Why your Google ranking is especially important for your small business
Exposure to customers can be an extremely difficult quest, especially for a small business with established competitors. You may have the best breakfast in your town, but who is going to show up in the top 5 results when a potential new customer is searching for something to eat? This is where SEO comes in: Search Engine Optimization.
It’s the hot buzzword for anyone in the digital marketing space, but it’s important to any business with a web presence! SEO is, essentially, improving your website in ways that are more appealing to search engines that are looking to serve up the most relevant results to their users. If I search for the best bagels in my town, Google will try to show me the most popular breakfast spots and hold off on hot dog stands.
This information is so important, in fact, that marketing companies like Lyfe Marketing report “over 50% of traffic” to most websites originate from organic search results. We can actually find the data to back up these numbers from supporting software like Google Analytics, which will show even higher numbers of directed web traffic from search depending on the type of business!
What can I do about it?
Appearing on Google results happens automatically and for free. In fact, it can be more difficult to keep your site from being indexed and crawled by the search bots. Where you end up ranking is a far different story, and depends greatly on what search terms are being used and what other sites offer relevant results, a low spam index, or other supporting factors like backlinks.
We even have a tool to help you analyze your website, which you can find by going here. Obviously, the best place to be is at the very top of the results , but even the first page is ideal compared to being indexed on the second page or beyond. A study from Chitika found that a staggering 91.5% of all web traffic to pages from results pages was from the very first page, with 4.8% from the second page and dropping below 1% by page four. This study was broad and unspecific, so depending on your business and industry the results could be even more concentrated to the top five or even three results on the first page.
Casual, and especially mobile, browsing has become the norm for more consumers than ever before, so having strong page optimization means that your business can be at the top of their search rather than entirely unnoticed!
