SEO Provides Small Businesses With Long-Term, Compounding Results
In our experience, it’s always best to use the most appropriate channel to reach your customers.
With our strengths in search engine optimisation, we see this particular channel being a fantastic long-term & stable opportunity for small businesses to invest in.
An effective SEO strategy can provide fantastic returns even within 3 months (I’ve seen it almost immediately!) despite a lot of digital agencies quoting 12 months and beyond.
The above image is sourced from one of the most prominent SEO & Digital PR experts in the world, Andrew Holland. It’s a simple image depicting the very stable cost of SEO services and the value of SEO when it compounds over time – very powerful!
Below, we dive into our Top 8 pain points that local Sydney small businesses have in today’s digital world. We showing you specific examples of how SEO (and other digital marketing tactics) can help boost your sales!
1. Customers Can't Find You Online
Small businesses often struggle to be seen and heard in a crowded marketplace.
This lack of visibility is primarily because they don’t have the extensive reach or resources of larger corporations or franchises.
The consequence is a smaller customer base, which unfortunately directly limits growth potential and revenue.
SEO and a well-optimised website can counter this by boosting online presence.
This strategy makes the business more discoverable to potential customers searching for relevant products or services.
How can Leadlly Digital improve your online visibility?
Online visibility refers to how easily and frequently your business (or your products) are found by potential customers on the internet. This can include visibility via search engines, social media platforms, online directories, online review portals and across various other digital channels.
Improving online visibility through SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) can have a significant impact on a business in several ways:
Increased Website Traffic: By improving rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs), SEO helps a business attract more visitors to its website. Higher rankings usually lead to more clicks, particularly when a site appears on the first page of search results. This increased traffic can lead to more customer interactions and potential sales.
Better Quality of Traffic: SEO involves targeting specific keywords and phrases that are relevant to the business’s products or services. This means that the traffic driven to the website is more likely to be composed of individuals genuinely interested in what the business offers, improving the chances of converting visitors into customers.
Enhanced Credibility and Trust: Websites that rank higher in search results are often perceived as more credible and trustworthy by users. Being prominently displayed in search results can enhance the reputation of a business and increase consumer confidence in its offerings.
An interesting fact about organic traffic (SEO traffic) is that unlike traditional marketing channels, SEO targets users actively searching for specific products or services, ensuring higher quality leads (most of the time!)
2. Small or Non-existent Marketing Budgets
Budget limitations are a significant concern for small businesses.
Unlike larger competitors, they can’t allocate vast resources to multiple marketing channels.
This constraint often results in reduced marketing effectiveness and slower growth.
However, digital marketing, particularly SEO, offers a cost-effective solution which compounds over time.
SEO provides sustainable long-term benefits, enabling small businesses to maximise their limited marketing budget.
Which digital marketing channel would be best for a small business on a smaller budget?
For a small business operating on a tight budget, SEO is often seen as the most effective digital marketing tactic.
This is because search engine optimisation, while requiring upfront effort and time, offers long-term benefits and has the potential to compound over time.
But how exactly can SEO be your power move for your business on a shoestring budget:
Cost-Effectiveness: SEO is more cost-effective than many other marketing strategies, especially paid advertising. While pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns can drive immediate traffic, they require continuous funding for both Google Ads & the agency setup/maintenance fees. SEO, on the other hand, involves optimising your website and content to naturally rank higher in search engine results over time, reducing the need for continuous large investments.
Building Organic Traffic: The primary goal of SEO is to increase a website’s visibility in organic search engine results. This increased visibility leads to more organic (free!) traffic. Unlike paid traffic, which stops when you stop paying, organic traffic can continue and even grow over time, as your site becomes more authoritative and ranks for more keywords.
Long-Term Returns: SEO is a long-term strategy. Initially, it might take some time to see significant results, but once your website starts ranking higher, the effects are often sustained. Over time, as you continue to optimise your site and produce quality content and UX updates, these improvements compound, leading to increased traffic and, potentially, more business without ever-increasing costs.
