“SEO is not a priority marketing channel for us right now”, and “we don’t have the resources”, are two of the most common responses the team at Vitalis Digital hears when engaging with SMB owners at networking events or on prospective business development calls.
We get it, the reality is small and medium businesses are often in the precarious position of needing to drive SQLs and subsequent MRR increases as quickly as possible.
The impact that paid advertising channels have in this regard is immediate, driving a stream of commercially relevant traffic through to a website in exchange for an ever-fluctuating CPC Dollar amount. The age-old ‘pay to get in front of your customer’ approach, is a traditional yet effective method.
Now, if at this point you think we’re about to launch into a rant as to why paid advertising is bad and everyone should replace it with SEO, we’re sorry to disappoint you. We’re actually big fans of paid advertising channels as part of a multi-channel marketing approach.
What we would encourage though is, if you’ve disregarded SEO as a priority marketing channel right now or, feel that you don’t have the budget to embark on an SEO campaign at present, have a read of this article.
Below we discuss why it is important for small businesses to factor in SEO as part of their marketing strategy as soon as possible and explain the benefits that this will have in the long run. Let’s get stuck in.
Now, if at this point you think we’re about to launch into a rant as to why paid advertising is bad and everyone should replace it with SEO, we’re sorry to disappoint you. We’re actually big fans of paid advertising channels as part of a multi-channel marketing approach.
What we would encourage though is, if you’ve disregarded SEO as a priority marketing channel right now or, feel that you don’t have the budget to embark on an SEO campaign at present, have a read of this article.
Below we discuss why it is important for small businesses to factor in SEO as part of their marketing strategy as soon as possible and explain the benefits that this will have in the long run. Let’s get stuck in.
What is SEO?
If you’re reading this article as a business owner who’s had an internet connection over the past 20 years, I’d be shocked if you didn’t understand the basics of Search Engine Optimisation.
For those that have been disconnected from the internet, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the proactive approach of optimising your website with the goal of increasing your website visibility across search engines. This is done with the aim of driving greater levels of commercially relevant traffic to your website.
Let’s look at it from a practical example standpoint.
Put yourself in the shoes of your target customer. Now type in a non-branded search term that you anticipate they would type in to find your website e.g. conversational ai tool, best CRM tool, project management software. One, two, three, hey presto there’s your website, and so ends the article, good night…
But wait, it quickly dawns on you that your website didn’t come up in position 1, or page 1. In fact, your website doesn’t come up for your ‘golden bullet’ keyword at all. Your competitors yes but yours, no.
Herein lies the very essence of SEO. Improve the visibility and ranking of a website in search engine result pages with the goal of getting your website to rank as close to position one for as many commercially relevant keywords as possible.
Think customization car specialists off of MTV’s early naughties hit TV show ‘Pimp My Ride’. SEOs are the customization mechanics, your website is the car, and the people staring at your audacious vehicle zipping down the road wanting to know more, are your target customers.
Okay, I’ll admit the analogy doesn’t stand up 100%, but hopefully, you catch my drift.
Backlinko – The table above demonstrated Click Through Rates based on ranking position
Why is SEO important for small & medium businesses?
Let’s rewind and rewrite the example provided above. You type into Google what your ideal customer would type in to find your website and just like magic, a page from your website appears in position 1, ahead of your main competitors. What next?
Bingo! Prospective customers click the link to your website, sign up for your service, and everyone (apart from your competitor) is left high-fiving, living happily ever after. Now imagine you could repeat this across hundreds of keywords! Before you know it, you’ve got a consistent stream of relevant traffic being driven to your website every month.
Whereas the example above is not always the case for many, industry data tells us that 27.5% of the time, users click through to the website ranking in position 1 for any given keyword. Had you not been ranking for this keyword, our hypothetical customers that signed up to demo your product would have never found you, no high-fiving would have taken place, and you’ll have considerably fewer sign-up requests against your monthly target.
Herein lies the true value of SEO for small & medium businesses. Generating a consistent flow of relevant organic traffic to your website that doesn’t involve paying per click.
Below we’ve compiled a list of reasons why you should consider developing SEO as a lead-generation channel sooner rather than later.
Key benefits of starting SEO early
Below we’ve compiled a list of benefits that starting SEO early will have for your business.
