What good is having a website if customers can’t find you online? A successful storefront is usually in a place that gets high traffic and can be found by new customers fairly easily. The same is true of a website. Online searches are the equivalent of driving by a collection of businesses. All of the sudden, when your customer sees what they were actually looking for, they decide to visit your shop. Or in the case of your website, they click your link. However, it’s not quite that simple.
Let’s take a look at a simple analogy.
Imagine you own a toddlers clothing store. