Sell More in 2024 with Small Business SEO

A new year provides new opportunities to grow your business and raise your income through the year. If you’re a small business owner looking to do even better in 2024 than you did in 2023, retooling your SEO may be your ticket.

SEO—Search Engine Optimization—drives, on average, 1000% more traffic to your website than social media alone and is a far more effective tool to sell more and grow your small business. In addition, SEO can help people find your content easier which can attract people from all over the world.

Search engine optimization can help your website rank more highly in search engine results. Here are some reasons why SEO is an essential tool for your small business.

Increase Your Ranking

Search engines want to provide the most relevant, helpful results to their users. SEO tells the search engine that your page is that relevant result that should come #1 on the first page—or not. 

Unfortunately, Ahrefs found that 90.63% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google. This means that if you aren’t optimizing your content, you’re not ranking on Google at all. So, for instance, if you Google “couches,” you’ll see a ton of eCommerce sites selling couches. However, your unoptimized blog post on the “top 10 most popular couches” won’t show up in this scenario because it’s not relevant enough to that keyword.

Forbes points out: “the first page of Google captures 71% of search traffic clicks and has been reported to be as high as 92% in recent years. However, second-page results are far from a close second, coming in at below 6% of all website clicks.”

So if you’re not on page one? You may be missing 90% of your potential customers.

Improve Your Targeting

If you want to get better at targeting your audience you must understand the desires of your customers and potential customers to learn what kind of things they’d search for that could lead them to your business. Discovering the keywords that match both your potential customer’s desires and your services or products is the first step in small business SEO. When you know these keywords you can then optimize your content to match what the user is looking for based on those words.

Speaking of customers, optimizing your content for them is crucial if you want your site to be seen by new viewers—new potential customers. You need to have the content they’re looking for when they type in search queries. If someone is looking to purchase a case of California wines, and you’re renting out a B and B that provides a complimentary bottle of California Shiraz, having your website come up in their search results is not going to help you—or them.

Additionally, if someone is researching the uses of CBD, but you’re optimizing your website to sell a specific CBD product, you’re not going to rank highly for those searches for information.

How do you optimize your content to reach actual, potential customers? 

Importantly, be mindful of searcher intent when optimizing your content. You want your content to be relevant, helpful, and optimized. You’re not going to increase your search engine rankings unless you have content people are looking for. 

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your site is, how excellent your products are, or how personal your online customer service is if no one ever finds your website.

Get Rich Results for Increased Traffic

Rich results is an enhanced Google search with extra visual or interactive features. It catches the attention of customers—which is why it results in increased traffic and helps your business sell more.

One case study found that optimizing for, and earning, rich search results produced…

• Increase in Impressions of 119.14%
• Higher Clicks by 111.13%
• Increase in Organic Users of 42.21%
• Increase in Organic Sessions of 37.44%

Would that improve your business? Yes, it would. It would improve any business.

The image below shows a display of rich results. Here you can see previews of images, links, and titles of the articles.

Rich results are a great marketing tool because they increase website traffic and aren’t as costly as ads or other marketing techniques. It’s a little like getting a billboard for the cost of a flyer stapled to a telephone pole. It can also show your content to people who would have never known about your business otherwise. Making sure your website content is optimized is one of the most important things you can do to grow your small business with SEO and sell more in 2024.

If you’re not sure where to begin, contact us for a consultation.