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Social Media Marketing vs. Search Engine Marketing

Which one should you do?

There is an ongoing debate among various marketers upon which among social media or SEO is the best way to boost your digital marketing. In this article we will discuss whether Social media is the new SEO or both these tools are mandatory for getting online success.

Let us find out the purpose of these marketing strategies –

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means getting noticed and getting relevant traffic through the search engine rankings. Your search engine ranking is the prime factor in determining the amount of traffic you will drive to your website.

How does SEO work?

Search engines use a number of algorithms and statistics while deciding which websites to show in the top results as a response to the audience’s queries. A SEO optimized website is user friendly thus along with rankings there are many more benefits of SEO.

Social Media Marketing – Social media marketing refers to building relationships, developing connections and getting traffic from various social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram etc.

How does SMM work?

Social Media Marketing helps you in doing market research. Along with this it allows you to implement various SMM strategies in your business to discover new opportunities and assists you to reach out to a larger audience.

SMM has gained a lot of recognition in recent times. Studies show that more than 70% of customers make a purchase after they see something on social media. According to ReliableSoft, 4 out of 10 social media users purchase an item online or in a store after sharing it with their connections on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest or pinning it as a favourite.

Major differences and similarities between SEO and SMM –

Let us look at some key differences and similarities between SEO and SMM which will help you in finding out which one to choose for your business.

Audience and their intent

SMM

You can find out who these users are, but you can have very little knowledge about how they think. These users find you through a social platform where they are less likely to act and more likely to share your content and spread awareness. When it comes to purchasing a product, they generally have a weak intent.

• SEO

You can find out what your users are thinking but you can have very little knowledge about who they are. These users search for something and based on the relevance of your content, your website is shown to them in the search results and they visit your website. These users are more likely to buy and less likely to share your content and spread awareness. When it comes to purchasing a product, they have a strong intent.

What type of content works here

• SMM

Content that agitates an emotional response often works best with SMM. Especially the content that stirs strong emotions like anger, awe, anxiety etc. The currently trending topics often get more response on Social Media.

• SEO

The content which performs best here is the research-based content. Detailed articles, articles that highlight common facts or instructional posts get more response from the audience. 

Content formats

• SMM

Images and videos are among the most shared content on Social Media. Thus, visuals are the best formats on SMM. Posts that have images along with catchy and emotional headlines manage to capture a user’s attention on SMM.

• SEO

Long textual stuff is the format best suited for SEO. The page that gets a high ranking on Google generally has 1500+ words. 

Speed

• SMM

Although it generally takes much time to gather followers and create awareness of your products on SMM, posts on social platforms can be uploaded within minutes and it takes very less time to see the results.

• SEO

Though Search Engine Optimization is a trustworthy process, it is typically slow and uncertain. It may take many years to build up credibility and even the most relevant pages take a long time to get higher ranking. If your website isn’t able to rank higher, it will not be able to get traffic and thus you may not be able to make conversions.

Durability

• SMM

Your post gets the most visibility and traffic within minutes of when it is posted on the social platform. Even though you get a quick response, achieving success in SMM demands continuous efforts.

• SEO

Once your page gets a higher ranking, it gets durable visibility and traffic. These high rankings may last for weeks or months depending on the topic of search.

Key Process Indicators

•  SMM

Followers are the easiest way to measure your growth on SMM. Apart from this, you can even build meaningful relationships, have meaningful conversations and spread your network.

• SEO

Links are the greatest measure of success when it comes to SEO. However, rankings are much more important than links. Having said this, traffic is even more important than rankings. You would want relevant visitors to visit your site.

Success rate

• SMM

SMM requires constant planning and on-going efforts in order to create brand awareness and interact with your target audience. Though your post can get instant likes and comments within minutes of posting, there is a high possibility that your post will be drowned by some new post as tons of new posts are added to Social Media every minute. SMM might have a smaller ROI as compared to SEO, but if your goal is to gain quick visibility, SMM must be your choice.

• SEO

As compared to SMM, SEO is a slow process. But, it is rewarding. It takes a lot of time to gain credibility, but it draws more conversions than SMM.

Comparative Analysis

Things that work in SMM	Things that work in SEO
Emotional Content	Research-based Content
Compelling Visuals	Long-text based Format
Users spend very little time on a post	Users spend comparatively more time on a website
Generates awareness	Doesn’t create awareness

• Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

Your post on Social Media or your Search Engine Results Page both ultimately have one motive – for a user to click on it. The click through rate is similar for both of them. 

It is difficult to select the best among the two – SEO or SMM. Each of these have their own benefits and disadvantages. 

To avoid this confusion, the best way is to use both of these marketing strategies together. SMM can help you in getting followers, generating awareness and getting traffic while with the help of SEO you can optimize your content to rank higher in search engines.

According to a analytics report published by Hoku Marketing, 

1. Nearly 80% or more customers research online before buying a product.
2. Amongst all the organic traffic that comes to a website, 92% of it comes from the results displayed on the 1 ‘st’ page of Google SERPs.
3. SEO increases the visibility of your Google My Business listing.
4. SEO can assist you with increasing your conversions by improving the user experience and usability of your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic that arrives to your website through the organic search engine results.

Let us see why SEO is important for your business and why you should start doing SEO right away.

Top 7 Reasons why you should start doing SEO

1. Nearly 95% of people won’t scroll past the First Page of Google SERP

According to the statistics by backlinko, the first result on Google’s SERPs is 10 times more likely to get clicked by a user as compared to the 10 ‘th’ result. 

Whenever we search for something, we naturally click on the first top results and ignore the other results. If this happens, you won’t get traffic to your website and this will affect your business. In order to bring organic traffic to your website, you must take assistance from SEO. 

2. Organic Search is better than Paid Search Ads when it comes to conversions

As discussed above, it is important that whenever a user searches for a relevant term, your website should come in the top results on the search page. Paid advertisements can help you with this.

Paid search advertisements have their own benefits and can assist you in generating traffic. But people trust organic search more than the PPC ads. According to Hubspot, Organic traffic is 5.66 times more  likely to bring conversions than the paid advertisements. 

SEO helps in bringing relevant traffic to your website. This establishes credibility, trust and loyal relationships with your customers.

3. SEO is free

With the help of tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, SEO is free of cost. 

Google Analytics can help you determine as to what your customers are doing once they visit your website. Google Search Console determines what the user searched for and how he landed on your website. This information is important in determining the performance of your campaigns and making relevant changes.

4. SEO can help your organization in making well informed business decisions

With the information collected from Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can shape your business decisions. Once you figure out the behaviour of your customer, you can decide how to convert them. 

