How Can SEO Improve Small Business Sales?

Utilizing SEO or search engine optimization is one of the best methods of increasing traffic to a website thus increasing sales with a higher volume of traffic. This is a great way to drive traffic to a business because there is minimal cost involved. The only cost if any is within the website itself and designing it in such a way to rank higher in the search engines. There are huge potential advertising savings possible with search engine optimization over purchase advertising. Though many small businesses do not have the resources to put much into a website for their business if they have a website at all are not aware of the potential of higher returns with higher sales with a few steps to optimize for the search engines.

Long Term SEO
With any business the more traffic usually equate to higher sales whether it be a small, mid sized or a large corporation as long as the product or service appeals to the consumer. With higher rankings in the search engines, there will be higher traffic volume to the site. This is where the importance of search engine optimization comes in. Typically business that rely on heavy advertising or affiliates for sales will be short lived. A business that has a long-term strategy in today’s marketplace will incorporate there website with the recommended optimization techniques. Though search engine indexing in Google, Yahoo, or Bing often taking several weeks to see especially with newer websites, consistent updates with quality content will often results in a higher rank webpage.

How Search Engines Rank your Site
The higher the website ranks on search results will lead to more traffic to the page ultimately leading to an increase in sales. Adding links to other site will increase the perceived quality of your site and more so with links to your site on other pages around the web. Rankings are determined by measuring the quality by checking the content of the page along with back links. Pictures, videos and any other regularly updated media or blog will improve rankings drastically. Links to your page on other websites tell the automated search bots that regularly crawl the web several times a month that there is relevance to this site and it would be possible interest to users searching for a particular topic. One a site is ranked well and is generating a fair amount of traffic, the higher rank will be maintained over time as the website or business grows with its increased sales potential.

Social Media and SEO
Other methods of increasing sales through SEO come through the social media sites such as FacceBook, Myspace and twitter. Social media sites are the highest rank sites as they are the most popular on the web and with links of a website being passed around rapidly, your site’s relevance to potential users will increase with popularity. Along with the integration of social media to a website’s business strategy there is traffic coming directly from the social websites such as Facebook as and added reason to incorporate this into the strategy. Search engines will rank a website higher if a link appears multiple times in social media webpages.
Once a webpage has generated traffic though search engine optimization the ultimate goal is to maintain your customer base with repeat business and the best way to accomplish this is to attract loyal followers. Followers are hard to come by and hard to get but once you have them, your business model should be devoted to keeping them.

Keep Followers Interested
Followers will continually check back with your company and along with the website with out having to spend additional money witch is usually limited along with other resources in any small business. Free repeat traffic allows business and web teams to target new clients and customers while still keeping existing customers content with much less effort than bringing in new business. Small businesses especially, are able to sustain themselves from repeat business which is most commonly the end goal along with keeping those loyal customers happy.

Search engine optimization is a great way to build web traffic along with increasing sales as the cost are relatively low and can be eliminated all together if no additional outside web assistance is required. The only cost would come from web design and other consultations, which are much cheaper than spending on advertising in paid search or other, purchased ad media around the web. The end result for small businesses is increased traffic to a website will increase sales and the most cost effective method is to optimize the website for the search engines.