How Small Businesses Should Tackle SEO

When more than 99% of companies are small ones, it’s hard for anyone to get a head start on the competition. And with the rising commonality of customers typing a new business into the search bar before visiting it, only 17% of companies put time, effort, and money into SEO to satisfy the needs of a staggering 80%.

Skirting around SEO, or steering clear of learning about it altogether, can hinder the growth of your business to a surprising degree, especially if it’s a smaller, more recent entity. Bring yourself face-to-face with what SEO is and everything it entails; we’ll help you get started.

The goal of SEO, or search engine optimization, is to make your company’s website and social media profiles more visible when customers search relevant words online. Why is this important if you have high-performing paid advertisements? Because these organic search results lead to more sales than those advertisements do. In fact, curious consumers opt for these results 95% of the time.

Working on SEO means using a series of techniques to rank higher, or closer to the top, of the search engine results. Strategies like altering website structure, putting links into your content, promoting your company on social media, and focusing on content marketing are all great ways to improve your business’s SEO.

If you still don’t think it’s worth your time, consider this: at least 70% of customers search the company they’re looking to purchase from before they complete that purchase to see if the company satisfies their needs. If your company can’t easily be found in the search results, you’ll lose customers to your better-equipped competitors.

Search engine optimization is like competing for a spot in a phonebook that lists businesses by relevance instead of alphabetical order. Businesses should truly focus on SEO as soon as they begin creating their websites, but this is seldom the case. While larger businesses have the budget, and sometimes the exposure, to invest in effective marketing campaigns, businesses that are smaller and newer can safely rely on SEO. It’s not free, but it’s a lot cheaper than explicitly marketing yourself.

So how do you get started? You’ll need to focus on tactics that increase your website traffic, acquire leads, and generate more sales. Both on-site and off-site SEO are important for your company’s online success. The former deals with keeping your text, image, and video content in line with the current search engine rules, while the latter refers to increasing your company’s presence in digital listings and directories mainly through influencer interaction.

First, take the time to build your website. Use this as a draft and start working on improving your pages, focusing especially on keywords, the words your customers search that are relevant to your company. If you’re unsure what your keywords are, find out what your customers are searching and which keywords your competitors are using to rank higher. Keyword Planner is a good tool to use when completing this step, though there are other options available as well.

Your next focus should be content marketing. Creating content of ideal length that is readable, keyword optimized, useful, and authoritative will boost your search engine ranking. The last of those elements is particularly significant, as making yourself an authority figure on a subject will keep your audience coming back to you for more information and naturally increase your SEO ranking.

Incorporating links into your content can also make your company more visible online. Make sure, however, to only include links to legitimate, well-respected sources that your target audience would likely visit outside of your website. Link building in a sneaky, dishonest way or with untrustworthy sources can result in lost sales and business penalties.

Of course, social media marketing is just as important as the aforementioned strategies. Most companies know that while a large amount of likes, comments, and shares doesn’t boost SEO ranking due to the risk of content being unfairly influenced or tampered with, having a presence on several different social media platforms brings traffic to your website. You can also give your customers more information about your company and learn more about what they like and dislike this way, making it easier to cater to their needs.

Unlike a stellar marketing campaign, SEO can’t be done once and left alone forever afterwards. As consumers and search engine rules change, SEO must change to accommodate. It’s an ongoing commitment, especially for small businesses. But when it’s done right, it can really pay off.

Increasing your Conversion Rate with Location Information

SEO is all the rage in the business world right now, but it doesn’t guarantee you success. Customers need to be able to both find your company easily online and find what they’re looking for on a straightforward, attractive template. The true key to increasing your conversions is company-to-consumer connection.

Recent studies show that appearing local to your customers is the best way to connect with them. Landing pages, social media accounts, and local business associations have proven themselves to be effective in upping the amount of customer interaction a business receives. Furthermore, 83% of consumers will typically only travel to shop at stores 15 minutes away or less. Most consumers value location over product price, a surprising find considering how much emphasis is put on SEO for marketers. Most buyers do, however, value quality over location, meaning they’re often willing to travel further distances if the quality of a product is outstanding.

If your business sells something that people buy consistently, such as food, gasoline, cigarettes, or bus tickets, consumers will seek out the location closest to them to make frequent purchasing easy. Customers prefer gas stations situated no further than 6 minutes away from their homes, grocery stores 9 minutes away, home, garden, and auto stores 14 minutes away, and clothing stores 20 minutes away.

Having this information at your disposal is convenient, but using it is a bit tricky. There exist many dependent factors that determine just how far a customer is willing to go for a product or service, including method of transportation, access to highways, and traffic level. Converting travel times into distances using roadway routes with light traffic comes out to 2.2 miles every 6 minutes, 4.1 miles every 9 minutes, 4.9 miles every 12 minutes, and 9.3 miles every 20 minutes.

Studies provided by Google and Access are too broad to use, citing that 80% of customer purchases are made within a 20 mile radius of home, and 72% of customers looking in their area choose a store no more than 5 miles away. With these newfound results, businesses can be confident that consumers visit grocery stores, cafes, pharmacies, post offices, and laundry service locations that are situated no more than 4 miles from their homes.