For instance, if your user is a 55 year-old male who lives in a certain part of the country. You can generate content which is specifically customized towards that user. SEO can help you in making informed business decisions.

5. Search Traffic contributes to 50%-70% of your total revenue

According to a research by BrightEdge Technologies, out of all the traffic coming to your website from paid search only 15% of it generates revenue. Whereas, from the organic search 53% generates revenue. 

You can get organic search by better optimizing your SEO.

6. SEO helps in strengthening customer’s relationship and trust.

With just minimal efforts, SEO can help businesses develop fruitful relationships with their customers. 

When your business shows up in the top results of Google’s SERPs, it is due to relevance and quality content. This helps in building the customer’s trust. Once you have the customer’s trust, you can work on building the trust and credibility of the customer. This can turn your website visitors into potential customers.

7. Search Engine Optimization builds a long term audience.

Search isn’t a one-time solution rather a continuous process of building the audience’s trust and credibility. 

Google constantly keeps on updating it’s algorithms. The more relevant or popular your content is, the stronger your SEO will become with time. SEO helps the businesses in providing relevant content to their visitors which builds an audience over time.

Paid advertisements deliver short term results for a high price. But, for long term trust and credibility of your customers, you will need SEO.

Thus, for startups and established companies that don’t want to invest in large scale advertising, SEO is the best way to build a brand.

With the advent of the novel coronavirus, and the strict lockdown regulations, not only human life is affected but the way we look up to businesses has also changed drastically. Amidst all this, the retail businesses have suffered deeply. In order to keep their businesses afloat, many small scale and middle scale businesses are contemplating taking their business online.

Covid is changing how people shop. Thus, to make sure that your business thrives in the new normal, it’s time you take your business online and explore new sales channels.

Shifting your business from offline to online isn’t as easy as it appears to be. Many times, what works offline may not work online. In such cases, you will need to adopt new business strategies in order to keep your current customers as well as attract new ones.

In this article, we will discuss the important steps you need to follow while taking your business from offline to online.

Why do you need to take your business online?

In recent times, to ensure the future success and stability of your business, moving your business online is the key. The crucial lesson that we have learnt from these unforeseen circumstances is that it is never too late to transform your business in order to avoid potential future damages.

The Internet has proven to be a dominant source of information about various products, reviews and the price. Potential customers can find you quickly and you can even reach out to new customers that you wouldn’t have been able to target due to certain limitations of location and time. You can work with like-minded businesses and can connect easily with other professionals.

Benefits of moving an offline business to online

Before moving your business from offline to online, you must note the benefits of it. They are –

1. Getting your information to your audience

By moving your business online, you can easily let the audience know about you and what your business is about. By doing this, you can showcase your products and services and can prove to your customers how you might be able to provide a perfect solution to their problem.

2. You can be available 24 x 7

Online shopping can be done anywhere without any limits of time. Instead of being held back by the standard store hours, by taking your business online you can be available for your customers according to their convenience. 

3. You can make the best use of your advertising money

By taking your business online, you can reduce your operational and administrative costs. Moreover, with the help of various digital marketing techniques, you can reach out to your potential customers more effectively as compared to traditional marketing methods.

4. You can find new leads

By moving your business online, you can expand the reach of your business and can target the global market. This helps in finding new leads for your business.

Now that you are aware of why you need to take your business online, let’s see how you need to do it.

1. You can collect the emails of your offline customers for your future online marketing strategies

By providing an email sign-up sheet, you can collect the emails of your customers which will be helpful to you for your future marketing campaigns. You can then make use of targeted marketing. By grouping your customers into different segments, you can provide them customised offers. You can send out ads or email newsletter that target these groups.

You can collect reviews or testimonials from your customers to know about what they like about your business and which are the areas where you need to improvise.

You can ask your existing customers to give their feedback about opening an online store. This way, you can remain connected with your existing audience and get insights about what they expect when it comes to shopping online.

2. Assess your online platforms

You need to improve your online presence. Your online platforms can help you form your new online business strategy. 

You need to have a presence on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn etc. In the case of LinkedIn, where your personal social media accounts double as business accounts, you need to note that site as well. Participating in digital forums or Question and Answer sites like Quora can portray your level of expertise in your field.

Assessing the result of your online campaigns, you need to figure out what worked and what didn’t work for you. Different platforms provide various tools to maximise your ROI. Make sure you utilize them.

3. Insights before taking your business online

You need to make a plan for establishing your business online. You need to figure out how you wish to do it by answering the following questions –

• Do you wish to completely transform your offline business to online?
• If you set up your online business along with your current one, will you be able to run both of the businesses simultaneously or will it heavily increase your workload?
• If you want to transition your business from offline to online step by step then which elements you wish to introduce into your business first?

Moving your business from offline to online doesn’t mean that you need to completely cease the activities of your traditional business. By taking your business online, you are just increasing the visibility and availability of your business.

4. Select an e-commerce platform

There are two types of e-commerce platforms – SaaS-based and open-source. Selecting an e-commerce platform is a simple yet a significant step in taking your business online.

SaaS-based e-commerce platform

SaaS-based e-commerce platforms are the ideal choice for people who lack experience with setting up a web store and are very easy to operate. Software as a Service or SaaS platform is a web-based software that you can use to design and build your website. In order to do this, you need to pay a certain amount through a subscription and you access it through the Internet.

Once you sign up for this, you will be able to set up your online store. You can do this without any prior knowledge of coding or web hosting. You might think of this service to be costly. But the features and benefits you get from it are often worth the cost.

Open-source e-commerce platform

Open source e-commerce platforms are type of website design software which contain code that can be modified or enhanced. These types of platforms generally require more technical knowledge as there aren’t any built-in tools to assist the beginners with designing their website.

They are affordable when compared to SaaS platforms and provide limitless options when it comes to customisation. But you will require technical knowledge to design a website that perfectly matches your needs. You can hire a freelance web developer who will provide you his expertise at an affordable price.

1. Buy a domain

A domain name refers to the address of your website. It’s what people will type when searching for your online store. You need to keep it short, unique and memorable so that customers can find your website easily and return to it.

Things you need to keep in mind when purchasing a domain –

•  The domain name should align with your brand. It should fit with the name of your traditional store but it is not necessary that you must have the exact same name.

• You need to make sure that no other site has registered a similar domain name as yours.

• You need to select a suffix. The most trusted and used endings are .com and .org.