Credibility and Trust: High rankings in search results can enhance credibility and trust among potential customers. Users often perceive businesses that appear on the first page of search engine results as more reliable and industry-leading. This perception can be especially beneficial for small businesses looking to establish themselves in a competitive market.
3. Stiff Competition with Larger Businesses
Small businesses frequently find it challenging to compete with the marketing muscle of larger companies.
This competition is tough because larger businesses have more resources to dominate advertising spaces and search engine results.
This dominance can overshadow smaller businesses, making it harder for them to gain traction.
By focusing on SEO and an optimised website, small businesses can improve their online presence in less competitive but high-rewarding keywords. The term is overused but most people refer to these keywords as “low-hanging fruit”.
With a smart digital strategy, this approach helps level the playing field, allowing you to compete more effectively.
How Can Smaller Businesses Compete With Established Competitors?
The trick is – be smart!
It would be a waste of budget to blindly throw thousands of dollars boosting a Facebook post that you think looks nice.
It would also be silly to throw tens of thousands of dollars behind an auto Google Ads campaign (with no experience!).
Smaller businesses can compete with larger businesses. Let’s be honest, we’ve all walked out of a small independent store with a smile on our dial after the business owner said “Hi, how are ya Frank?”. Same goes for your small business. You just have to meet your customers where they are – whether that be on Facebook, Instagram, local classifieds (who knows?!) or Google.
I’ve ranked online businesses who are a tenth of the size of their competitors for very competitive search terms before – you just need to show Google that you’re the authority and show website visitors the genuine, loveable you! Let that personality shine through your website!
With Leadlly Digital, we provide optimised websites (with SEO built-in) so you not only have a sparkly online showroom, your customers know you’re there, and before you know it, you’ll be asking us to slow things down (which has happened before!).
4. Your Business Has Low Customer Engagement and Retention
Engaging and retaining customers is crucial yet challenging for small businesses.
They often lack the tools and strategies that larger companies use to keep customers interested.
Poor engagement leads to lower customer loyalty and repeat business, impacting revenue.
Again, an optimised website with engaging content enhances user experience.
This improvement not only attracts customers but also encourages them to return, boosting loyalty to your brand!
How Can Leadlly Digital Help Your Business Retain Customers?
This combines online and offline efforts.
We’re willing to work with you to develop a comprehensive digital strategy to boost your business, by providing you with leads. But what’s the point of investing in more leads when you can’t retain or sell to them??
It’s essential to have a solid offline plan to align with our Leadlly Digital strategy that we provide for you. We can provide suggestions, and our digital strategy will be thorough and no doubt will combine some offline elements but ultimately this offline sales funnel comes down to you as a business owner.
With the businesses that we’ve worked with previously, the most time consuming process is the entire marketing function of the business. Imagine that Leadlly Digital looks after all digital marketing for you – so you can spend valuable time on the neglected parts of the business that you just haven’t had the time to focus on or fix? That can be us!
5. Why Is My Current Digital Marketing Not Working?
Understanding the impact of marketing efforts is important for any business.
Small businesses, however, often struggle with this due to a lack of sophisticated tools and knowledge.
Without clear insights, they can’t optimise their strategies or allocate resources effectively.
Digital marketing, especially when integrated with SEO and analytics, provides valuable data.
This data helps in making informed decisions, ensuring a better return on investment and giving your business a chance to grow in the right direction!
Leadlly Can Help You Strategise Within The Digital Landscape
We help you commit to a digital roadmap – whichever digital marketing channel makes most sense for your budget, and we’ll strategise from there.
In order to create a Digital Strategy, we need to assess your current digital marketing efforts, the competition, competitors’ tactics and the existing landscape.
It’s thorough but absolutely necessary to back our strategy with data as opposed to just “a hunch” which is lazy.
Sometimes it’s a complete overhaul, other times its just tweaking specific areas of a digital marketing plan. Either way, we’ll create a digital strategy that works – because it’s based on informed conclusions from data – no BS. No fluff.
6. Unable To Keep Up With Digital Marketing Trends
The market today changes rapidly, and keeping up is a significant challenge for small businesses.
