7 Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses (And Pro Tips)

Would you like to know the benefits of SEO for small businesses?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful digital marketing strategy to help your website and business become more visible to online searchers. This makes it an excellent channel for marketing your business and products, even if you’re a small business.

In this article, we’ll show you the benefits of SEO for small businesses.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a site or its content to improve its ranking and visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). The primary goals of SEO include making it easier for search engines to crawl, understand, and rank your site or content for relevant search queries. Doing so results in more people finding your content when they search online, leading to more organic traffic.

This brings us to our main discussion of the day: the benefits of SEO.

7 Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses

There are many pros and cons of SEO for small businesses. In this section, we’ll focus on the pros/benefits. 

So, let’s get to it!

1. Increased Visibility on SERPs

One of the most significant benefits of SEO is that it increases your visibility on SERPs. Visibility on SERPs is crucial as there’s a lot of competition on SERPs. For example, take a look at the screenshot below. It shows how many blog posts were written today (as of the writing of this article):

With so much competition, getting eyes on your content is very important. And SEO does just that, especially if you have the best WordPress SEO plugins. And it doesn’t get any better than All In One SEO (AIOSEO).

AIOSEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market and is trusted by over 3 million savvy website owners and marketers to help them dominate the SERPs and drive relevant traffic to their sites. This is because the plugin has many powerful SEO features and modules to help you optimize your website for search engines and users. Examples of said features include:

• Search Statistics: This powerful Google Search Console integration lets you track your keyword rankings and see important SEO metrics with 1-click, and more.
• AI Title/Description Generator: An AI-powered tool that generates SEO titles and meta descriptions with 1-click.
• Next-gen Schema Generator: This makes adding any type of schema markup super easy.
• Redirection Manager: Helps you manage redirects and eliminate 404 errors, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site.
• Link Assistant: Powerful internal linking tool that automates building links between pages on your site. It also gives you an audit of outbound links.
• SEO Preview: The SEO Preview tool gives you an overview of your search and social snippets and general SEO so you can improve your optimization.
• IndexNow: For instantaneous indexing on search engines that support the IndexNow protocol (like Bing and Yandex).
• Robots.txt editor: The advanced Robots.txt editor gives you full control over the instructions you give web crawlers about what folders and files to crawl on your WordPress site.

All these features (and more) help boost your site’s visibility on SERPs. Others also help you boost your organic clickthrough rate. This, too, boosts your visibility and also results in business growth.

For step-by-step instructions on how to install AIOSEO, check out our installation guide.

2. Boosts Brand Awareness

Another benefit of SEO for small businesses is that it can help increase brand awareness. Brand awareness refers to the extent of your target audience’s familiarity with your brand and how easily they can recognize it. This is critical to business growth. The more familiar people are with your brand, the more likely they will do business with you. 

SEO helps boost your brand awareness because the more your content ranks high on search engines, the more touchpoints your prospects have with your brand. Touchpoints simply refer to the encounters your prospects have with your brand. SEO gives you a lot of opportunities to get your site, products, and other content in front of your target audience.

3. Drives Sales

Most benefits of SEO have a snowball effect, particularly the benefit of high-quality traffic. High-quality traffic leads to high-quality leads, leading to a boost in sales.

This is the biggest benefit of SEO, as it reduces your customer acquisition costs.

Because SEO’s primary goal is to help you become more discoverable by your target audience, ranking high means reaching more people interested in your product or services. And if you play your SEO cards right, you may even land the featured snippet, also called position zero. This is usually the first organic ranking after ads and gets more real estate on SERPs.

Getting to the top of the SERPs results in you getting a whopping 27.6% of all clicks on the top page of SERPs. This means you get the lion’s share of traffic. It also means you generate more sales.

4. Cost-effective Marketing Channel

Most small businesses and startups don’t have the luxury of massive marketing budgets. And that’s why SEO must be one of your top marketing channels. That’s because not only is it effective, but it is also cost-effective compared to other marketing channels like paid advertising.