Then, you need to register the domain for your business. If you have opted for a SaaS-based e-commerce site, you can purchase and register your domain through it. Whereas, if you have opted for an open-source e-commerce platform, you might need to buy web hosting and a domain separately.

2. Design a high-converting e-commerce website

You can now create a website to serve your customers. Here are some of the elements you need to consider for your website –

• Brand consistency – Your website must be consistent with your brand. Your customers must have the reassurance that they will get the same products online that they know and love offline. Your customers can shop for your products either online or offline, depending on what’s convenient to them.
• You must use quality images – You must use clear images that showcase your products from different angles. Make sure that the images you use are optimized so that your website loads quickly.
• Mobile responsive – Your website must be mobile friendly. If you opt for a SaaS e-commerce platform, you must check the mobile view before publishing your website. In case of an open-source platform, you need to convey your requirements to your designer.

3. Take help of SEO

Once you have set up your website, you need to make sure that people find you. In order to expand your reach, you need to make use of the following –

• Create incentives to encourage email sign-ups –

Whenever you visit a website, you can commonly see a pop-up which says, “Enroll in our newsletter in order to get 10% off your first purchase.” These incentives help you in building your email list. You can offer other incentives too.

• Grow your social media following –

You need to find the social media site that targets your audience and by promoting your business on it, you can reach out to a larger audience. 

• You can make use of paid advertisements

Making use of tools like Google AdWords and buying ads on social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook etc can get you the online presence you are looking for. With the help of pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, you can only pay when a customer visits your site from the ad.

1. Configure payment and shipping methods

Once you are through all the above steps, the only step that remains is the payment and shipping of your goods. Many e-commerce platforms have built-in payment options or you can also opt for web payment to simplify the process. Next, you need to appoint a shipping carrier to deliver your products that people purchase online.

With the help of technology, it is now very easy to take your business online from offline. You can do it yourself or you can get help from an expert.

In order to achieve success in your business and to achieve your targets, marketing plays a key role. Traditional marketing was the only fundamental type of marketing known to businesses until recent years. Lately, online marketing came into play. 

As businesses had very little knowledge about it, digital marketing was just considered as a new or a distinct way to market. However, the amount of trust and importance it has received in the past few years is remarkable. 

With the world becoming more and more digitized and the Internet being interlinked with everything we do, the importance of digital marketing is unambiguous.

This article illustrates the benefits of digital marketing and portrays 9 crucial reasons why you should start online marketing for your business right-away.

Top 9 reasons why you should start online marketing today

#1. Your customers are going digital

According to the statistics provided by Blue Nile Research, while purchasing any product, 79% – 82% of customers use mediums like search, brand websites and customer reviews. Moreover, 14% – 25% refer to social, mobile and blog posts to discover new products and brands available in the market.

What we can see from the above statistics is that, customers constantly use their mobile phones or desktops to look up for products or services just like yours. This step has become a prominent stage in the buying journey of the customer. If you do not take a part in these digital marketing strategies, you might miss the valuable opportunity of reaching out to your customer.

#2. Digital marketing strategies are reasonably priced and effective.

One of the greatest advantages of these digital marketing strategies are that they are affordable and also effective. Moreover, they provide an appealing ROI to businesses. 

With the help of digital marketing, businesses can market through various mediums like social media, email, SEO-oriented content marketing etc. When compared to traditional content marketing strategies, content marketing is said to cost 3 times less. 

Not only, content marketing but the overall strategies involved in digital marketing provide a positive ROI to businesses, which helps them in better optimizing their marketing budget.

#3. Digital Marketing can be used in conjunction with traditional print marketing to drive better results

It is believed by many business owners, that once they go digital, they won’t be able to go back to traditional marketing. But, that is not true. Whereas, you can reap the benefits of both of them, by using them in conjunction with each other.

By using traditional marketing techniques like television and print ads you can build brand recognition and by marking use of digital marketing tactics like SEO, blogs and social media, you can offer more targeted content to your audience.

The reason behind using this integrated marketing strategy is that, you consider the strengths of each of these marketing strategies and then you utilize these strengths in order to maximize your results.

#4. You can improve customer relationships with the help of digital marketing

Most of the traditional marketing strategies enable one-way communication with the customer, however with the help of digital marketing you can establish a two-way communication in real time.

This allows businesses to address the customers concerns effectively without delay while also establishing trust-worthy relationships with them through quality consumer engagement.

#5. You can increase your reach with the help of digital marketing

Traditional marketing is a great way to reach local audiences through radio or television ads. If you want to reach a targeted audience based on a certain geographical location, traditional marketing is quite effective. However, when you wish to reach out to new audiences on a global scale, digital marketing is something you should opt for.

With the help of digital marketing, you can reach out to a larger audience. This can be made possible through search engine marketing, tailored blog content and relevant social media platforms.

#6. It is easy to track and monitor the success of your digital campaigns

Digital Marketing offers marketers and business owners a way to track the success of their marketing campaigns. This helps businesses in figuring out what is working and what isn’t, when it comes to their marketing campaigns.

With this information, businesses can not only measure their ROI, but based on their findings, improve and create more successful marketing campaigns. 

Traditional marketing strategies require the campaign to end in order to see what worked and what didn’t. Whereas, with the help of analytics tools in digital marketing, you can track the success of your marketing campaigns in real-time and make changes accordingly.

#7. Align your marketing campaigns with how people shop today

According to Lyfe Marketing, 88% of people consider online reviews as an important part of their buying journey. Moreover, 23% of people visit your business after they read a good review about you.

Most customers now-a-days look for products or services they want online. Many of these customers are not patient enough to go beyond the first 5 pages of the search results. So, just having an online presence is not enough.

So, with the help of SEO, you can optimize your website in such a way that whenever a user searches for a keyword relevant to the products or services you offer, your website shows up in the top results.

#8. Digital marketing integrates Marketing with Mobile Technology

According to a research conducted by IBM, mobile transactions are increasing at a high speed of 35% per year. 

But it is not just the buying and selling of products that counts for success. The reviews and information you provide can be very helpful for a user with the help of a mobile-friendly website. 

#9. Your competitors are doing it

According to a research published by the Content Marketing Institute, 76% of B2C marketers and 88% of B2B  marketers are using marketing strategies under content marketing like blogging in order to engage their target market.

They are other marketing strategies which are widely used by the marketers today. Thus, if you wish to remain competitive in your industry, you need to keep up with your competitors who are already using these digital marketing strategies.

Not only these, but there are many ways in which digital marketing can positively impact your business. 

The modern buying process begins online. Your customers are online and that is where you must be. 

