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SEO is great for small businesses to grow their organic leads and traffic

Archive for the ‘Lead Generation’ Category

SEO Works for Small Businesses and We Can Prove It

SEO works for small businesses, it really does.

You don’t need to feel intimidated by competing against large well-known brands. With a smart

Smart business owners typically weigh the pros and cons of an investment before fully committing to it.

When spending money on search engine optimization (SEO), it’s often a matter of how much to invest rather than why.

If you’re still questioning whether SEO is worthwhile for a small business, we have eleven reasons why SEO works for small businesses and why you won’t regret investing in it.

Quality User Experience

The goal of SEO is to provide online users with the best answers as quickly as possible. When your business optimizes their website and social accounts, it’s easier for people to find you online.

Ideally, there is a seamless flow of information from the company, to search engine, to the searcher.

Behind the scenes, search engines constantly work to improve user experiences and provide correct answers. The person searching will find an answer and take the next step towards a solution—which means interacting with your business.

Optimal Reach

Investing in SEO also increases the reach of your business. As a website becomes optimized, it’s easier for search engines to navigate and understand your site’s content.

This higher understanding gives your website favor; resulting in search engines ranking you as their highest suggested result.

As an example, Water Extraction Experts has invested in adding relevant keywords to their website.

Search engines now have a better understanding of what the company offers, and it’s more likely to show people results for their business when those keywords are used.

This also helps to build a stronger connection between the company’s website, social accounts, and links across the web.

Now that Water Extraction Experts has an effective SEO strategy, the company has multiple results on the first page of this search. Included in the search are links to their website, contact page, and social media accounts.

Cost-Effective Marketing

Cost-Effective Marketing

SEO methods target users who are actively searching online, which means they are looking for specific products, services, or answers.

By creating optimized content, your business can reach people who are searching in the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of their purchasing cycle.

Once these users land on your page, you can lead them down the appropriate inbound marketing or sales funnel.

Marketing Agency Impact found that properly optimized websites result in organic search leads that have a 14.6% close rate compared to a 1.7% close rate for outbound leads.

Boosted Brand Awareness

As the saying goes, “Any publicity is good publicity.” When it comes to SEO, gaining exposure in search engines is your best opportunity for growth.

As you create more optimized, relevant content, your business will build credibility. This causes search engines to trust that your company provides users with high-quality content.

The more trust that you have from search engines, the more your business and brand awareness will grow. The cycle then builds again and again for each new piece of optimized content you produce.

Easily Trackable ROI

Once you begin investing in SEO, tracking your growing traffic will become addicting. While proper SEO methods are not an overnight solution for growth, they will add up in the long run.

Some businesses do see almost an instant improvement, but others can take a couple of months or even a year to fully see growth. The great thing about SEO is that you can quickly change tactics or use new keywords if a strategy isn’t working.

By keeping track of traffic, unique visitors, page rankings and keyword search frequency, it’s simple to see if your methods are going to be a good return on investment.

Improved Local Search

Local search SEO efforts are especially important for businesses with brick-and-mortar stores or services that rely on local customers.

This optimization tactic includes sharing company information and using keywords specific to your area. One way to boost local search is to add your business address and contact information across multiple platforms.

Another is to include keywords such as your city or business name, or “find near me”; considering that people now narrow searches specific to their location.

Because SEO works for small businesses, family-owned businesses are a perfect example of companies that need to invest in it.

Let’s say that ‘Betty’s Bakery’ in Boca Raton, FL makes incredible breakfast pastries but lacks the awareness to attract guests. By using keywords such as “breakfast in Boca Raton” or “Boca Raton best pastries”, Betty’s can attract more vacationers searching for a restaurant.

Efficient and Effective Marketing

As a marketing method, SEO one of the most effective tactics for growing business. While large companies have entire teams dedicated to SEO, it is not as hands-on as social media, blogging, or email.

Once a page is optimized for SEO, you can sit back and watch it bring in new customers.

