Running a business was never easy, but running a small business successfully takes more than great luck. In the digital era, any company needs an online presence. Whether it is a simple Facebook page or a dedicated e-commerce site, your business needs to be visible to the online audience. Thousands of companies come and go every month; only the ones with a robust digital game survive the neck-to-neck competition among budding enterprises. Even the indie barista on the street corner has their dedicated social media presence they monitor.
In 2018, SEO has become everything in digital marketing. SEO is market research, keyword research, competitor research, copywriting, blog writing, building like authority, UX and UI. In short, it has all the answers to your business problems till date. Right now, SEO has become the hope for small businesses, independent entrepreneurs, and large corporation alike. It is a multi-faceted instrument that will increase your brand’s visibility and provide you with relevant visitors from the web.
What areas of SEO are essential for all small businesses?
For all small businesses, there are a couple of areas that require the touch of SEO. How many areas have you covered till date?
- Website: it is the prime real estate for SEO. Your site needs to be mobile-friendly, with an easy-to-use UI and a high ranking. Nothing beats a well-structured and fast site.
- Website Content: your website content should always help the customers understand the products and services you are offering to the people of Mauritius. They should find more than one reason to work with you.
- Blog Content: nothing helps more than informative blog content. You should highlight your services, product quality, and USP to a wider audience through quality content.
- On-page factors: apart from excellent quality content your site needs several on-page factors including basic meta tags, headers, SEO title, page title, URLs and meta descriptions. Adding these on-page SEO elements can help users find you easily.
- Local SEO: if your business serves a local audience in Mauritius, you might want to work on geo-specific content, and location-specific keywords to target a local audience. Businesses without local SEO are currently losing between hundreds to thousands of customers due to visibility issues. Speak with Mauritius SEO Rankglider to find out more about local SEO strategies.
- Link authority: building link authority is imperative for garnering high organic traffic. There is a direct link between strong positions in the SRL and high authority link building. Building a commendable link profile takes effort and time. Buying links is a black hat SEO practice that attracts severe penalties from Google and other search engines.
- Credibility: people like to spend money on products and services that are credible. Several genuine testimonials, reviews and case studies on the website help customers trust a business. For increasing customer loyalty, you should focus on building a strong business profile on the third-party business sites as well.
Why should every small business think about SEO?
Search engine optimization is an effective way to boost relevant organic traffic. It is the only way to improve your ranking on search engine result lists without spending a fortune on paid advertisements. Moreover, it is always relevant in the digital market. Here are some of the most persuasive arguments in favor of a robust SEO strategy
- Cost: the cost of an SEO strategy is never too much. You can decide to manage your website or your social media presence internally. While you should always consider taking SEO advice from the experts, you may take the matter into your own hands after you get the analysis of an audit. SEO is never as costly as most small businesses think it to be. It gives you a cost-effective way of fighting against your competitors.
- Organic traffic: organic traffic is the influx of visitors from direct Google search results pages. Nothing compares to the quality of organic traffic since they always present a high probability of converting. Paid traffic is less in number, and the current scenario of PPC campaigns suggest that a high percentage of the paid ad traffic can be bots.
- Trust and loyalty: customers hardly ever go beyond the first search engine results page to search for websites and merchants. Securing a high rank and getting good reviews to act as badges of trust. Research shows that customers like spending money on sites they find trustworthy. You will also have high authority external links, and optimized page elements to impress your visitors. Therefore, working on your online presence and SEO can improve buyer loyalty for your business.
- Improved user experience: in 2018 user experience is the most crucial aspect of any digital experience. Google values it above several ranking signals, ever since the launch of the Hummingbird update. The search engine giant has finally understood how to interpret user feedback. In most of the cases, customers can decipher what they like and dislike about a site. If they enter your website and find it slow, or cluttered, or difficult to use, they will bounce back to the SRL. That will increase the site’s bounce rate and take a toll on your rankings. Improving SEO automatically enhances the UX and enhances the Google ranks of a website.
- It is a long-term investment: some might want to argue that SEO is costlier than physical ad placement in Mauritius. However, physical advertisements are ephemeral compared to SEO. Although SEO always evolves, and you need to pay attention to update your old strategies, it will last longer than most physical advertising and broadcast marketing methods. SEO can breathe a new lease of life into your old digital marketing strategy within a few weeks.
While you are attempting to revive your old digital marketing strategy, remember to give it time. SEO usually takes between three months to six months to make a difference. Since Google releases numerous updates per month, it is always advisable to work with an expert SEO agency in your locality to optimize your site and content for the local audience. All in all, SEO is the only multi-faceted technology that can boost your ranks, improve your traffic and enhance the experience of your users at one go.