Search engines help millions of users who come searching for answers to their queries. If you have a website, online business or store, SEO can get you the targeted customers, by driving free relevant traffic from the search engines directly to your website or blog.

SEO Overview 

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process which attempts to improve your search engine rankings. In more simple words, what SEO does is, it ensures that whenever a user searches for relevant words or phrases to what your website is offering, your website shows up in the top few searches of the Search Engines Results Page (SERPs).

Now let’s see a research done by Hubspot before we go further into studying the reasons why SEO is important for every business. So, it says, more than 75% users never scroll past the first page of the Search engines results page (SERPs). By looking at this, we can clearly state that, if your website doesn’t make it to the first page on the search engines results, chances are that the majority of users won’t even know your website exists.

SEO is the backbone of every business. It serves its purpose by helping the businesses get the online visibility they need, which in turn attracts more customers to them. In today’s era, running a business is similar to competing in a marathon. Here, SEO can surely help bypass your competitors and win the race.

Let us consider that there are two businesses from the same sector, offering similar products or services to their clients at the same rates. Now, out of these two businesses, one of them has a SEO optimized website and the other doesn’t. According to you, which of the two, will draw more customers through online search and which firm do you think has more chances to grow faster?

To answer the above question, let’s take help of some statistics.

1. According to InternetLiveStats, every day Google receives more than 3.9 million searches.

1. A study made in 2004 by Advanced Web Rankings, was posted by theleverageway , the first five organic results by Google get 67% of clicks.

1. According to databox, 70% of marketers say that SEO is more effective at driving sales than PPC.

By looking at the above statistics, I am sure that we can surely answer the above questions. Businesses who follow good SEO practices will gain benefit from it. SEO can get your business benefits like increased traffic and conversions, credibility and brand awareness. 

Top 9 Reasons why SEO is important for every business 

1. SEO gives you more visibility –

One of the most significant benefits of SEO is that it improves the visibility of your website by improving your rankings in the search engines. With the help of SEO you can add relevant keywords to your website’s content, so that whenever a user searches for those relevant keywords on search engines, your site is one of the top results which shows up.

Increasing the visibility of your website will eventually lead to more people looking up through the products and services you offer and thus becoming your potential customers.

According to a case study done by Pronto Marketing, clients in their business saw their keyword rankings improve by 25%, over the duration of nine months.

Image source – Pronto Marketing

2. SEO is measurable –

When it comes to proving how digital marketing is better than traditional marketing, one of the most significant advantages is that your marketing efforts can be measured in Digital Marketing. Google provides various tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console in order to measure the results of your marketing efforts. 

Web analytics give you the actual report and analytics of how the site visitors behave once they are on your website. They tell you more about the visitors like their age, gender, location etc. They also tell you how they landed on your website, the most liked content on the site by the users, your total conversions and much more. All this is measurable. With this valuable information, you can plan your business strategies better and grow your business faster.

3. It drives more organic traffic –

As mentioned earlier, SEO increases your visibility in the search results which in turn increases your chances of driving more relevant users to your website. Let us see the real life implementations of SEO by businesses and it’s results.

1. As published on Search engine Land, Columnist Andrew Dennis, highlights the process he used for driving traffic to a brand new website, without using any tools or hacks. Here, he discusses the methods he used at Siege Media, and how he built the site’s SEO strategy, wherein they grew from zero visitors to 100,000.

1. Peep Laja, is a blogger who successfully managed to get over 40,000 visitors to his blog in the first month of it’s launch. He did this by planning and executing a tactical SEO strategy

4. It enhances User Experience –

One of the significant experiences of SEO is that it enhances user experience and helps you leave a lasting impression on your customers.

What is user experience? It is the overall experience of the user using a product like a website or a computer application with respect to how easy or pleasing it is to use. This term encompasses the overall involvement the user has with the product. 

SEO connects you with users who are searching for information relevant to the products or services that you offer. If your website contains information that is relevant to what the users are looking for, it is bound to leave a positive impact on the user’s experience.

Other than this, SEO also involves other methods you can enhance the user experience of your customer such as, developing an easy-to-navigate layout, increasing the speed at which the pages in your website load and using a mobile-friendly configuration.

5. It improves your site’s engagement rate –

An enhanced user experience for your audience means that will likely be spending more time on your website. This user engagement is important because high user engagement leads to increased ROI. 

If your customers are engaging with your product, it means that they are bonding with your business. This can ensure customer loyalty for your product. Since your website is easy to navigate and it contains the right information they are looking for, it is easy for users to engage with your content. This eventually leads to the user spending more time on your website and increasing the engagement rate.

6. It yields higher click through rate –

Another benefit of SEO is that more visibility and relevance in search results will lead to better click-through rates. The prominent your site is in the search results, the more click-through rates it will receive. 

Let us look at an analysis done by Advanced Web Ranking. According to them, the website ranking in top positions in the search results gets a significantly higher click-through rate, on desktop as well as mobile searches.

In this analysis, they generated a CTR of 30.54% on desktop and 23.59% on mobile. They say, the click-through rate gradually drops with respect to a drop in the website’s search position. Thus they suggest that there is a correlation between higher search ranking and higher click-through rate.

Image source – Advanced web Ranking

7. It helps you drive more sales

SEO improves your performance as it helps you attract relevant customers and quality leads. This helps in driving more sales to you. Now, how does this work? Let’s study the case of Pinocchio’s Italian Eatery situated in Brighton, Colorado.

This restaurant had never worked with an SEO expert before nor was their website mobile friendly. With the help of an SEO team, they launched a mobile-friendly website that had an optimized layout in an attempt to ease user interactions. When they did this, the restaurant reported a 16.7% increase in their sales.

8. Organic results get more clicks than Pay-Per-Click

Search ads are much more significant in the search results, so it can be assumed that they will get more clicks than organic search results. While paid-advertisements have some impact on the website’s traffic, people still prefer the organic search results over the paid advertisements.

According to a research by SparkToro, most of the searches don’t even get a single click. But, among all the searches, most of the users went for the organic search results. In 2018, 66% of clicks made from mobile and laptops, went for the organic search results. Only 3% people went for the paid advertisements.

Image source – SparkToro

9. It helps you keep up with the competition

Every marketer finds SEO important so generally even your competitors are probably going to use it. According to Zazzle Media, 88% of their marketers consider SEO as a significant part of their marketing strategy. 

This means that implementing a SEO strategy will help you keep up with your competitors. It may be a tough challenge to get ahead of your competitors, but SEO will make sure that you won’t be very behind in the race. 

Image source – Zazzle media

Thus, we have discussed how SEO plays an important role in determining the marketing strategy of every business.

