When small businesses need to cut down their expenses, marketing is often the first area that comes to mind. Many people neglect marketing and some even question its worth.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a concept that is familiar if not already known to most business owners and leaders today. However, it may not be what many claim it to be. Only a few truly know and understand how it actually works and how it might impact their business.

SEO services drive organic traffic to your website by ranking it appropriately in search engines and providing valuable user experiences. One of the reasons why most website owners prefer SEO than paid advertising is because of the long-term benefits associated with it.

In this article, we are going to unravel how organic traffic works and why every business should practice SEO regardless of its size.

Fundamental Principles of SEO Today

Links Still Rule

Links are important from the beginning and emergences of SEO and even up to date. It is one of the strongest indicators of a website’s superb performance to Google. The more relevant and high standard the links you acquire, the higher your website’s SERPs or search engine results pages.

Relevant Content Wins

Content and links are both relatively important to boost your SEO. You need content to attract relevant links and you need links to boost your website’s ranking in search results. This will help boost organic traffic to your website.

When crafting and optimizing your content, here are some things you need to keep in mind:

Keywords

Keywords matter in context and are still strong relevance to Google. Including your targetted keywords to your titles, meta descriptions, alt attributes, H1 tags, URLs, are all important.

Increase Your Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E-A-T)

Google provides search quality guidelines for you to follow and produce highly relevant content. This will help you to ensure that all your contents are high-quality and written for humans.

User Experience (UX)

User Experience (UX) plays a substantial role in boosting your website. It may be complex because it is often too hard to measure and it depends on various existing factors.

This includes your website’s infrastructure, layout or design, ease of use, content, and other more which may contribute user experience. Understand where your site lacks from a UX standpoint and try to fix the issue as soon as you spot it.

Mobile SEO

Mobile SEO can either help boost or completely destroy your website. To begin with, you need to invest in a responsive design that will make your website perform smoothly both on mobile and desktop form. 

Voice Search

Voice search is becoming more popular among customers. It is a possibility that voice searching will be a revolutionised SEO in the near future. Thus, no business should overlook this possibility. To keep up with the competition, ensure that you optimize your content using natural language and answering questions.

Available SEO Services

There are some SEO agencies that cover all of these services while some others only deal with segments and specialized services. Here are some of the common SEO services which you can find and avail for your business:

• Content Management – This includes everything that involves content making. It involves blog posts, web articles, e-books, copywriting, and other more that boosts your website and helps your business move forward.

• Keyword Tracking – Constantly changing keywords is an effective tactic in boosting organic traffic and directing people to your website. Tracking them is imperative to understand the market’s perspectives and standpoints.

• Local SEO – Local SEO is essential especially for brick and mortar or small startups. It helps small businesses to position their business effectively in their own city or within their locality.

• Social Media – The more active the business is on the variety of social media networks, the more likely it is easily recognized by customers. This will also help boost your website’s ranking as you merge various social media networks to your site.

• Analytics – Analytics are important for you to be aware of your progress and digital success, as well as failures. With this, you will be able to point out where you stand out among the competition and where you need to improve.

How Much Does SEO Cost?

SEO is an investment. From the business perspective, developing a website and optimizing it is building an asset. However, you must be bothered by the idea of how much cost it entails. Truth be told, the amount may vary from agency to agency and from industry to industry.

For low competition and single local SEO, it typically pays around $300 to $500. For multi-location and stronger competition SEO, price ranges from $1000 to $6000. Depending on your budget and the goals you want to achieve, pricing varies. How much it costs can’t be just measured with the money but also the value you want to commit to your customers.

Make Your SEO Investment Worth It

Don’t just ask if investing in SEO will be all worth it. Although it is common for marketers to question these things, it is important to balance out the risks and rewards for your business. Whether you are currently experiencing tight financial constraints or had been previously burnt by previous SEO attempts.

We encourage you to think of it differently. Instead of asking its worth, consider the list of things you can get the most from it. A good SEO expert or agency, whether in-house or outsourced, will be committed to ensuring you will achieve your goals.