How to Grow Your Small Business
Some small business owners, particularly in the post-Covid climate, struggle to grow their companies. Even if they have a groundbreaking product or service, the marketplace is increasingly competitive, particularly online.
What’s Holding Your Business Back?
The inherent problem is that it’s never truly clear as to what’s holding a small business back from achieving sustained growth. Several factors could influence a decline in sales, a slowdown in leads, and a lack of online visibility – audience behaviours and expectations could have changed, buying trends could emerge, and new disruptors could enter the marketplace.
However, fundamental to any small business growth is understanding your target audience and what they want. Quite often, that boils down to pinpointing the types of questions that they need answering and what they need help with, which can often be dictated by their search behaviours.
In simple terms, understanding what your target audience is searching for, and creating an SEO strategy that reflects that data, can help alleviate these pain points. No, this doesn’t mean creating a page dedicated to every single search term that you can think of, flooding it with keyword-heavy content, and waiting for the leads and sales to come pouring in. It means thinking strategically about your short- and long-term business goals, understanding what SEO involves, how it benefits you and your audience, and giving it time to manifest into results that help your business on the path to sustainable growth.
The Struggles of Small Business Growth
There are many reasons small businesses struggle to scale up effectively. Some industries are just fiercely competitive in the search landscape which makes it difficult for smaller, independent, and newer companies to stand out.
At a more granular level, many business owners rely on outdated marketing tactics that are no longer providing results, whether it’s creating streams of low-value content or building links in as many third-party sites as possible (something which Google has cracked down on judging by its recent Helpful Content Update). Meanwhile, others don’t fully grasp who their ideal customers are and what messaging will resonate and find it difficult to balance the art of capturing essential pain points and keywords into persuasive and convincing prose.
In other cases – and this is most telling of all – many small companies have an online presence and website that lacks visibility. In today’s highly competitive digital landscape, you need to take steps to help potential customers find your business online. Most people by now recognise the value of a website’s first impression – so if you can capture their intrigue by creating purposeful content and demonstrating your authoritativeness on your site, you’ll be positioned in a better place to grow your company and brand awareness.
How SEO Can Drive Growth
This is where impactful SEO comes in; SEO improves your visibility in search engines. By optimising your website content for relevant keywords and providing a great user experience simultaneously, you’ll stand a better chance of driving ideal customers to your site when they search for related products or services.
By extension, your improved traffic will translate to higher rankings in search results, and, in turn, higher rankings provide even greater traffic and more conversions.
Competing with larger companies that have hefty marketing budgets to play with can seem ambitious, but it doesn’t have to be. Many small businesses try to grow their presence in their local areas and communities to start with, which has a knock-on effect. This is a cost-effective way to establish a firm online presence from the outset. You can then build on those foundations as your business evolves. Soon enough, with the right strategy behind your site, with purposeful content added to your site regularly, you’ll be driving leads and sales and building your online presence with each passing year.
SEO also levels the playing field so small businesses can compete with larger companies that have big marketing budgets. It’s one of the most cost-effective strategies for establishing an online presence and driving leads.
To align with Google’s constantly changing algorithm, focus on providing tremendously helpful information to your audience rather than just targeting keywords. This looks to be where Google is maintaining its focus, so answer their questions in-depth, avoid thin content, and make sure pages are easy to digest. These best practices will improve the user experience of your site significantly.
As an SEO and digital marketing agency in Sussex with a proven track record of helping small businesses scale and grow, it’s fair to say the team at Artemis are no strangers to the challenges you’re facing. If you have questions about how you can cost-effectively and efficiently position your business to a point where it can grow and your site can be an accurate reflection of your firm, then we can tailor a solution to meet your needs.
Get in touch today to discuss your goals and how SEO and CRO could be an asset to you in your business growth journey.