Facebook now has 2.27 billion active users, with nearly 1.5 billion users being active everyday. If we count that, it sums up to just about nearly 5X the population of the United States and roughly 20% of the world’s population. The numbers keep on increasing day by day.

We can now imagine the social influence that may be achieved with the assistance of Facebook in terms of your business. It is not only about the amount of individuals who use Facebook but also about the user attention it has. Globally an average user spends an hour on Facebook. If we consider that an average person sleeps for 8 hours. We are able to say that he spends 7% of his time when he is awake on social media. 

So, spending time learning about Facebook marketing is well worth the investment.

How to know if your customers use Facebook?

According to the foremost recent data provided by the Pew Research , we are able that, on average every internet user uses at least one social networking site. Depending on the age, the time youngsters spend on Facebook is comparatively more than that of the adults. If we were to find out the internet social network people prefer the most, Facebook tops the list.

In January 2018, it was found that 68% of Americans used Facebook. The second to top the list of networks was Instagram with 35%. So, it is clear that there is a high possibility of your audience using Facebook. We just have to determine the way through which we will market our business on Facebook.

5 Ways to use set up Facebook for business

1. You need to make a business page and not a personal profile

You need to make a business page for your organization and not a personal profile. A business page may look just like a Facebook profile, but it offers some unique tools to brands and businesses. Your audience can Like your page to receive updates about your products or services in their News Feed, and this is something you cannot do for a personal profile. You can set up your business page by following the instructions given below-

• Head to https://www.facebook.com/pages/create. You need to be logged into your personal account on Facebook, however, your personal information won’t be visible onto your new business page.

Note: Since 2017, facebook started showing admin names for a some categories of pages. 

• You need to choose from the subsequent page types – Business/brand or Community/public figure.

• Enter your business details.

• Add brand images –

You need to upload your business profile picture/logo and cover photos. While uploading these pictures, you need to make sure that they fit in the category of the optimum image sizes for Facebook, so that they look their best otherwise facebook will give you the option to crop images for the specific.

According to Hootsuite, Facebook’s recommended formats for best results are as follows –

• Facebook profile picture size – 

The recommended size for the business profile pictures is 170 x 170 pixels on desktop, and 128 x 128 pixels on smartphones.

• Facebook cover picture size –

The recommended size for the business cover picture is given as follows ––

• For desktop – 

The recommended size is 820 x 312 pixels.

• For smartphone –

The recommended size is 640 x 360 pixels.

• For smartphone –

The recommended size is 400 x 150 pixels.

#2. Complete your brand information –

To complete your brand information, you need to click on Edit Page Info and fill in the following sections –

• Your description –

As your business description, you can write upto 255 words that clearly describe what your business is about and how it helps people.

• Contact Information –

You can fill in all the ways through which you want your audience to be able to reach you. You can include your business website too.

• Extra options-

If you feel that it is relevant to your business, you can also add extra options like, your operating hours, price range and your privacy policy.2. 2.2

#3. Create your Facebook username also known as your vanity URL –

With the help of your business username, people can find your business on Facebook. You can create a username by clicking on Create Page @username, to create one. It can be upto 50 characters long.

Here are some marketing tips for your Facebook’s username –

Choose a search-friendly Page name for your business. In most cases, this will be your brand name.

As long as possible, you must use a consistent business name across all the social networks.

#4. Add a Call-To-Action button –

A call-to-action button helps your audience with reaching out to your business easily. They can also shop for your products or engage with your business. You need to click on Add a Button under your cover photo to set it up.

#5. Review the settings of your Facebook page-

Your Facebook Page settings give you custom control over which audience see what on your business page. You can also understand your privacy and security settings here.

Top 8 Facebook marketing strategies for your business –

#1. Define your audience –

In order to put up a successful marketing strategy for your business, you need to understand who your target audience is.

You need to ask yourself the following questions with regards to your business

• How old are your target followers
• Where do they live
• What kind of jobs do they have
• What challenges do they face
• How and when do they use Facebook

In order to start, you need to understand and follow the basic Facebook demographics. Once you know as to which of your audience uses the platform and how that maps back to your target customer, you can look at the insights of the customers on Facebook. You can do this by finding out more about your customers, like –

1. Age 
2. Gender
3. Education
4. Relationship status
5. Location
6. Language
7. Facebook usage
8. Past purchasing activity

This is one of the most significant steps in using Facebook for your business marketing.

#2. Set goals

It can be great if you get a huge number of likes to your business page on Facebook. But, unless those likes do not contribute to your broader plan of marketing, they are of no use. As an effective part of your Facebook’s business marketing strategy, you have to have clear goals tied to your real business objectives. The goals may differ for different businesses, but they should all focus on actions that have a real impact to your business marketing strategy. Your goals could be –

• To generate leads
• To increase conversions on your website
• To improve customer service

These goals are a good place to start off with your strategy. You also need to make sure that your goals are much more specific and they can be measured. Everything you do on your business page—every post, every comment, every ad—should eventually lead towards you achieving your goals. 

#4. Plan your content mix –

Once you have set your business goals, you need to create a plan to achieve those goals. You can either follow the 80-20 rule or the social media rule of the thirds –

The 80-20 rule says –

1. You must use  80% of your Facebook posts to inform, educate and entertain.
2. You must use  the other 20% to promote your brand.

This means that the maximum of your posts (80%) should be of value, so that your customers will be willing to learn about your products and services in the next 20% of your posts, which are more focused on sales of the products/services of your business.

The social media rule of the thirds says –

The social media rule of the thirds can be described with the following points. It says – 

1. One-third your content must have ideas and stories.
2. One-third of your content must involve personal interaction with your followers.
3. The remaining third of your content can be put to promote your business.

The final part of planning your content according to your business requirements  is to know when and how often to post. According to research, the best time to post on Facebook is –

1. For B2B Brands – between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. EST on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday.

1. For B2C Brands – 12 p.m. EST on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday

It may be any business, but it is important to post consistently. Creating a content calendar will balance your distinct content types such as text, images, videos etc. and also keep your posting schedule on track.

#5. Optimize your page for engagement –

In order to achieve the marketing goals that you have set for your business, you need to make it easy for people to find your business page on Facebook. Once they visit your business page, you need to compel them to like your page. You must put some extra efforts in the cover page of your business profile, as it is the first thing people see when they visit your profile.

Next, you need to make people view, like and follow your business.

In order to make people who follow you on other channels, find your Business page, you need to do the following –

1. Add a link of your email signature, newsletter and other channels in your business page.
2. Add Facebook Like and share buttons on your website and blog to make it easy for people to find, follow, and share your business page in one click.

