By Andrew Dunn
Small businesses need every advantage they can get in today’s ultra-competitive landscape. Unless you have a monopoly with no competitors, other companies are trying everything they can to steal your customers, plus grab any future ones.
To beat your competitors at this game, you need to get noticed before they do. The easiest way to do that is to use some of the technology at our disposal.
What’s the best way for small businesses to use technology to get noticed these days?
SEO.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is improving (optimizing) your website so that it can be appropriately indexed and found more easily on the internet.
The primary focus for SEO (and should be for many small businesses) is to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo using keywords.
What Are Keywords?
Keywords are the words and topics that describe your website, products, and services. They are the words and phrases that potential customers will type into their search engine to find what they are looking for.
Put very simplistically, the more keywords your website ranks for that a customer types into their search engine, the higher your website will show up on the SERP.
The higher your website ranks on SERPs, the more visitors you’ll get. The more visitors you get, the more business you’ll do. Simple, right?
If It’s So Simple, Why Doesn’t Every Business Ranks High on Google?
Like everything else in business, it’s not as easy to do as it sounds. There are many moving parts and different tactics to using SEO to get your website noticed on SERPs.
SEO is an ever-changing and fast-growing field essential to business success, but it can be challenging to master yourself.
This is where SEO services for small businesses can be a game changer.
What Are SEO Services?
SEO services are companies or individuals you can pay to optimize your website for SEO for you to increase your business’s visibility and organic search traffic. Today, companies, consultants, and even freelancers perform SEO services on an ongoing or case-by-case basis.
There are also different types of SEO services offered by companies and freelancers. These include
- On-page SEO: Optimizing pages on your website for page titles, meta descriptions, headings, content, and more.
- Off-page SEO: Off-site optimization that includes link-building/backlinks, social media, local citations, backlinks,
- Technical SEO: More complicated optimization, which includes indexing, code efficiency, website speed, mobile responsiveness, site maps, and audit links.
- Local SEO: Optimization for businesses that want to be found by local people (such as businesses with brick-and-mortar locations)
Why You Should Use SEO Services
If you are a small business owner, consider using SEO services to improve your SERP ranking and get noticed more by potential customers.
Sure, you could take some online courses and learn SEO in a few weeks, but another problem is that SEO is fluid because sites like Google make thousands of changes to their SEO algorithms each year.
SEO can be intricate, and you, as a small business owner, most likely don’t have the time to dedicate to learning and re-learning SEO tactics. You have more significant business concerns than repeatedly taking days or weeks to learn about SEO.
You’ll want to employ SEO services.
What Are the Benefits of Using SEO Services?
Here are some of the benefits of using SEO services to get your business noticed and increase engagement:
- Will Save You Time and Money In the Long Run: Outsourcing your SEO services saves you the time and money of learning it yourself, and you’ll make money back in increased customer awareness and sales.
- Delegate Essential Tasks to Professionals: SEO is vital to business success and growth, so you’ll want to trust this critical task to a professional.
- People Will Find What They’re Looking For: The main goal of your website is to be the end point of your customer’s buying journey. If people find exactly what they are searching for on your website because you have the keywords they are searching for, they are more likely to buy from you.
- Better Odds of Success: You have a much better chance of being noticed if you use professional SEO services than doing it yourself.
- Enhance User Experience: SEO services will enhance the overall user experience of your website because people will find exactly what they are looking for.
- The Investment is Worth It: The investment will be worth it in the end — whatever you pay for SEO services should at least be returned within a few months, if not more and sooner.
- Be More Competitive: SEO services will allow you to get noticed more and compete better with other businesses.
- Track Your Growth: You can monitor your successes and tweak anything to enhance your digital marketing strategy further.
- Increase Other Traffic: SEO services will increase traffic for other parts of your website, including social media, blogs, email, and other advertising.
- Brand Identity: SEO services can help you build brand awareness, which is essential for companies wanting to rank higher in SERPs, grow their customer base, and become a “household name” that will get free organic traffic.
- Quality vs Quantity: While getting more visitors is a decent key performance indicator (KPI) to gauge if you’re getting noticed, visitors finding what they are looking for and engaging with your site is better.
As you can see, utilizing SEO services will significantly outweigh any costs you and your business might incur.
Plus, consider that the costs of using SEO services might not be in perpetuity. You could purchase SEO services to optimize your website once for a few keywords and rank for them forever! Wouldn’t the cost of paying someone for SEO services be worth a lifetime of ranking on the first page of Google?
How Much Do SEO Services Cost?
SEO services prices will vary in costs depending on the size of your business and what services you need to be done. However, we can provide some rough estimates.
According to OuterBox.com, in 2021, local SEO campaigns will cost businesses about $1000 per month. That number jumps to about $2,500 to $7,500 monthly for national campaigns.
However, you also get what you pay for. Some SEO firms charge $500 per month, while others charge $500 per hour.
Additionally, most SEO companies in the United States charge $150 to $250 per hour, but overseas companies can charge as low as $10 to $50 per hour.
A large SEO firm in the U.S. will charge significantly more than a Bangladeshi college student.
Factors That Will Affect How Much You’ll Pay for SEO Services
Here are some of the factors that will affect how much your SEO plan will cost:
- Your SEO goals
- The plan you choose
- SEO service provider’s location
- Your business size
- How aggressive do you want to be with your SEO
- The pricing model you choose
- Service provider’s experience
Many SEO service providers are out there today, and each will have different prices for different services. Do your research and find the best one for you.
Conclusion
You don’t need to hire SEO services to succeed — you can absolutely SEO-optimize your website yourself. However, if you want to get ahead of your competition sooner rather than later, you should consider enlisting the help of a qualified SEO services company or professional freelancer. SEO can significantly improve your business’s visibility, increasing your bottom line when done right.
About the Author
Andrew Dunn is a serial business builder with over seven years of experience growing businesses. He is the founder of INDMND.com, providing valuable insights for business owners to leverage technology to 10x their businesses. He is passionate about scaling businesses using SEO, paid media, and remote teams.