Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses

Over the years I’ve noticed businesses tend to approach search engine optimization (SEO) in one of the following two ways:

It’s an afterthought. In this case, the business tries to add SEO separately like grafting a new branch on to a fruit tree.
It’s at the core of their digital marketing. Rather than thinking SEO is a completely separate tactic, these businesses use SEO to fuel other areas of their marketing.

Which approach are you using? Which approach will give you better results? In this article, I’ll highlight some of the reasons why SEO should not be an afterthought in your marketing plan.

SEO Guides Web Development

Let’s start with your website. If you built your website without considering SEO, then chances are pretty good that your website is not structured properly for search engines.

I see this all the time. Businesses invest thousands of dollars building a beautiful website and then later learn they need to completely overhaul the navigation and site structure to have a shot at ranking in Google. This happens when you start web development without first conducting keyword research.

Keyword research to identify what your prospects are searching will guide your web development project and ensure your website has the correct pages to rank in Google.

SEO Powers Copywriting

Next, let’s address the copy on your website. Again, if you did not first conduct keyword research, then you’re missing critical information to guide your copywriting. Keyword research for SEO gives you invaluable insight into what your prospects are thinking about and the questions they want answered.

Plus, one of the keys to ranking high in search engines is to provide the most relevant, up-to-date, and comprehensive information on your webpages. Therefore, when SEO is guiding your copywriting, then you’re more likely to have webpages that engage your visitors and keep then from clicking the dreaded “Back” button to leave your site.

SEO Fuels Email Marketing & Social Media

To be successful with email marketing and social media marketing, you need great content. Otherwise, your audience will stop opening your emails and will tune you out on social media sites.

As I mentioned above, you also need great content for SEO and one of the best tools to publish articles is a blog. That means, if SEO is at the core of your marketing, then you must have a solution to create and publish content, month after month.

So if you’re already publishing great content for SEO, then it’s not going to take much extra effort to launch email marketing and social media marketing. Simply repurpose those articles and publish them via email and on your social media platforms to jumpstart those marketing tactics.

SEO Forges Partnerships

Finally, SEO can help you forge strategic partnerships. This one is not so obvious so let’s take a closer look at how this works.

I’ve mentioned throughout this article that SEO relies on great content and you likely were picturing this content published on your own website. However, to be successful with SEO you also need to publish your content on other relevant website with links back to your website.

How do you publish content on other websites? First, you need to contact them and start a conversation. Then if it’s a good fit you can explore the possibility of a referral partnership. In my experience, sharing content is a great first step that can later lead to strong strategic partnerships down the road.