If you want people to share your content about your business, you need to make sure the content you post to Facebook is highly shareable. Creating valuable and entertaining content that your customers will be happy to share with their connections is the best way to expand the organic reach of your business.

#6. Consider using other Facebook tools –

When all of your Business profile is set up, some tools on Facebook can help you with the marketing strategy, they are as follows –

1. Facebook Groups – 

In today’s time, a Facebook group can be considered as the new equivalent to your favourite coffee shop or community center. They are a place for people to share new information and ideas. Creating a facebook group for your business, will enable you to share new ideas with your customers about the new products/ services and you can also collect their feedback or grievances here. 

Nearly 1.4 billion people use Facebook groups every month. Thus, it is an audience too large to ignore. You can also use Facebook Groups to showcase your business expertise within the industry and provide added value to your customers. This is a great way to build trust and ongoing loyalty of your customers.

2. Facebook Chatbot or Facebook Messenger Bot – 

Research shows that on an average, Facebook users exchange more than 20 billion messages with businesses every month. Users expect a business to respond to their queries immediately. When a survey was conducted, a Facebook user said that he would not wait for more than 10 minutes for a response from a business before moving onto another one. 

Facebook suggests that businesses must use a Facebook Messenger Bot for the purpose of quick replies to their customers.

3. Facebook Business Manager – 

According to Facebook, a Facebook Business Manager is, “a one-stop shop for managing business tools, business assets and employee access to these assets.” It is a tool that allows you to manage the organic and paid Facebook posts within your business. 

#7. Incorporate Facebook ads and Facebook pixel –

Just because you post something related to your business on Facebook, doesn’t mean that all your customers will see it. The approximate percentage of customers that your post on Facebook can reach is given below –

1. For Business pages with fewer than 10,000 followers: 8.18% organic reach
2. For Business pages with more than 10,000 followers: 2.59% organic reach

This is because Facebook’s first priority will be given to posts from customers’ family and friends and then the posts related to your business will be shown to the customer. Facebook Ad’s can help you with this.

• Facebook Ad –

A Facebook ad is a type of content you pay to share with some specific or  targeted customers. It is all about getting your business in front of the right customers and thus achieving your business goals.

• Facebook pixel –

A Facebook pixel is a simple piece of code that you place on your business website. It operates as follows –

1. It tracks the conversations between you and your customers
2. It remarkets your products to customers who have already visited your business website
3. It builds targeted custom audiences for the future ads related to your business.

The pixel will start collecting data as soon as you place it on your business website, so you’ll have remarketing and custom audience information ready when you start the first marketing campaign of your business..

#8. Track, measure, and refine  –

You cannot just set a Facebook marketing strategy for your business and then forget about it. You have got to track and measure the performance of your business so that you will know the following – what worked and what didn’t work for your business. By doing this, you can improve the marketing strategy of your business in future.

With the help of Facebook Insights, you can measure the following –

1. Likes
2. Reach (how many customers saw your posts)
3. engagement (how many people liked, clicked, shared, or commented)
4. which of your posts result in people unliking your Page

Facebook Insights will also help you determine which post types work best for your business, so that you can find out which post is working well for your business and which are not. By following this, you can do successful marketing for your business on Facebook.

 

         

How to use Quora for business

Are you looking to promote your business or enhance the brand awareness of your business through an atypical social media tool? Then, Quora just might be the right choice for your business. Quora, when compared to other social media tools like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, may not have a huge user base, but it helps marketers in enhancing their firm’s business and increasing their brand awareness, just by answering a few questions.

What is Quora?

Quora is a question-and-answer platform that allows users to ask, answer and even edit responses to questions virtually related to any topic or industry. Adam D’Angelo, co-founder of Quora, describes it as, “a general place for people to share knowledge of all kinds”, with a focus on, “high-quality content”. Many of those who answer questions on quora are experts of the tech industry, such as Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zukerberg.

History of Quora

Quora was founded in 2009 and launched in June of 2010. D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever , the founders of Quora, formerly worked for Facebook. D’Angelo then resigned his position at Facebook in order to create Quora. Their goal was to create a question-and-answer platform better than the existing ones. An iPhone app was launched in 2011 and an Android app was launched in 2012.

By March 2014, Quora had 1.15 million unique users of it’s site. In April 2014, Quora became the second largest source of information after Wikipedia, with over 500,000 topics. 

Purpose of Quora

On Quora, in general, answers are voted on by users and preference is given to those users who come from credible sources. Unlike many other social platforms, here users are supposed to register on the site using their real names and not as an alias. This ensures the credibility of the answers. Like other social networking sites, users can create profiles and can connect with other users as well as research about the topics of their interest on the site.

DÁngelo describes the motivation for the users as, “On Quora, you are not answering the questions because you want to get points or because you have nothing else to do. You are answering questions because you want to build your reputation or you genuinely, intrinsically enjoy helping other people. It’s the same reason someone might want to make a website with information. We just made that a lot easier. ”

What makes Quora unique in terms of content distribution?

What makes Quora unique is the reason people come to the platform. More than 300 million users visit Quora every month in order to conduct research, ask for tips, evaluate products and learn more about the world around them. This knowledge exchange gives valuable insights to people looking for new ideas or searching for new products.This could also include people looking for reliable information about your company, it’s product or services, your business competitors or your business as a whole.

Unlike many other platforms where the knowledge shared gets buried or it disappears, the content shared on Quora is evergreen. This means the answers which users share aren’t just relevant for a day, they are still easy to find, months and years later.

How to use Quora for business?

In times where customers are switching from the traditional methods to the online methods of marketing, advertising teams really need to focus on their marketing strategies and think outside the box. Successful marketing strategy no longer includes increasing the number of visits to your website, but you need to deliver such a value to your customers, which will make them follow you.

Quora is a great tool where you are looking to deliver value to your customers. You can do this by giving detailed answers to their questions. One must remember that the motto of advertising on Quora is to answer the questions of your audience rather than showing a advertising message to as many users as possible. 

Here is how you get started –

#1. Create a brilliant bio

No matter which social media platform you might be using to promote your business. A great profile is mandatory. With Quora, it is somewhat different. You cannot create a profile for a brand in most cases. It can be created only for individuals. So, you will need to decide as to who in your organization will be responsible for posting answers.

Quora shows the first 50 characters in your profile, as a tagline above every answer you provide. So, you can include your company name here. By seeing this name, users will come to know where you come from. Your full bio can also include clickable links. However, you must use these links very modestly, as they help drive traffic back to your most useful website-based resources.

