Finding The Right Small Business SEO Services
Small businesses heavily rely on online visibility for sales and leads. While the online presence of small businesses has been mostly thought of as running several paid advertisements to gain immediate traffic, sustainable and stable long-term success is achieved with constant efforts on the website’s search engine optimization (SEO).
Is It Worth Hiring Small Business SEO Services Or SEO Agencies For Your Website?
The truth is that while SEO is free, there is no easy way around a successful SEO strategy. According to a leading Perth SEO consultant, SEO demands time, and while there aren’t many differences between small business SEO and large business SEO, small businesses require particular focus on some key areas such as local targeting. There are many sophisticated SEO best practices that are regularly needed for a successful SEO strategy that a small business team with a limited number of people might not have time and resources to work on.
Many small businesses have tried to tackle the complex SEO challenges on their own and haven’t been very successful. Your business needs to scale with sales, and for that your building up your online presence is crucial. It’s always best to get some SEO experts to get the work done for you.
These are some key questions that you need to ask when looking for the right small business SEO services:
Do They Have Any Past Experience?
A lot of work that goes into SEO is usually around on-page optimization. Some general mainstream SEO practices apply to all businesses. The SEO agency you hire needs to identify critical areas of improvement for specifically your website. If the SEO agency you’re hiring has some experience, they should be able to identify those areas in your website.
Given that the majority of Google searches come from mobile, you also need to ask them how they plan to optimize your website such that it’s mobile-friendly. Your website might be created and programmed on a computer, but if it’s not optimized for mobile, your business could be losing out on a lot of opportunities and potential customers.
How Do They Plan To Increase Traffic?
SEO is about getting customers to your website and getting your website to the customers. You need to ask your prospective SEO agency about their plan. How do they plan to perform the keyword research? For small businesses that target a niche market, having exclusive and targeted keywords is crucial to their SEO plan. This will make marketing a lot easier for you.
With the keyword research done, you might feel that you should start using them in your content ASAP. However, some practices should be avoided at all costs. You should ask if they are aware of black hat and grey hat practices that should be avoided at all costs. If the SEO agency replies that they would be stuffing keywords or they have some insider help at Google that might help your website rank higher, this is a huge red flag to announce that this is not the SEO agency for you.
Can They Help Secure More Conversions?
One of the problems that small businesses face is that their website gains a lot of traffic, but that traffic doesn’t convert to sales. So don’t doubt your products or services at first. But, could this be a problem with your website? Could this be because your website has some design flaws which is causing customers to flee?
The SEO agency needs to provide you with valid answers. Of course, you’re not an established brand like Nike, and people will come to your website to either research, purchase, or both.
If the website isn’t allowing the customers to research the product well, if the customers aren’t satisfied with the design of the website, or if the website isn’t guiding customers correctly to the check-out, then you might want to either consider an improved design change or an optimized website code.
What Strategy Do They Have To Make You Stand Out From The Competition?
SEO experts make great use of analytics to understand how the competition is performing. Ask how they can help you with regular reports that show your visitors’ demographics, traffic sources, and best performing keywords and how they stack up against your competition.
The SEO agency should be clear about how they plan to use those analytics best to ensure that your business has the upper hand in the market. A good tip would also be to ask for monthly reports to ensure transparent communication. This way, you can also see how the present trends influence your niche.
How Do They Plan On Improving Local SEO?
Usually, for small businesses, the local audience is their target market. Therefore, local SEO depends not only on Google but also on social media. Running inorganic ads and SEO on social media can be much cheaper and less time-consuming than Google ads.
There can be many questions that can be raised from here, which can make a night and day difference for your conversions:
- How frequently do they plan to roll out their content?
- Is the team using the current trends from analytics into their SEO strategy?
- What’s the strategy to improve domain authority?
- How do they plan on gaining traction by backlinks from market leaders?
- How do they plan on engaging your target audience on social media?
These are demonstrable and measurable metrics. A successful capitalization on local SEO services is bound to create a chain reaction of traffic.
What’s The Ongoing Long Term Plan?
SEO requires ongoing effort. Search engines keep updating their algorithms for better relevant search results frequently, and the SEO experts need to adapt accordingly. Hiring small business SEO agencies can make your business scale massively. Creating strategies according to the latest algorithm updates can be the push you need for being on Google’s page 1.