Small business owners often lack the agility and resources to quickly adapt their strategies.
Unfortunately, this sluggish response can result in missed opportunities and decreased relevance in their market.
A strong digital marketing strategy, underpinned by SEO, allows for quicker adaptation to these market trends.
It helps you and your small businesses to stay competitive and responsive to changing consumer needs.
Leadlly Stays Ahead Of The Digital Game
Digital Marketing can be challenging, particularly for business owners who only have 24 hours in the day!
Here at Leadlly, we encourage our staff to attend regular digital events such as SEO talks, digital conferences (such as the SEO Conference Sydney & SXSW) as well as regular online courses just to keep our skills up to date.
For example, we’ve recently picked up that Google are sunsetting the free Google Site websites – which over 12 million small, local businesses were using to generate leads and customers. We’re on top of this, ensuring that local businesses we know are aware of the changes around free Google Sites, and providing local businesses solutions moving forward.
If you don’t have time to, feel free to reach out to us for a chat – we’d love to help you over a coffee!
7. Poor Brand Reputation Or Credibility
For small businesses, establishing a reputation and earning customer trust can be both challenging & daunting.
Small businesses are often new and unknown, making it hard to build that credibility.
This lack of trust can deter potential customers, hindering growth.
A professional, well-optimised website and strong search engine presence can significantly boost credibility.
These elements signal to customers that the business is reputable and trustworthy.
Reputation Can Be Everything in Business
Building brand trust can take a long time, ruining that trust can take just a moment.
If your reputation has taken a hit online, we can help you turn it around with a specific brand-focused digital strategy. We look into the problems, challenges, hurdles, limitations and solutions for brand distrust and decline.
We would also advice investing in a regular SEO plan with us. Google love promoting businesses that have a great reputation. Google’s entire product is around providing ‘Googlers’ the most relevant results, in order.
For example, if you type in “cafe with great coffee in Parramatta”, Google understands that you’re after a cafe, that is open and has a Google Business Profile rating of above 4 stars (out of 5) located in or around the suburb of Parramatta. You would be satisfied with suggestions of cafe’s that have a reputation for having great coffee, located within walking distance of Parramatta CBD, correct? And you would be equally disappointed if the first organic suggestion was a cafe which was closed, located in Sydney’s Northern Beaches and had very poor reviews, correct?
Now picture your business, we have defined tactics to improve your reputation within Google, so new customers have a positive first interaction with your business – via your amazing new website built by Leadlly Digital!
As part of the SEO plan, we would incorporate tactics around local SEO, Google Business Profile optimisations, Social Media profile optimisations, reputation management and brand building to improve your image online.
8. You Have A Lack of Digital Marketing Expertise & Experience
Let’s be honest for a minute, many small business owners out there do not possess fantastic digital marketing knowledge.
This lack of expertise can lead to ineffective marketing strategies and a potentially damaged online presence.
As a result, opportunities for growth and customer engagement may be lost before you even begin..
Investing in SEO and website optimisation is a very practical solution as it can bridge the gap or can be outsourced to digital experts such as Leadlly Digital, leading to better and more efficient digital marketing outcomes.
Digital Marketing Is A Critical Function Of Any Small Business
Rarely businesses can avoid marketing and be successful – look at Tesla & Elon Musk as an example. He hasn’t actively marketed the business BUT it’s so well known – how?
The answer is simple really – he’s a lunatic. He creates infinite amounts of publicity which gives him that visiblity, both online and offline.
Unfortunately, you’re probably not Elon Musk reading this value-packed blog article right now? Or if you are – we’ll sell you Leadlly Digital for US$1B minimum – haha!
Circling back, every small business needs to bring in new leads & customers if they want to grow. And how to you reach customers who are looking for your business, but just don’t know you exist? Through a customised Digital Strategy by us at Leadlly Digital of course.
After a 30min strategy call, we’ll be able to determine the most effective digital channels we should be focusing our attention on first, prioritising is critical particularly for smaller budgets so we can see results fast!