If your business focuses on niches, it is advisable for you to create topic-specific bios. For instance, you might have one bio which demonstrates your expertise as a Digital Marketer and one where you profit as a Content Writer. To create topic-specific bios click on your profile page. On the right hand side, you will see the ‘Knows About’ column. 

Next to each topic you choose, you can display your experience in that area. Once you do that, the other things you can add are – 

• Your interests – 

You have to make sure that your interests align with your business.

• About Me section –

Include the information which shows your leadership qualities. You can add links to your website (moderately), if you think it can help you in offering more content.

•  Your employment and education credentials
• Your location or the cities you visit regularly
• An eye-catching profile picture. Generally, a clean head and shoulders shot is often recommended for professionals.

           A complete bio makes it easy for the users to find you on Quora, as well as it speaks a lot about the credibility of your answers.

#2. Track relevant topics with notifications

One of the best ways to use Quora for marketing purposes is to conduct research. You will be able to find out as to what the industry experts are saying. You are able to track topics and have questions sent to your inbox. To begin, type a keyword into Quora’s search box that you want to follow.

Quora automagically delivers a list of topic suggestions for you to explore. When you click on a topic page, you will also see another list of related topics at the side.

You have to hit the Follow button to start following a topic. You also need to make sure that your emails notifications are enabled correctly in order to get alerts. You need to go to your Settings page and click on Emails and Notifications.

You can also choose the frequency and the type of emails you receive from Quora.

#3. Find the right questions to answer

The secret behind learning how to  Quora for marketing is in knowing which questions to answer. There are million queries floating on Quora today. However, not all of them will be able to bring value to your business. The significant thing must be to show users that you are an expert in a specific field.

One of the easiest ways to find relevant questions is to type a keyword in the query box at the top of the platform and select Search. Once the list of queries show up, you need to find the ones from the last month or so. You need to focus on the topics that are relevant right now in order to get the visibility you need. It also helps you in adding an authoritative voice to completely new discussions. You need to follow through the following points –

#4. Choose topics that fit your business –

Look for a topic which a product or service in your business works or solves efficiently or a topic that you have recently written about. The best way to answer any question with social proof, is with the help of a case study.

#5. Find threads with a lot of upvotes –

When you’re browsing through Quora, you’ll see an Upvotes section under each question. The threads with a lot of upvotes often have the most views. If you give an intuitive answer, it may get thousands of views a day.

#6. Make sure to answer the new questions too-

You do not need to exclusively focus on the most popular queries. If you answer new questions early, it fills your profile in terms of the evidence of your knowledge.

#7. Answer questions with passion and authority –

Once you have found questions that are relevant to your business, you need to make sure that your answers stand out in comparison with the others. Just one or two statements on “How to use WordPress” won’t do. However, you can demonstrate your expertise related to that field and leadership by giving intuitive responses that contain links to relevant content on your blog, case studies and statistics.

You need to make sure that your answer reflects your passion for the topic. If you are trying to appeal to a younger audience you can use Quora’s version of emojis.

One of the easiest ways to construct a great answer is to pull snippets from the content you’ve already created. Try to grab a significant quote from a recent article that you have written and expand on it, also make sure to complete it with a link back to your site.

The above images show you an example of an insightful answer.

Adding an image to your answer helps too. Graphs and charts are excellent at capturing attention. People follow visual instructions 323% better than the written ones.

#8. Connect with other Quora users –

Quora isn’t just a search engine, it is a social media platform too. That means you need to be social. You also need to learn to connect with potential leads and customers. Quora allows users to communicate directly with each other. 

For businesses, this is a great way to build relationships with customers. People may also ask questions about a specific product or service in your business. Who can answer that question better than a prominent employee of your company. Quora is a great platform to address the concerns and queries of your customer. 

#9. Review your analytics constantly

While using other social media platforms, you can track your performance with tools like Google Analytics. The same goes with your Quora marketing strategy. 

Being active on Quora is a great way to build credibility. The more answers you give, the more your presence and the reputation of the business will grow. However, you also need to monitor the kind of impact that your efforts are having. That way you are able to calculate the Return-On-Investment of your Question-Answer sessions.

With the help of Analytics, you are able to answer a lot of questions. You will be able to find out as to how many people viewed your answer to how many upvotes you got. In addition to this, if you add a tracking link to your answers, you will be able to measure how many valuable click-throughs you will be getting.

What is SEO?

SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process of optimizing your website in order to get organic or unpaid traffic from the search engine’s results page. In simpler words, it is the practice of increasing the number and quality of visitors to your website by improving rankings in the algorithmic search engine results.

On any given day, people conduct more than 2.2 million searches. That is just for Google, the numbers on the other search engines have yet to be added. According to the report of InternetLiveStats, more than 1.3 million searches were made at the time of writing this article. Thus, showing up in the top searches of Google is a very important factor which decides whether your online business strategy is working or not.

What are the types of SEO?

We can basically divide the types of SEO into 2 categories. They are –

 

1. On-Page SEO – All the on-page SEO strategies happen on your website.

1. Off-Page SEO – All off-page SEO strategies happen off your website.

Both the above mentioned strategies are equally important to make your website user-friendly and trustworthy, to your customers and search engines. Crawl reports tell you whether Google can access your site and if yes, what information can be recorded and if it is relevant or not. So, if these crawl reports approve your site as relevant for users, there is a high possibility of your website ranking well in relevant searches. 

Why does SEO matter to search engines?

Whenever a person searches for something, the page he is delivered to, after entering the search query is called the search engine results page (SERP). On The SERP, you can find 2 things, the “organic results” and the “pay-per-click-ads” or (PPC). Here, the organic results are influenced by SEO while the PPC advertisements are paid for showing up on the results page.

We cannot pay any search engines to show up our ad in the organic search results. However, they make money by the ads on the page. It works in this way- the better results they show, it is more likely that the users will use that search engine again. The more people using the search engine directly leads to them showing more ads which ultimately makes money for them.

How does SEO work?

Search engines have web crawlers or spiders which are the automated robot kind. These robots or bots, collect all the information about your website and the pages which build up your site. They can use this information while displaying your site to the user. They collect things like page speed, title tags, backlinks, internal linkings, social signals etc.

Google uses more than 200 ranking factors in their algorithms. Thus, we need to consider a lot of things and plan our actions accordingly, while optimizing our website. The on-page and off-page ranking factors together decide as to how work our site is optimized and thus, how well it ranks on the search page.