Now that we know how powerful location is, how do we use it to turn consumers into customers? You’ll first have to make the location information of your business very accessible. It may seem more beneficial to advertise your products on every inch of your website that’s free, but this may end up driving your website’s visitors away, especially if it takes up an entire mobile phone screen. Include a Contact or Location section in your website’s tab collection and fill it with location photos, interactive maps, and nearby addresses to clearly highlight where your business is.

If your company has more than one location, you’ve probably already taken the time to create a page on your website with the addresses and hours of each store. Although this is useful, don’t stop there; create a landing page for each store as well. If you don’t think that’s worth the effort, at the very least, create a Facebook page, Yelp listing, or Google My Business profile for every location. Your audience will then have all the information about your stores at their fingertips, more easily turning casual site visitors into loyal customers.

Your store’s address may be all your customers need, but if your location is unusual or hidden away, descriptions of the space around the store are extremely useful for newcomers looking for it. Add information about nearby buildings, stores, and intersections to make the process of locating your store easier. A collection of photos from different angles can also help consumers coming from a different direction recognize your store.

To accommodate customers traveling to your store from more than 10 minutes away, mention well-known landmarks that the building is near. Describing your store’s location in relation to a popular plaza, highway, or department store will almost guarantee that no consumer seeking out your store will get lost on the way there. People from out of town will especially appreciate your efforts. Even though your location doesn’t move, change its description depending on who you’re targeting, using words each audience will recognize.

Location plays an unexpectedly big role in customer acquisition, and should therefore never be neglected. Give your audience the location information they need, and they’ll give you the conversions you want.

The Pros and Cons of Influencer Marketing

There are few tactics in modern-day advertising that are as effective as influencer marketing. Even though it’s over a decade old, influencer marketing has only become commonplace recently, approaching an impressive $2 billion in revenue last year alone. It then comes as no surprise that 41% of marketers had a greater impact on consumers when using influencer marketing than when using other methods of advertising. Additionally, 32% of marketers claimed influencer marketing was necessary for the success of their campaigns.

If influencer marketing is so great, why don’t all marketers use it? The main reason many companies still avoid it is the challenges it comes with. It can be difficult to tell regular content apart from sponsored content in some cases, and the metrics it produces aren’t always clear. But the biggest problem that influencer marketing users experience is fraud.

Dishonest companies using influencer marketing as their main advertising strategy will pay consumers to like, comment on, follow, and promote their brand on popular social media platforms. Most of the time, these consumers haven’t tried the company’s products or services and are simply saying exactly what the company tells them to say. For a strategy that thrives on genuine recommendations of a brand, this is very harmful.

Fraud in influencer marketing happens more often than you may think. We forget that failing to clearly label sponsored content is also considered fraud, and over 100 large companies have been guilty of it in the recent past. To curb the incidents, the Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters to those companies and created stricter rules about sponsored content. Smaller companies aren’t exempt from these rules, of course, but it’s much easier for them to break them without suffering any immediate consequences.

Incentives for advertisers may help decrease the frequency at which this problem occurs. Allowing compliant brands to access advanced analytics to see the effects of their marketing efforts or giving them the option to push overtly labeled sponsored ads to the top of user feeds could be a better way of encouraging everyone to follow the rules. Instagram has already begun to test out this strategy, offering a Paid Partnership tag that gives marketers access to the advertisement’s reach and interaction data.

Follower fraud is harder to identify than unlabeled sponsored content. Both individual users and active companies on social media can enlist the help of an autobot for a fairly low price. This autobot selects a series of fake accounts to follow the user’s account, making them appear more popular than they really are. Unfortunately, this sneaky strategy is happening more and more as social media becomes the centre of the advertising universe. Although it’s difficult to spot, it can be identified by closely examining follower numbers in relation to content interaction rates and unusual comment patterns. Companies that are caught in the act are blacklisted by the platform’s advertisement administrators.

All marketers should be aware that while their competitors may appear to have a plethora of followers, there aren’t enough policing systems within social media yet to quickly spot fraud, meaning those followers could be paid for or part of a pod. A pod is formed when influencers team up and interact with each other’s content. The algorithm for Instagram in particular will favour this activity and show it to more users.

Pods aren’t all bad, but they can pose problems to companies that are looking for organic results. Their partners could be commenting on their posts to increase their own reach without necessarily approving of or agreeing with the content. This can lead to a change in the company’s audience type and greater costs associated with the pod partnership. If you choose to use a pod, be sure to carefully monitor the amount and quality of comments you give and receive to avoid skewing your results.

Although pods and autobots are not as easily tackled as missing sponsored content tags are, a few organizations have been trying. Fohr Card, for instance, created a follower health tool that skims through an influencer’s followers and labels them as active users, lurking users, or autobots. That way, companies wanting to team up with an influencer can avoid fraudulent ones outright. Though this tool helps, most fraud analysis still needs to be completed manually.

Until the fraud issues are dealt with, businesses can use different marketing strategies and consumers can keep an eye out for insincere companies. If you choose influencer marketing despite its downfalls, play it safe and aim for authenticity.