Lead generation
One of the biggest misconceptions about SEO is that it takes a long time to generate an ROI. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
We concede it does take time to rank for high competition, high volume keywords (we call these investment keywords and will discuss this later on). What prospective SEO adopters don’t factor into the SEO equation is targeted, longer tail keywords that generally generate less traffic and as such, are less competitive and therefore easier to rank for. We call these low-hanging fruit keyword opportunities.
The creation of high-quality content that targets bottom-of-the-funnel keywords will see your website generating traffic a lot sooner than you think. It may not represent the 100s of monthly leads that you’ll generate from high-volume keywords but, it still represents an ROI on your SEO efforts a lot sooner than you might think.
Reduce advertising costs in the long run
Towards the beginning of this article, we agreed that the utilisation of paid advertising channels is necessary when driving traffic to the website initially, even if it does make a big dent in your marketing budget.
The main risk associated with paid advertising is that you have to pay for your traffic. As soon as you stop paying, your main traffic driver disappears.
SEO provides a more organic approach to traffic generation. With SEO there are costs incurred initially that can include consultancy, content creation, and link-building costs. For the most part though, as long as the content produced is of a unique nature and good quality, once it has been created, it’s then a waiting game.
The beauty is that once the content begins ranking in traffic-driving positions, you’re not paying per click. Over time, your initial investment is repaid and the longer your content ranks in positions 1-10, the greater the ROI on your initial investment becomes.
Quick Tip: If you can, utilise both in harmony. Whilst you’re building up your rankings for a core target keyword, supplement the lack of organic traffic through paid traffic means. Once you are ranking in a traffic-driving position for your target keyword, rinse and repeat with another target keyword. The image above visualises this nicely.
Target the correct keywords from the get-go
One of the biggest & most costly errors that we see SMBs make – uninformed decisions when it comes to content creation. Content creation not backed up by data is guesswork, sometimes it comes off and adds value, but most times it underperforms adding little to no value.
Factor in that all keywords are not created equally. Some are best targeted through service page/landing page content, and others through informational blog content. Some sit at the top of the marketing funnel whilst others are located towards the bottom (often your more commercially relevant keywords). Getting this part right is crucial and will determine content creation priorities.
Reparation work when remapping keywords across your site will not only set you back financially but, think about the time lost and needed for the correct piece of content to rerank for the respective target keyword.
At Vitalis, we class keywords into three categories:
-
- Investment keywords – high commercial relevance, able to generate high levels of traffic, highly competitive
-
- Low-hanging fruit keywords – commercially relevant, generates lower levels of traffic, less competitive
-
- Unicorn keywords – high commercial relevance, able to generate high levels of traffic, low competitiveness scores
Investment keywords take longer to rank for and as such, the content that targets these keywords should be created and indexed with as much lead time as possible.
Low-hanging fruit keywords don’t take long to rank in traffic-driving positions as long as the content produced is of high quality. These keywords stand the best chance of demonstrating an ROI against SEO quickly.
Unicorn keywords, an illusive beast, difficult to find but if you can find them, potentially a game changer for your lead generation efforts.
By understanding which keywords fall into each category, you can prioritise which keywords to target first. SaaS businesses that understand and act on this concept early are able to rank for attainable keywords quickly, generating valuable SQLs through the website whilst also building the foundations to rank for more difficult keywords in the future.
Quick Tip: You don’t need to invest in expensive keyword research tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush to conduct keyword research. Using Google’s Keyword tool, you can conduct keyword research for free.
Stagger your budget
Investing in SEO at an early stage will save you the headache of rectifying costly issues at a later stage.
In our experience, clients that don’t invest in SEO early always end up paying large amounts of money down the road for an agency to come in and overhaul their websites, unpicking a tightly wound knot of technical and content errors.
In addition to a mass website overhaul, companies that invest in SEO later in their lifespan are always playing catch-up with their competitors. Think of all the revenue lost to competitors who laid SEO foundations early and are now ranking for commercially relevant keywords ahead of you.
The misconception is that you need to spend thousands of your monthly marketing budget on SEO monthly. This doesn’t have to be the case. Start slow, invest in an initial consultancy exercise that will point you in the right direction and build from there.
