Internet Marketing – SEO helps small business owners create fast, robust, and user-friendly websites that rank higher in search engines, which in turn helps bring more qualified potential customers to their sites and eventually increases conversion rates.

SEO also helps build brand awareness for your business as search engine users are more likely to trust a site that is on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) than brands that are not.

If you’re a small business owner, you should utilize SEO to build a strong web presence and bypass your competition to gain new customers for your business and take it to the next level.

If you own a web site yourself or know someone that does, you are probably familiar with the importance of internet marketing tools. The site may have a professional design, quality product or service, great content, and functionality, but if the right internet marketing strategies are not utilized, your site may not be attracting the key to real success, highly targeted traffic.

Getting a lot of consistent traffic has very little to do with the web site itself, but rather how the owner or webmaster of the site chooses to advertise the site. There are hundreds even thousands of sites competing on the web today, so you must use the most effective internet marketing tools to achieve targeted results.

There are many different internet marketing tools that can be used effectively, all of which are designed to increase your web sites traffic. Simply put, you must find a way to get people to your site. Put yourself in the “shoes” of your prospective visitors and clients. “Where do they go to do web searches?” is a key question that must be answered and can be quite simple to answer, the search engine.

The webs most popular sites are search engines and portals, therefore, you should focus your internet marketing efforts on the search engine.

When surfers browse search engines, they will be more inclined to view a site placed high on the search engine, as opposed to a site with poor search engine placement. With that in mind, you must use the correct internet marketing tools to build a strong (high) search engine ranking.

This is where the term Search Engine Optimization is derived from. SEO, as it is called commonly, is a set of methods and tactics aimed at improving your search engine ranking and the visibility of your site in search engine results.

Search engines index sites in several ways, one of which is by looking at the keyword density of the website, or the content of the site. Content alone is one of the most valuable internet marketing tools to utilize. If your site has excellent relevant keywords aimed towards achieving a high search engine ranking, as well as providing valuable information, you can expect a high search engine position. But because of the high competition of web sites using the same internet marketing methods, you must continuously find new and better ways of attracting targeted traffic.

Today, one of the most popular and effective internet marketing tools is the use of Pay Per Click advertising. This method involves bidding for a particular keyword in a specific search engine, the search engine then compares the bids of all the merchants for that specific keyword, and the highest bid gets the top placement for that specific keyword search.

For example, if you bid $.75 and a competitor bids $.73, you will be awarded the higher position. This internet marketing tool is being utilized by thousands of web sites on hundreds of PPC search engines. Google Adwords, Yahoo Overture, and the new MSN Adcenter are the three most popular sites that offer pay per click ad services today.

Content and pay per click advertising are just two of many internet marketing tools that you can utilize to improve your search engine optimization and achieve high web site traffic. There are literally hundreds of other techniques and methods, both free and paid, that you can use successfully to increase the visitors and profits of your site.

Internet marketing tools are the true key to SEO and generating profits in the highly-competitive online business battlefront that we call the Internet.

5 KEY Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses

1. User-Friendly Websites

SEO will help small business owners create a faster, smoother, and user-friendlier website. Although most people still hang on to the old definition of SEO, thinking that it is only about optimizing for the search engines, however, today SEO is also about improving user experience too.

Well-structured, clean, and uncluttered websites compel a casual visitor to stay longer, thereby decreasing bounce rate and increasing page views. Similarly, highly relevant content (sales pages and blog articles) keeps you readers happy as they are more likely to solves answer their questions, solve their pressing issues and helps them find exactly what they’re looking for on your site.

On-page SEO, if done properly, makes your users happy, which makes search engines happy too as they love to serve high-quality information to their users.

 

2. Bring in MORE Customers

Let’s face it, one of the main reasons for having a website is to stand out from your competition and increase your customer base. Otherwise, why invest 1,000s of pounds (£) on marketing, right? Businesses that have an SEO-optimized website bring MORE customers and grow as twice as fast as businesses that do not have one.

SEO is probably the most efficient and affordable marketing strategy that exists today. Moreover, it will only bring in customers who are actively seeking to find your product or service!

If you’re willing to spend few hours of time, energy, and a small amount of money, SEO will help brings “targeted” traffic to your website, and eventually more customers to your business than any other marketing tactics you’ll ever use.

 

3. Better Conversion Rates

Seo-optimized websites loads faster, are easy to read and surf, and will display properly on almost all types of devices, including mobile and tablets. Websites that are easy to read and navigate are more likely to grab and hold attention from your readers or visitors – i.e. they’re more likely to become your loyal customers, subscribers, and returning visitors.

 

4. Build Brand Awareness

One of the benefits of getting higher rankings on the SERPs is building brand awareness. When your sites appear on the first page of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, your potential customers are more likely to trust your brand when they search for a particular term rather than other brands that don’t have a strong web presence.

That is why small businesses that want to build better brand awareness (either locally or expanding nationally) must invest in SEO and start gaining top rankings for the KEY terms related to their business. We’re not in the 90s anymore; search engines now play a significant role in making or breaking your brand.

 

5. Bypass Competition

Let’s take an example of two businesses that are in the same industry, selling similar products, at similar prices. One of them has an optimized website while the other has a non-optimized website. Considering everything is else is equal, which company do you think will attract more customers to their website from local searches? Which company will likely grow faster and become more successful?

Search engines and SEO are very powerful. If your competitors are doing SEO marketing, simply you must ask yourself why you haven’t invested in such a strategy yet too.