The competition being so tough, how can small businesses compete with the big ones in the battle of SEO?

We have studied about SEO. It’s types, the importance of SEO to search engines and the working of SEO. After studying all this, it may now seem very difficult for small businesses to compete with the already dominant businesses in terms of SEO. But, there are benefits of running smaller websites, that can make a significant difference to your SEO.

Here, we’ll see how small businesses can target better opportunities than the bigger websites, even though the bigger websites have their natural advantages.

The advantages of having a bigger or high ranking website in SERP –

It is very natural for the bigger websites in SEO to have bigger advantages.The advantages of these websites are as follows –

• Domain Authority

Domain authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engines results page (SERPs). A domain authority score ranges from 1-100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.

Domain authority is calculated by evaluating multiple factors, including linking root domains and the number of total links, into a single DA score. This score can then be used when comparing websites or tracking the “ranking strength” of a website over time.

• Trustworthiness

The big websites have built their big brand names and their reputation over time and over years. People know who they are and users are familiar with their products and services. Thus people have a biased tendency towards liking or trusting that brand and buying from them.

These websites have been in competition for a longer time and people have grown familiar with them and trust them. This thing builds over time and it is difficult to introduce people with a new concept.

• More financial resources as compared to a smaller website

When it comes to being strong financially, the smaller websites are often financially fragile, with little cash on hand or resources to buffer even a minor financial shock. On the other hand, the bigger websites are financially sound and put hundreds of millions of dollars towards their marketing or SEO efforts.

The advantages small businesses have over the bigger ones in SEO –

1. The ability to take quick decisions

In small businesses, work priorities can change quickly. For a particular time, your team could be having different resources and you might be investing them to the said priority of that time. In a week or so, your top priority work might be replaced with some other work which could be required to be addressed as the new top priority. In this case, you don’t have to check up with the manager, the team or the boss. You don’t need to run the approval through three layers of management. 

You can be very quick in taking the decisions and focusing on the work. Smaller businesses can get a remarkable amount of work done in smaller time as compared to the bigger businesses.

2. Creativity

In a smaller business you don’t have a huge brand name and the fixed boundaries that come with it. Bigger businesses have an identity and people are familiar with it. Now, even if they wish to make some improvements in their working or products, they cannot make major changes, they need to keep up the identity with which people recognize them.

In smaller businesses, you can be more creative while thinking outside the box. You are allowed to execute your ideas and see how they work for you.

3. Focus

As a small business, you can choose to focus your marketing efforts on one specific thing. So, if you know that, SEO has better opportunities, then you can ignore other web marketing channels. If re-targeting and PPC are not working for you that well as compared to SEO, you can simply focus on SEO for a few weeks.

In bigger businesses on other hand, a marketing manager is responsible for a long list of things, which he needs to perform and just cannot ignore his other responsibilities in focusing on just one thing.

5. Authenticity

A bigger brand will generally have big brand associations. On the other hand, a smaller business may have a smaller audience but they can build very strong positive associations with them. As a smaller business, you don’t need to convert your website visitors into paying customers, that fast.

You can work on building your brand’s appeal to a very specific niche. If you monetize them over well enough, over time you can also build a great business. It might still be a small business, but if you follow this, it would be a great small business.

6. Niche Appeal

Let’s just say, we compare your small business with some big business like Flipkart or Amazon, who have a strong online marketing strategy and are in the top-most ranking in SERPs. They make a wide variety of products available for you online and after browsing through the products, you can buy from them.

Now you can choose to take a small slice of their business and focus on that. You can just exclusively focus on a few products  and become an authority in that. For instance, you can only focus on home appliances and put all your efforts towards them and build your brand identity towards this specific niche.

Is SEO important for every business?

You may be having a business in industry, where there might be no competition at all. Evidently, you might be ranking no.1. Or you might be struggling to even get a rank and might be wondering to switch to other options than SEO, which might get you the visibility your business needs.

In this case, no matter what the situation might be for you, if you have a website for your company, you ought to have SEO. Whether your business is big or small, old or new, struggling or successful, SEO is very crucial for the success of your business online. In fact, even if your business is one of it’s kind in the industry, your business still needs SEO.

Top 4 ways in which smaller business can compete with bigger businesses in the battle of SEO

#1. Target those keywords which the bigger sites are unable or by far aren’t competing on

There are some keywords which the bigger businesses in this case like Flipkart or Amazon won’t be targeting yet or are unable to target due to legal issues or PR issues or because they have an indirect path to Return of Investment. Those keywords can be classified into 3 types. They are –

• Long-tail keywords – 

So, Flipkart might be targeting something like, ‘Flipkart assured best AC’s’, but they are definitely not targeting something like, ‘Latest AC’s of 2019’. Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they are closer to a point-of-purchase.

• Comparison keywords – 

So, Flipkart can’t go after their competitor’s brand names, and they certainly wouldn’t choose generally to compare themselves to another brand. So, some other businesses name vs. Flipkart, they are just not going to have that on their website.

But, you can have a comparison on that and also build your page around that. That’s a major advantage a small website has over a big one.

• Comparison keywords – 

So, flipkart has business relationships with a lot of brands. So, it’s not in their best interests to rank the products from different brands from 1 to 10 or from 1 to 100.

As a small website, you don’t have that constraint. You can go after those keywords, which your competitors avoid using.

 #2. Focus on building 1-1 relationships

You can build better and more direct relationships with people. Big businesses will go through their PR team and have their team connect with people. But, in a small business you can go directly and connect with people. 

#3. You can go deeper into your research and build better content

You can invest more in a single piece of content rather than focusing on many different types of content. So, when a certain set of keywords are very important to your business, you can focus on building your content around those keywords. You can put your time, energy and resources into that content and focus on building your website around it.

#4. Aim for authority and brand association in a very specific niche

Bigger websites offer a wide variety of products and services and thus cannot entirely focus on a particular niche. But, smaller businesses can do this. They can aim for authority in a specific niche and strive towards ranking higher when a search related to that specific brand is done. 

Some key insights on SEO for small business owners –

There are many things about your business that you can’t control. You cannot control when a new competitor appears, how well your customers react to a new product launch or even the profits your business gets. 

But, they are some things about your business which you can control with the help of SEO. You can control how your website ranks in the search results, which leads to the number of visitors that visit your website, which decides how many online sales you are going to make and thus decides the amount of money you will be making by being online.

If you invest in your website’s SEO, you make a direct investment in it’s visibility and profitability. So, regardless of what might happen tomorrow, if your SEO is constant, you can count on it as an important factor in helping your business grow and prosper.