Avoid Common SME Problems with SEO
As 94% of mobile search traffic engages and clicks on organic search results on Google, any SME cheating their way to the top by putting their money into Google Ads is making a huge mistake.
According to statistics, companies only capture 6% of users using Google Ads.
Arguably, the money spent bidding on keywords and PPC would be better invested in getting to the top of organic search results. So, then, why do most SMEs shy away?
Therefore, businesses and brands that do not invest in SEO risk losing millions of pounds in traffic.
However, many SMEs don’t realise that SEO is more than just free traffic, and as a result, they fail to learn how it can help them overcome several problems at once.
1. Finding customers
Customers don’t find businesses; they find services and products.
Sadly, SMEs lack the massive brand association or awareness big companies enjoy, which means customers won’t know who you are until you make them aware.
- Take Vanilla Circus, for example; you didn’t Google us and come to read this post. Instead, you found us likely through Google Search – and that’s OK because we got you here in the first place.
Organic search traffic is a fully reliable way for businesses to rely on customers to come to them.
Using your product or service keywords and customer pain points, we can uncover what they Google. If we can bring you to the top of their search, then we have a higher chance of converting them.
Conversely, advertising hopes the user has the problem and hopes to catch them at the right moment, in the right mood. But that’s not the case with search marketing. See using urgency in your digital ads.
Customers are searching for a solution; you’ll never be considered if you’re not in the top 8-10 results.
2. Increasing visibility and awareness
Appearing on the first page of Google is like advertising your product to millions of eyeballs every month.
Think of it this way: the higher you rank in search engines, the more visible you are to people when searching keyword terms relevant to your brand.
You’ll even appear in Google Image results and on maps.
It’s simple: a higher visibility translates to more organic traffic. The more traffic, the higher the percentage of users you can convert and, in the future, reconvert. If your product or service lives up to what you promise, you’ve possibly found a customer for life who will then refer and review your brand.
More importantly, digital marketing is crucial for your success in local domination, especially if you live in a well-populated and high-trafficked city or county.
By ranking in local search results or with keywords that have a location attached, your brand relevance and visibility will help you achieve a certain level of local fame, which might have only been possible with expensive advertising in the past.
3. Delivering quality and qualified leads
A good SEO company, like Vanilla Circus, will go after high value, converting keywords closest to the money.
We only deliver traffic that sells because pointless, vanity traffic will not make you a millionaire and will not increase your brand awareness.
For example, say you sold cars; smart keyword choices might be “cars for sale” or “cars for sale near me.”
Creating blog posts detailing the “best ways to clean a car” would not be very helpful in your case, and whilst it would increase traffic to the site, it would not be the right kind of traffic.
Therefore, a specialist company like ourselves only focuses on delivering quality and qualified leads, and we do this by
- It is going after keywords that make sense and convert.
- Write cost and finance pages to catch consumers at the end of their buying journey.
- See a beginner’s Guide to Lead Gen.
4. Frees up time and money for marketing
You don’t need us to tell you that time is money. Think about it.
We all have the same number of hours in a day. Your company might have spent one of those hours running an advertising campaign, whereas your competitor might spend several hours on their website. Who wins at the end of the day?
Who sees the most significant return on their investment? When your advert is not switched on, it’s not attracting customers. Your website is there whenever someone searches.
By spending your marketing budget on wiser investments like SEO, you’ll experience a more significant and faster return on your investment, which expands your purse and allows you to focus on much more important things, like scaling the company.
5. Allows businesses to scale at large
Your strategy should focus on local and national SEO and national. Say, for example, you’re based in London; it would first focus on ensuring your rank for every prominent location in the city and for London itself.
The next step, beneficial if you’re nationwide, is to rank for national keywords that include searches without a location. This is where the significant traffic and potential to convert many customers are especially beneficial for online services and businesses.
Take one of the dentists we work with, for example; last year, they barely filled up the calendar and had very few new patient sign up a month:
- They already had some pre-existing work on the website, resulting in around 50 new monthly patients.
- Six months later, this figure doubled, with 100 new patients signing up monthly (think of the lifetime value).
- The savvy practice increased the price of their new patient exams, increasing their profit with this consistent influx of further patient enquiries (not including actual treatment bookings).
- So, you can see how digital marketing can help businesses scale and acquire the money to open more businesses, websites and locations.
6. Keeps marketing budgets low and removes reliance on costly advertising
Advertising is expensive, whether you choose to advertise on Google, magazines, television, billboards, radio or even social media.
While it might initially seem cheap, especially when you can set 10-a-day budgets on Google and Facebook, this can be pretty costly if no one clicks or those who click do not convert or even enquire.
For example, you could spend up to £250 per lead with Google Ads, who, in the end, does not become a customer – now that cuts into profits dramatically.
Another downside with ads is that if money is low for one month, you cannot boost it if you rely on running ads to bring in custom. The positive aspect of ranking copy is that it’s evergreen, which means if you employ an excellent company to manage it (like VC), you can rely on the fact that you’ll be there when your customer is searching.
SEO, therefore, is a much more sustainable asset and investment.
Advertising is for the lazy and will only mostly be beneficial if you’re offering a crazy discount, but do consider your cost per acquisition.