Pages, however, do need to be tweaked and updated to reflect new keywords or updated strategies. Overall though, SEO is not as time-consuming as other marketing efforts.

It does, however, take time to learn the ins-and-outs of an effective SEO strategy. It’s smart for small businesses to consult with a marketing agency to get an SEO plan started.

Higher Search Rankings

How many times do you view the second or third page of results when searching online? Probably not much if you’re like many other online users.

This is why SEO works for small businesses and is so important. It’s the primary path to getting your business to the top of the first page.

Remember the cycle of quality content and trust we mentioned above? SEO starts this cycle to boost your visibility, credibility, and likelihood of rising through the rankings.

In the case of online search engine rankings, being #10 is much better than ranking #11; although you should still aim for that #1 spot.

Quality Sales Leads

Quality Sales Leads

Cold-calling is an essential sales method for some businesses, but why not let your website do the work for you?

With an optimized website, potential customers can find your services and reaching out when they are ready to purchase. While this process applies to businesses in the service industry, the idea behind it can work for any business.

Reaching out to these warm leads through a phone call or email is much easier and more effective when they already know about your company.

Ideal Audience Targeting

Reaching your ideal customers is easier with SEO since it’s possible to target age, location, gender, and interests through keywords.

Not only can this attract customers who may be more interested in your business, but it also increases the likelihood of qualified leads. With qualified leads comes a boost in sales, customer referrals, and loyal customers.

When choosing keywords to reach an ideal target audience, don’t be afraid to get creative. For example, instead of entering “plumber in wellington fl” with 685,000 results, a local business could use the keyword “friendly plumber in wellington fl” with only 293,000 results. Just one word can change your ranking!

Competitive Advantage

SEO works for small businesses and when your business invests in a solid SEO strategy, it makes you more competitive online.

If your rankings are below similar local businesses, SEO may be all you need to steadily rise to the top. While white-hat SEO isn’t a quick-fix solution, it will benefit your business and make you more competitive.

Build an Effective SEO Strategy

Investing in SEO is worthwhile for any small business that wants to improve their brand awareness, build quality content, attract new customers, and increase credibility.

If you’re ready to take the next step with SEO but want guidance on best-practices and how it can affect your ROI, contact us today for a free 1-hour consultation.

You can also fill out the short form below and we will get back to you as soon as we are able. Let us help you get started with the best small business SEO strategy for your business.

About Elevare

Elevare is an all-inclusive marketing and business development agency that offers the services and skills necessary to help businesses of every size to be successful.

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9 Great Ways to Generate Leads

Ahh, lead generation. There are many tried and true ways to build an ever growing leads list for your small business. But what happens when your go-to means for leads seemingly begins to dry up? It may be time to take a step or two back and consider some alternate routes.

Lead generation falls under middle-of-the-funnel, one of three portions of the sales funnel. Its area is nestled between prospects, but before opportunity. As a whole, the sales funnel is the hypothetical buying process a company leads a customer through when purchasing a product or service. With each step of the sales funnel being different than the one before or behind it, it may need a different lead generation approach to keep the funnel moving.

Email Marketing

The development of automation software in the last decade has reduced the cost of sending mass emails to mere pennies. Look at it this way. You’re already creating engaging and concise content for your blog and social media. With email marketing, you can easily continue the process for email blasts to your current customers. A 2014 study done by Exact Target found that 91 percent of people use their mobile devices for email. With so many people accessing their email at a regular interval, it only seems natural to have your company’s presence in their inboxes.

Then there is the low cost and high return value to email marketing. With a return-on-investment rate of $38 to $1, packaging the information already on your website into a weekly newsletter is a great way to have current customers pass it along to their friends.

Micro-Events and Networking

These small, exclusive networking opportunities are usually surrounding or within larger events, such as conferences and tradeshows. This is a great opportunity to ask your peers about what customer pain points and challenges they’re running into. Simply talking with others is a great way to learn what customers are facing. It can be a more personal way to build a relationship with potential referrals than an unknown person coming from a contact on your website.