One way in which SEO can help you save money is that you can DIY your SEO. With the right SEO tools and plugins, you can easily design, develop, and deploy your campaigns without hiring an SEO specialist.

Another factor that makes SEO cost-effective is that it continues to bring results for years. Sure, you may need to do some maintenance work on your site and content regularly, but each campaign will continue bringing you traffic without you having to spend another cent. This means you get a high return on investment despite not having spent much.

5. Powerful Lead Generation Strategy

Leads are the lifeblood of any business, especially small businesses looking to break into a competitive market.  That’s why a well-executed SEO campaign results in you driving targeted traffic to your site.

This targeted traffic is more likely to convert into paid customers than traffic from paid campaigns, as inbound leads come to your site by choice. Your content attracts them because they find it valuable. As a result, they’re more likely to convert into paying customers.

Another reason SEO is such a powerful lead generation strategy is that people prefer organic results on search engines to paid ads. That’s why 68% of all online experiences start with a search engine. And that’s also why organic search results convert better.

6. Helps Build Credibility and Authority

Ranking high on search engines signals to users that your brand is credible enough to be trusted by search engines. In addition, seeing your brand and content on the first page of SERPs instills a sense of trust in your target audience.

Besides helping build credibility, SEO helps you establish yourself as an authority in your field. The more people find your content, the more they deem you an authority in your niche.

Both these aspects of SEO can be bolstered further, not just by ranking high on SERPs but also by having your search listing show social proof.

And what better social proof than reviews?

This is why you need a powerful SEO tool like AIOSEO. It makes it easy to add any type of schema to your site and content, with review schema being one of them. 

You can check out our guide on adding review schema here. 

A well-executed SEO strategy will benefit your business by helping you build credibility and authority. And these are essential ingredients for growing a thriving business.

7. Can Help Drive Local Traffic

If you run a service-based business or brick-and-mortar establishment, your target audience is within your geographical location. Because of this, it may be tempting to think you don’t need to invest that much into SEO. 

On the contrary, you still need SEO. 

Research shows that 46% of all searches on Google have local intent. It also shows that 97% of search engine users have searched for a local business online. 

Especially if you’re a local business, you need SEO to make it easy for your customers to find your business. For example, you can add Local Business schema to help search engines identify your business and service area. 

You can also embed Google Maps in your content to make it easier for your customers to find your location.

All these make it super easy for you to rank for local searches and drive traffic to your site and business.

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The Cons of SEO for Small Businesses

While SEO is one of the best marketing channels for small businesses, it also has its caveats, although only a few. One of the most significant cons of SEO for small businesses is that it can take time for you to start seeing results.

However, to combat this problem, you can use our IndexNow module to get your content indexed faster on platforms that support the IndexNow protocol.

The other significant con of SEO is that search engines are always changing and improving their algorithms. However, if your SEO strategy follows search engine guidelines, these won’t impact your rankings and traffic that much.

However, when you consider the pros and cons of SEO, it’s evident that the pros far outweigh the cons.

That’s why you must implement SEO growth hacks to ensure fast business growth.

Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses: Your FAQs Answered

The Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses: The Effort is Well Worth It!

SEO should be your primary marketing channel if you’re a small business or startup. This is because it can give you a lot of mileage even on a small budget. Plus, if you have a powerful SEO plugin like AIOSEO, you can even DIY your SEO and manage to compete with the bigger brands in your industry.

We hope this post helped you know the main benefits of SEO for small businesses. You may also want to check out other articles on our blog, like how to start a small business blog and our blog post SEO checklist.

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Kato Nkhoma Content Writer

Kato is one of those rare unicorns born with a pen in his hand—so the legend says. He’s authored 2 books and produced content for hundreds of brands. When he’s not creating content for AIOSEO, you’ll find him either watching tech videos on YouTube or playing with his kids. And if you can’t find him, he’s probably gone camping.

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