SEO for Business Growth

I’ve often been asked how SEO can help business owners or entrepreneurs attract more customers to an online store or a company website, directly at networking events, after speaking engagements, or other events.

So, the question essentially is asking what SEO is, what it does, and how it’s relevant to their needs.

What SEO Is

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of outranking competitors online, most notably in the world’s most-used search engine, Google.

What Is SEO and How Do I Use It

Now, let’s say for the sake of example, that you decided to hire an experienced digital marketer to reboot your company website and program it with researched SEO terms and descriptions for your local market.

It’s entirely possible that you could then within anywhere from a few days to several weeks or several months (depending on your demographics and market) outrank competitors, and even rank at the top of local Google search results. SEO enables your company website to move up Google search results if implemented correctly.

So What, You Ask?

This improvement in Google visibility (also called SERP, short for Search Engine Result Pages) in turn would result in you getting more phone calls, more emails, and more office or store visits from people wanting whatever you provide or sell.

After all, when people search Google they typically look for terms not specific company names, so if they’re searching for a specific service or type of business and yours comes up first, it’s highly likely that they’ll contact you.

Now, of course we can’t get specific in terms of how this process would work for one business without knowing your business details and location and local market, but I’ve seen this done (and actually done it) for many business owners over the course of several decades.

An example of this in action would be a local handyman in Denver, Colorado.

Since few (if any) handyman contractors or companies used SEO in their company websites, this person was the only one directly using SEO to try to be competitive in Google search.  So within two weeks that company website rocketed to the top of local Google search results.

This increase in traffic to a company website, however, created a new set of problems for our client.

Now that he was getting many more phone calls and emails from new customers interested in working with him, asking for project quotes, or wanting to schedule time, the handyman company owner couldn’t keep up with the newfound demand. The client wanted more business, wanted more leads, but when they literally came knocking…it was too much to handle.

I Changed My SEO and This Is What Happened

 Scaling Is Necessary When Effective SEO Is Put Into Practice

This is where scale comes in. “Scaling” is basically being organized in such a way that if or when you start getting more phone calls and emails form new customers, you’re ready to get back to them quickly.

You can stagger or delay new customer projects rather than just turn them away or send them to competitors, so you’re not losing any many and can gradually grow as you begin taking on more work and increasing revenue and expanding into new markets you might not have been exposed to earlier.

Scale is often problematic for new small businesses, startups, entrepreneurs, or business owners unfamiliar with digital marketing. It can be like strapping a rocket pack on someone’s back. If they’re not ready to move very quickly, the best SEO in the world – instead of helping them – can be overwhelming.

Sometimes the keywords and descriptions or combinations vary depending on the market, but digital marketing (of which SEO is one part) is used by businesses specifically because they do want more customers.

Another example is an area optician who, again, because none of their competitors were using correct SEO terms, easily shot to the top of local Google search results once this was deployed in their site.

Implementing correct SEO on their company website (in conjunction with building a professional, agency-level company website, delivering content that supports that SEO) led to them getting many more phone calls and in-store visits from new patients and allowed them to bid on government contracts, which they could not do before since their site didn’t look very professional or show anything that differentiated them from other competitors or big box outlets.

Since that update they’ve brought in at least an additional thirty new clients in the last two years I know of specifically and get weekly offers to bid on government contracts they weren’t getting before (and I know they won at least two since our last chat). This resulted in a spike in profits as you might imagine.

That would not have happened without greatly improved, localized SEO.

The relationship between improved SEO rankings and actual increased profits is one of hand-in-glove higher visibility online across multiple platforms, if executed correctly, such as Google itself, Yahoo, Bing, Google Maps (for local businesses), and review platforms such as Yelp and Google Reviews.

The more exposure you have to your ideal consumer base, the more interactions they’re going to have with you over time. This higher interaction rate then brings us increased profits since more businesses and clients will be making contact.

Now, if we add to that ways in which digital marketing can help reduce overhead (such as allowing a business to take payments online, provide interactive directions, screen patients or clients if necessary, log in employees, permit scheduling of classes or room reservations or sell tickets or book appointments, for example), so that you’re actually cutting what you’d spend over a longer period of time, you could conceivably increase profit margins while expanding into newer markets.