Quick Tip: If you can’t afford a heavy-hitting digital marketing agency, you’re not alone. Other routes to SEO bedlam include utilising a freelancer who will set you on the right course or, a start-up agency looking to grow its client base. Both options are almost always cheaper alternatives whilst still providing an incredible level of service. Smaller agencies always provide a greater level of service as they have more to lose from not doing a good job for their clients.
Improved Brand Awareness
You’re a smaller brand, you don’t have the luxury of brand awareness (or marketing budgets) the likes of Monday.com, Hubspot, or Zoom. Fret ye not!
Start small, the more frequently you begin to show up in SERP results for relevant keywords the more people will come to know who you are. Instilling brand awareness is a lengthy exercise, so why not kill two birds with one stone? SEO provides a fantastic vehicle for this through keyword targeting, content creation & link-building exercises.
Competitive Advantage
If you’re not utilising SEO as a marketing channel, you can be sure that your proactive competitors are.
As discussed at various points in this article, SEO can be a slow burner. Those that find a way to invest in it now will undoubtedly reap the rewards in 6-12 months’ time.
Early adopters of SEO will find that they’re ahead of competitors on a number of fronts, a few notable ones include:
-
- Brand recognition across their niche
-
- Keyword rankings
-
- Organic traffic levels
-
- Organic lead generation
Whilst your competitors are playing catch up and investing their budget in SEO at a later stage, you’re deciding how to strategically unlock additional sources of potential customers to build on the extensive organic digital footprint that you have cultivated from an early stage.
Keeping your house in order – SEO Best Practice
A stitch in time saves nine… and all that.
Ensuring that your website complies with SEO best practices from day dot will save you a lot of time and money whilst reducing the number of headaches in the long run. What do we mean by this?
-
- Front load any technical SEO work that needs to be done to your website and implement internal website policies that ensure that anything you do, or add to the website forms part of a standardised process for your team to follow
-
- Sort out your content housing structure
What this means is that your website will remain technically proficient, ensuring that no major errors crop up that might result in significant technical errors that block the website from ranking.
Ensuring that you have a robust content housing structure in place ensures that you avoid the headache of a mass overhaul in the future when looking to add additional services or products to your website.
Quick Tip: if you ever deal with an agency that insists that a good chunk of time needs to be spent on technical SEO work every month, head for the hills because they’re just after your money. Once the initial technical audit and fixes have been completed, it’s then about reviewing the website periodically and armed with your internal SEO best practice processes, there’s very little that you should need to sort out following periodic reviews.
Contribute to your overall business strategy
SEO adds additional benefits to your overall business objectives beyond ranking for keywords and driving traffic. We’ve worked with clients in the past who, upon reviewing keyword research conducted, added additional functionality to their service offering. Having seen what their target customers were searching for, they made a strategic business call which resulted in an additional stream of income.
Additionally, part of a value add SEO service includes keeping one eye on your competitors at all times. Constantly analysing what your competitors are up to enables you to make informed decisions about the types of content to produce, potential strategic decisions as part of your offering and more.
Quick Tip: If you currently utilise an SEO agency, ask if they can incorporate your competitors’ SEO performance as part of your monthly report. If you’re thinking about signing an SEO agency, make sure this is included as part of their service offering.
Signing off
So there you have it, 7 reasons as to why SEO should be incorporated as part of every SMBs core marketing strategy.
Objections to implementing SEO strategies are almost always about budget and internal resources. If you are able to overcome these objections and carve out a budget for initial SEO work, future you will thank you for it.
From cost savings through to competitive advantage, organisational prowess to lead generation, SEO provides the foundations for any successful marketing strategy if done correctly.
Ensure that you have the basics down and are heading in the right direction, investing little by little over time and before you know it, you’ll be ranking for core keywords, driving valuable leads and who knows, becoming a leader in your niche.
Vitalis Digital
Vitalis Digital is a dedicated SEO marketing agency that helps businesses in the SaaS, Tech, and eCommerce space create successful lead-generation engines using SEO.
With clients across the globe our approach is simple, make a best-in-class SEO service accessible to all by blending top SEO, outreach, and content professionals with smarter ways of working that result in a reasonably priced service. We understand your organisational goals and work back from there.
To find out more, get in touch for an informal chat today. The team is on hand to answer any questions that you may have.