Why Small Businesses Need to Prioritise SEO

If you’re not familiar with the term “SEO”, it stands for search engine optimization. SEO makes your content accessible and deliverable to viewers via main search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. If successful, SEO can be an ongoing source of free, organic traffic for your business.

The purpose of a search engine is to provide users with the best possible answers or information to a question or topic. This means the results of a search must be helpful and relevant. With SEO, keywords are used. These keywords are a combination of words that describe a topic or a phrase that users are searching for. If these words can be identified, simple and helpful content can be delivered to users.

Why is SEO important for small businesses specifically? For one, small businesses might not have the financial means that a larger business has. This means that it is harder to reach a larger audience, making it difficult to share a product or service. The budget for digital marketing may be limited as well, making it that much more important for search engines to reach potential customers.

SEO helps potential customers find small businesses without the business needing to reach out to them. When there is a need for a service, customers can type into their search bar and identify related businesses located in their surrounding area. People spend a significant amount of time online these days and are more prone to search for services in their web browser rather than calling around on the phone. For example, if a customer simply types in “laundromats near me,” they are immediately shown all of the available businesses in the area, which helps market small businesses that the customer wouldn’t have otherwise known about.

When it comes to marketing your small business and reaching as wide an audience as possible, SEO is an incredibly efficient and helpful tool.