Many small business owners have heard about or are familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) and have big dreams for their first website. Building a results-driven website can be challenging, but an effective SEO strategy can make a substantial difference. An SEO consultant is a professional that comes in and optimizes your website for maximum usability and search engine friendliness. Developing an SEO strategy can be time-consuming and not easy to understand, especially alongside running a business. Deciding to hire an SEO consultant is helpful as it will save you a lot of time and increase traffic over time once implemented.
Taking the step to bring an SEO consultant onto your team can be costly, meaning many small businesses choose to do web marketing themselves to save in funding. However, business owners have come to realize that investing in an SEO specialist is now considered a necessary part of any successful business as you may be missing out on appealing results if completing it on your own.
Why Should You Hire an SEO Consultant?
Don’t let the cost of an SEO consultant be the end-all in your decision to bring a specialist onto your team. Before even reviewing the cost details, it’s vital that you become knowledgeable of the many benefits as this will show you why you should even bother with an SEO consultant. You’ve likely invested a lot of time, resources, and money when it comes to your website, and an effective SEO strategy will help people find it.
Search engines are easily the gateway to your visitors, and implementing a robust SEO method or strategy is a must to gain traction in today’s digital world. Unless you have in-depth knowledge of the current SEO best practices and implementations, you’ll likely need a hand in navigating the SEO process. While this may not seem like enough of an answer, investing in an SEO consultant will ensure the job is done correctly, and you get the results you’re hoping for.
Along with this, there are many more benefits that come with hiring an SEO consultant, and some may be ones you haven’t considered or been aware of.
Build Brand Awareness
An effective SEO strategy will help your business get higher rankings in SERPs, in turn, helping build brand awareness. If potential customers see your business pop up repeatedly in SERPs, the more they are aware of who your business is and what it does. You are more likely to build trust with potential customers if your business is what they see when searching for key terms. Local and national brand awareness for small businesses is essential for success and making your name known. If you’re looking for ways to enhance brand awareness, investing in SEO will help you gain top ranking in key terms related to your business.
Invest in Your Business
While it is known that SEO is a costly investment, it’s essential to look at the big picture. If you’re a small business wanting to increase traffic and sales, investing in SEO is really an investment in your business’s future. It may take some time before you start to see results from an SEO campaign; however, you will notice the results are incredibly beneficial for your business’s success. An effective SEO strategy will deliver more leads, build brand awareness, and increase ROI compared to other digital marketing strategies. Likely, you will also notice more conversions due to an SEO strategy’s ability to target individuals looking specifically for a business like yours directly.
Improve Your Conversion Ratio
Websites that are optimized with an effective SEO strategy have been proven to run faster, are easy to read and surf, and are friendly for the varying mobile devices in the world today. If your website meets these guidelines, readers and visitors are more likely to extend their stay and continue to return as necessary. Improving your conversion ratio is helpful because it will increase both targeted and organic traffic. The more potential customers coming to your website are interested in your products or services, the more likely they are to convert into loyal customers.
User-Friendly Experience
Search engines are drawn to websites that make it easy for visitors to find what they want and provide useful valuable information. By optimizing your website content with an SEO strategy, your written content, photos, and videos help make a difference. Along with these elements, navigation and device friendliness will be improved. Creating a well-structured, uncluttered website is the key to providing potential customers with a user-friendly experience. If potential customers can navigate your website with little to no issues and find your content relevant, they’ll likely return in the future and recommend your business to others.
Increase Targeted and Organic Traffic
SEO strategies help increase visibility for your website and business. As your visibility increases with these techniques and strategies, your targeted and organic traffic will increase, thus resulting in an increase of leads and sales in the long run. If an SEO strategy is done correctly, such as with the guidance and support of an SEO consultant, you should be attracting more relevant traffic to your website. Keywords will be targeted directly related to your products or services, so potential customers searching these terms will come across your website and convert into a customer.
Find Customers in the Discovery Phase
Finding new customers is often tricky, but focusing on SEO will help you reach customers during the discovery phase. The discovery phase is the stage in which potential customers are just beginning their search. During this phase, they’re conducting numerous searches, learning about the various choices available, assessing the pros and cons of each, and more. Implementing an SEO strategy on your website will help your products or services become available in their initial searches, which is pivotal in the purchase decision process.
Cost-Effective Marketing
There are big and small businesses within every industry, and, likely, the big players in your industry will easily outspend you in marketing. Rest assured, incorporating an SEO strategy into your digital marketing can provide you with many benefits and even has the potential to make your business stand out from competition down the road. Companies with access to large budgets can spend more on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and other forms of ads. A well-thought-out SEO strategy will help your business climb to where the big players are by bringing more traffic to your website and improving your ranking.
Long-Lasting Results
Many companies choose to utilize some sort of paid advertising as results are seen in a few days rather than multiple months. Both online and offline ads only provide you with results for as long as you spend money on them. SEO efforts must be maintained over time, but the results are long-lasting. Once you have started ranking, the results will only continue to improve. Maintenance is required for SEO efforts, so you can be sure to continue ranking above the competition and stay visible to potential customers when conducting their search. Investing in SEO will give you results for a lifetime if designed and implemented correctly.
Stay Ahead of the Curve
There are numerous reasons why hiring an SEO consultant, or specialist is beneficial for your business. The more you become familiar with SEO and its strategies and methods, the more you’ll begin to realize that it’s an ongoing, continual process. Hiring an SEO consultant will ensure that you have an expert working on your SEO at all times, and, because of this, future roadblocks are commonly addressed early on or avoided altogether. Along with developing your SEO strategy, an SEO consultant will also do the following:
- Provide recommendations for web-maintenance
- Stay up to date and knowledgeable of the latest SEO techniques and strategies
- Help prevent your website from being blacklisted from top search engines
But What About the Cost of SEO?
You may still be asking yourself if SEO is really worth it, so we’ll share a scenario so you can get a better idea of how valuable SEO actually is. To start off, let’s say you make $100 per order on average, and 1,000 visitors visit your online store each day. Along with this, becoming familiar with the percentage of your visitors that convert or decide to purchase your products or services is vital. For this scenario, we’ll say your average conversion rate is 2%.
Your average monthly revenue without SEO services is $60,000 which is calculated by completing the following equation: 1,000 visitors per day x 30 days x .02 conversion rate x $100 = $60,000.
Simple SEO strategies can improve your website ranking and move it from a lower-ranking page to a higher ranking. By optimizing your website with SEO, you’ve noticed a 50% increase in daily traffic.
Once you see your traffic increasing, you adjust the equation accordingly, such as 1,500 visitors per day x 30 days x .02 conversion rate x $100 = $90,000. Once you’ve begun adjusting the equation, you can compare your total revenue to the revenue you started with before incorporating SEO strategies. In this unique case, your monthly revenue increased by $30,000, which equates to an additional $360,000 a year.
While it may be costly to invest in an SEO consultant, it’s worth it. Your website is an integral part of your overall marketing objectives, and having a marketing strategy that supports SEO objectives will help you get the most organic traffic possible.
It Won’t Make You Money Right Away
Like many effective marketing strategies, results aren’t seen right away. Choosing to incorporate SEO techniques and methods into your website will be costly but will eventually make you money over time. You must keep in mind that an SEO strategy alone won’t give you remarkable results; you must have an interlinked digital marketing strategy.
An experienced SEO consultant will optimize your website with SEO and fine-tune your existing digital marketing strategies, so everything correlates and works as one. Basic SEO principles and taking steps to promote your website will help you gain the organic traffic you deserve. Many things in life take time, so take the plunge and invest in SEO for your website; the results will surprise you.
