With COVID-19 changing the world around us, businesses have been directly impacted by consumers staying inside their homes and spending considerably less cash. Now, business’s goals are to slim down their budgets while keeping their operations running.
Marketing has become every company’s best investment because of its ability to keep businesses in touch with their customers, maintain brand engagement and visibility, capture the ever-increasing size of online sales.
But, if everyone is online, how is your Wirral business going to stand out?
The answer is SEO.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the best strategy for a business to adopt if you aim to maintain and increase online brand visibility while keeping expenses to a minimum.
Here are three reasons SEO may help businesses hurt by the pandemic to survive and subsequently thrive in 2021 and beyond.
1. Less Expensive Per Click and Per Acquisition Than PPC
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is the primary alternative to SEO and requires businesses to bid a set amount for every user interaction with an ad. The cost per click depends on several variables, including the ad service employed (e.g., Google Adwords or Facebook Ads), the ad quality, and the ad locations.
A small business can quickly end up spending between £5,000 and £10,000 a month at £1 to £2 per click, and this expense will only grow larger as the company becomes more well known. Large businesses tend to spend a fortune on PPC advertising as their name recognition and brand awareness increases.
SEO, on the other hand, brings organic traffic to your website. This process starts by finding and then placing “dofollow” links on other websites and within existing content on your website – content which you can produce yourself for free (your time invested aside), and won’t be an ongoing expense.
Some businesses pay for SEO services to have highly-skilled experts develop the best strategies for content and link building. But the associated monthly outlay is tiny by comparison and, due to their incredible ROI, they actually decrease over time.
It’s essential to be aware that different companies have different competition levels, and therefore costs can vary greatly. A small business may hire SEO services for as little as £500 a month, while large companies can pay upwards of £10,000 a month. But those spending upwards of £10,000 could be reaping millions in sales that continue to increase as time goes on (we’ll talk about this next).
Being realistic about your company’s competition and how long SEO takes to boost rankings is crucial when estimating SEO costs.
2. The Effectiveness of SEO Increases Over Time
SEO is an investment that provides stable, long-term benefits without the cost increases that you experience with PPC advertising. With PPC, as soon as you stop paying for ad space, you stop getting any results.
By contrast, SEO builds your site authority and visibility sustainably over time, meaning that if you are diligent with your SEO, your content and link-building activities will bring in traffic long after the upfront work has been completed.
The more site authority your company has, the quicker you can boost the rankings of new content. With high enough site authority (sometimes referred to as Domain Authority by SEO analytics companies such as Moz), businesses need to do less to improve or maintain their rankings. This allows you to reduce your SEO spend gradually over time.
3. SEO Builds Brand Customer Trust
Excellent SEO practices have become an integral part of successful businesses’ digital marketing strategies, mostly since Google has systematically blocked so-called “black hat” SEO outfits from finding loopholes and grey areas in their algorithm.
For years, you were able to “hack” search engines and achieve high rankings without putting in the effort and time to get there naturally. Now, businesses require long-term SEO strategies to develop content and generate natural audience engagement.
Content marketing and social media strategies can be paired with an SEO strategy to increase your business’s online exposure and build your brand into something familiar and trusted.
Research has discovered that consumers view higher-ranking sites as more legitimate, higher quality, and more convenient to access. By the same token, some consumers distrust online ads and actively ignore paid advertisements at the top of search results. Thus, SEO is a systematic way to build organic traffic to your site, increase your company’s credibility, and avoid compromising your brand image and reputation.
Choose Ctrl Alt Create to Oversee Your SEO Campaigns
If your Wirral business is struggling due to COVID restrictions, don’t entirely cut marketing from your budget. Instead choose to spend money on more cost-effective digital marketing strategies such as SEO, which pairs low initial investments with high returns.
SEO is less expensive than PPC, in both the short and long term, and can do so much more for your business than costly online ads. So get in touch with us at Ctrl Alt Create to execute an SEO strategy that increases your business’s visibility and boosts your sales today.