If you put together one of these events, remember it’s all about relationship building to start and not a sales process until further down the road. Have a refined pitch practiced and ready to deliver during the few minutes you may have with a potential lead or referral. Their time is as crunched as yours and by listening to what they are saying – or not – you can get an inside look at their challenges and pain points.

Referrals

Be methodical about referrals, and include employees in the collection process. Giving an incentive to current customers, such as a discount or coupon for a product or service is a common referral method. Other ways to generate a few leads is through surveys. Not only will you be hearing comments and concerns from your current customers, but also including a response for potential referrals.

Feel the Power of Blogging

If you’re reading this, you’ve already taken the first step in finding new leads. And though it may seem like the internet is a vast expanse of ocean with no starting point, we recommend dipping a toe or two into blogging before jumping in with social media. Having a blog can start several conversations, and adds value to both your website and customer relationships. Social media can reach audiences you may previously have not considered and is a considerable resource to use in spreading the words of your blogging efforts.

Add a Quiz

Whether they’ll readily admit it or not, people love to take the Buzzfeed-like quizzes sprinkled throughout social media. And while they’re finding out what their hidden vacation destination is or who their animated character spirit is, businesses are ready to dole out the results, but only after the user submits their email address. Gating quiz results, is a great opportunity to let users know about your blog, newsletter or other periodic updates they can receive by giving their name and email.

If you think a quiz would be a good fit for your lead generation, but aren’t sure where to get information, look no further than the content you’ve already created. An easy starting point is to create a quiz based on information from your high traffic pages then on the results page asking if they would like to receive more related information via email.

Social Media Ad Campaign

Social media has been a boon for lead generation, but with a couple of caveats usually related to ever-changing algorithms. With most businesses utilizing Facebook, it also means a near constant feeling of swimming up stream for getting your post viewed. A way around it is through boosting posts, one of several paid advertising options Facebook offers. Twitter has jumped into the paid advertising realm with its lead generation cards. These cards stand out more than a regular tweet with a URL and have a click through rate of more than 40 percent according to TwitterSmallBiz.

Before jumping into a paid social media campaign, regardless of platform, you’ll need to know what platform your buyer personas spend the most time on. Using your most viewed content is also key in having a successful social media ad campaign.

 

 

Local SEO and Citations

Local search engine optimization and citations are relatively quick ways to be found online. There are many tools for getting listed and found, such as Google, Bing, Angie’s List, and Yellow Pages. These listings are the quick but concise returns you see when searching for a business through a search engine, usually the business name, address, and telephone number.

Google AdWords

As the leader in search engines, it’s no surprise that Google AdWords are also a very powerful tool in pay-per-click advertising. A key caveat is what Google determines the quality of your proposed ad is. The higher the quality, the higher the quality score and more likely you’ll receive a top placement even if you weren’t the highest bidder in the ad auction. AdWords appear across the Google Display Network and can be tailored to specific platforms and apps, along with targeting specific demographics and users to see your ad.

Free Consultations

The word free can scare small business owners, but it can be a great way to add leads. Consultations encourage people to contact you or fill out a form for more information. This action is a crucial part of developing relationships with customers. People get a quick sneak peak of the product and services your business offers, and how it can help solve an issue or problem they are facing.

Why Do the Work Yourself?

Trying to find the lead generation to end all lead generations is tiring. Throw in the day-to-day routine of running a business and whew, we’re tired thinking about it. But only for the few seconds it took to write the sentence, because the team at Elevare never stops thinking about lead generation. Whether your social media needs a little boost or you’re ready to dive head first into email marketing, we can jumpstart the lead generation train for your business!

 

Get a FREE 30 Minute Consultation!

We would like to offer you a FREE 30 minute consultation to help you find the best solution to help launch your business to new heights. Just fill out the form below and our marketing specialist will contact you within the hour!

 

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