When It Comes to Small-Biz SEO, Consistency Counts

To establish a strong online presence, it’s no secret that search engine optimization (SEO) is at the core of any local business marketing strategy. Ensuring that your business website, social media networks, blog, and so on are optimized will help people find your business online far more easily.

It’s also important to work at optimizing all of your online resources  — your website, blog, social media pages, etc. — so the search engine algorithms pick up on your presence no matter where you’re located on the Internet. For example, making sure you’re listed in local directories will help boost your SEO in addition to ensuring that your happy customers are leaving reviews for you online in as many places as possible.

In other words, it’s important to have a focused, yet diversified SEO approach to your business. And based on the results of a new survey provided by MarketingSherpa, you want to make sure that you implemented your strategy consistently, on a continuous and regular basis.  On its website, Marketing Sherpa sums it up this way:

“Organizations that routinely follow a formal process and thorough guidelines for SEO practices and programs reap the biggest benefits in terms of organic traffic conversion rates and lead quality…from our survey of more than 1,500 search marketers.”

MarketingSherpa found that organizations with an SEO strategy in place were able to:

• Convert 150 percent more traffic than "Trial" organizations and 25 percent more than "Transition" organizations ( in other words, companies with informal processes and guidelines for their SEO programs).
• Receive a greater percentage of their total leads from organic search.
• Receive leads from organic search that tend to be of higher quality than their counterparts in the other SEO maturity phases, with one in four "Strategic" organizations (those with formal, highly consistent SEO programs) stating that leads from natural search are of the highest quality compared to just one in 33 "Trial" organizations.
• Reach a point in their SEO processes where they have filtered out low-quality leads altogether, compared to 16 percent of "Trial" organizations and 11 percent of "Transition" organizations still contending with low-quality leads.

I can’t reiterate enough the importance of having a diversified SEO strategy to help customers find your business online, boost leads, and drive business growth. The results of this survey prove that taking a strategic approach to SEO will give your business the competitive edge in needs to keep up with, and stay ahead of, the competition.