Is SEO Worth It As A Small Business Owner?

As a business owner, the question of how to best spend your marketing dollars has likely kept you up at night, on more than one occasion. You ponder on things like whether small business SEO is worth the investment.

You can’t help it. Your deepest desire is to see your business bloom while supporting all your staff and buying your family a life of freedom. That’s why you work as hard as you do.

You’re smart and savvy when it comes to finding a good deal with your suppliers, but when it comes to marketing, you often feel stumped.

You’ve chatted with your friends and they have used various digital marketing methods with various levels of success. They might make some recommendations but the question of whether you can part with your hard earned money so easily still circles around in your head.

After all, you’ve heard of as many great outcomes as you have catastrophic ones. The world of SEO, paid ads and online marketing receives many mixed reviews and it seems to you like there are many agencies who are out to take your money without delivering the service.

This article will help put your mind at ease by giving you the tools you need to work out if it is all worth it for your business. We’ll dive deep into the can of worms that is known as small business SEO and whether it can really add value to your business.

You’ll walk away with a crystal clear answer on whether SEO is worth it. You’ll know what to look for so you can confidently make a decision as to whether it’s a good investment in your business or whether other methods are better suited.

For many business owners, this question circles around for days as they try to reach the best decision for their business.

Let’s get started

There are a few ways you can think about whether SEO is the right move for your business and we’ll cover all of these below. In short, SEO is likely to be worth investing into if you would like to:

• Deal with qualified leads who have already sold themselves on your product or service
• Save at least 60% on hiring a salesperson who is out there selling 24/7/365
• Capture more of the jobs you love or that have higher profit margins

First thing’s first, make sure you know a least a little about what SEO is and how SEO works. We’ve also covered the following topics that can help you develop a solid foundation of understanding SEO to help you make your decision:

• 4 Ways Google Can Send You Qualified Customers Daily
• SEO Services That Generate Results

Now that’s out of the way, let’s get stuck right into the meaty question at hand – is SEO worth it for your business?

Dealing with qualified leads who have already sold themselves

If you’re like most business owners, you likely know the struggles that come with low-quality leads. It’s hard enough to get the phone ringing more and when it does, most of the calls seem to be from time wasters and tyre kickers.

If only there were some way you could have those people stop calling you and wasting your valuable time! Better yet, if there was a way to replace those calls with genuine prospects, that would seal the deal for you, wouldn’t it?

In the question of whether small business SEO is worth it for your business, consider if having the ability to talk to people who have already sold themselves on your product or service is important to you. If it is, then SEO is likely to be well and truly worth it!

People who find your business as a result of your SEO efforts have likely already done some research. They’re interested in what you have to offer and they have called you to get an idea of what benefits you can offer them that no one else can.

SEO specifically targets people who are genuine leads for your business. It’s about more than just getting the phone ringing. It’s about getting real, genuine prospects calling you more often and saving you time instead of dealing with tyre kickers.

Our research and data, taken from SEO projects we’ve worked on in the last few years, has shown that about 50% of the people that come to our client’s websites are from SEO related marketing activities. These people are directly interested in our client’s services and are often ready to buy.

These people are also more likely to call our clients and they are easier to sell to than people who find the client through paid advertising. It’s because these people have already sold themselves on the service.

When compared with the people who visit a website from paid ads, these leads:

• Are far better quality
• They stay on a website longer
• Read more information
• Sell themselves on the service rather than feeling like they are being sold to

If it’s important for you to connect with more people like this, SEO is likely to be a great investment for your business and will surely be worth it.

Save at least 60% while hiring a salesperson who is out there selling 24/7/365

Not every business needs a salesperson. Not every business needs to be selling 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

However, if you had the ability to be selling at this frequency, do you think that would help your business grow? If so, SEO might be worth it for your business.

Not only does it allow you to be selling 24/7, but the people who find you as a result of your SEO marketing also won’t feel like they’ve been sold to!

SEO reaches people who actively search for your product or service, no matter if they search at 10 am or 2 am.

If you were to have a dedicated salesperson out there selling every hour of every day at the rate of $20/hr, you would be spending $14,600/month. It’s likely that they would bring in a few sales in this time, and they would be available for customers at any time of day.

Can your business wear such a cost though?

SEO gives you all the benefits a 24/7 salesperson would, at a fraction of the price. It works in your sleep and costs much less per month.

You would also have the benefit that your prospects won’t feel like they’ve been sold to. So in this regard, SEO is a worthy extension of your sales team.

How Long Does It Take for SEO to Work?

It depends on a variety of factors. No two websites are the same. Some websites may take a few weeks and others months depending on how much content they have, how much (if any) SEO they’ve done in the past, how long the site has been around e.t.c.

Capture more of the jobs you love or that have higher profit margins

All good business owners have an idea of who their ideal client is. It could be the people who are interested in your most profitable product or service. It could be the people who already know about the value of what you do, so you don’t have to spend as many of your resources educating them before they buy from you.

With SEO, you can focus on capturing the jobs you love. It is a marketing technique that lets you laser target the jobs you bring in through the door by attracting people and jobs you want to be working with.

And again, when your ideal customer calls you asking for a quote on your ideal job as a result of SEO, they won’t feel like they’ve been sold to! The value of this is priceless. There is automatically more trust because the customer didn’t click on an ad to find your business or speak with a salesperson before calling you.

If you want the power of such a laser-targeted approach working for your business, SEO is likely to be worth it in your business. Our experts can look into this for you at the very start to see what the opportunity is like for your business in your area.

Any results-driven SEO company should be able to chat with you about the strategy that will bring in more calls from your ideal clients. At Digital Surfer, we access keyword data as well as competitor and industry data to help our clients target their marketing budget towards the areas that will have the most impact.

For instance, this is how we have helped small, local boutique lawyers compete against nation-wide law firms for a slice of the pie of their ideal cases. We’ve also helped tradies target people who actively search for the jobs they want to be doing more of and that have higher profit margins.

Work with companies that will deliver a return on your investment for small business SEO

When deciding if SEO is worth it, you should also consider the intentions of the company you’re working with.

At Digital Surfer, our priority is to deliver a return on investment for our clients SEO campaigns. With our existing clients, we typically return an average between $3.80 and $5.60 for every dollar they invest in their campaigns with us.

If you’re considering SEO for your business and would like to work with an SEO company in Brisbane that will deliver results, let’s chat.

Related SEO Articles