales and HR, just to name a few. Calculating the ROI of SEO in increased revenues is not easy nor transparent, but is certainly doable.
SEO is indisputably the most powerful organic tool that small enterprises have at their disposal in leveling the playing field with your larger competitors.
How SEO Helps Website Traffic
Traffic is very important in understanding SEO. Traffic by itself to your website does not guarantee an increase in revenues. One of the primary results of SEO is that it makes your site more visible in the organic search results.
That’s the regular search results, not counting the ads. At least 50% of all website traffic flows through organic search results. If a web page is ranked on the first page of the SERPS, they will be exposed to 90% of that traffic.
That is especially the case when it comes down to local search results or a niche market. This is done by ensuring that your website is ranked on the first page of the SERPS. Use paid search tools like Spyfu, Google Trends or Invoca to find out what searches you are appearing in.
Attracting the Right Audience
A properly designed website built on SEO must take into account every technical aspect into account to draw your target audience. The website architecture and any content must be structured to draw for inbound traffic.
This is accomplished through detailed competitor analysis. You have to know who the competition is and what they’re doing in order to develop and implement an effective strategy.
A great starting point would be surveying your own customer data to understand who your audience and how to do so. What devices do they use? What technologies have you observed them using when they shop with you? What makes tracking ROI of SEO so tricky is keeping track of all the inbound traffic.
Keeping track of people who engage with your brand would be a good way to do this. Specifically, keeping tabs on what they click, comment on, like, share or add to the cart are all useful metrics.
Your traffic should also be customers who buy more, or ready to take the desired action. Customers who don’t take a lot of time convincing or time to make a buying decision are also vital to your company. Segmenting your customers is the key to managing your traffic.
Reducing the Bounce Rate
SEO will reduce the bounce rate on your website. Micro-conversion, the little actions that you ask people to take, should be baked into the website design. Customers prefer to know exactly what you want them to click, and who can blame them? SEO-friendly web design has clear calls to action that direct people to key pages on the site.
Not having a menu on key pages is another way to reduce the bounce rate. When a person arrives on one of your pages, you want them to do one thing only: click on the call to action. Once people click on the CTA they are far more likely to engage with your website.
That means more visitors becoming solid leads. And leads tend to become paying customers. To maximize conversions. You need to understand human behavior and psychology.
\You will not go anywhere by putting a random CTA on any page that you want to. If companies engage in too much selling, that will disrupt the user’s experience. Visitors will then lose patience and leave. That said having CTAs are critical.
There is no doubt that having no CTA will hurt conversions because no one will understand why you want them on your website in the first place.
SEO Is A Must for Any Small Business
SEO is undoubtedly the smartest business investment anyone can make. Not only does it ensure your competitiveness, but it also yields a return of at least 50%. Think of it as revenue-generator, not an expense. While calculating the revenues from an SEO strategy is not easy, the math does not lie. The ROI of SEO is simply unmatched, and businesses must adapt or their competitors will.
