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Why don’t more businesses engage in SEO?

Large businesses and technology-based businesses are usually on top of the SEO game. They have dedicated employees who keep up with the complex and ever-changing search rules.  They may even have a personal contact at the larger search engine companies.  They track their results every single day and in some cases, every single hour.  Small businesses just can’t compete at this same level and unfortunately, this means many simply drop it from their efforts all together.

Yet, for small businesses, this is a very bad strategy.  When it comes to how people find your business, a successful online presence is absolutely essential, especially if your primary customers are in the younger generations, or really anyone 65 and under.  And to make an online presence successful, you must engage in SEO.  And if this sounds scary to you, let’s take a hard look at what your objections could be.

 SEO doesn’t work.  SEO does work.  The statistics show that.  But you have to practice SEO correctly in order for it to work for you.  Keywords are a huge part of whether SEO will work for you or not.  Let’s take an example.  If you are a massage therapist in Rockledge, Florida and you specialize in Swedish massage, you need to make sure those exact words are included in the content of your website.  And because you are a local business, using your address and mapping tools, you will help searchers better find you when doing local searches.

Your goal is to think like your customer and use the keywords that they will use in order to find you online.  And once they find you, your goal is to make sure they get great information from your website, so that they will not only stay on your page, but will be incited to make contact.

SEO is too difficult to understand. The algorithms used by major search engines are extremely complex.  But you don’t have to understand the algorithms in order to make SEO work for you.  What you do have to understand is how you can practically apply the way the search works to your website plan.  This means finding out what those time-tested best practices are.

One of the things we know that causes a page to become higher in the search engine results is blog content. Google looks for relevant and up-to-date blog content.  All things being the same, if one website has high-quality, frequently updated blog content and another doesn’t, Google will show the site with the blogs higher in the rankings than the other.

SEO is too expensive and takes too much work.  When it comes to hard work and money, the answer is – it may take some time, effort and money especially if you’re starting off with a poorly created online presence.  But with sales potential of a well-created online presence, the initial outlay is well worth the cost.

When it comes to an ongoing SEO budget, you don’t have to put a lot of money into it.  Just like any other marketing method, you must put some in so you can get back the results you want to get.  Unlike other marketing methods, you can choose your budget and options. But remember, with an increasing number of potential customers using search as their means of finding local businesses, you want to make your budget high enough to appropriately target these potential customers.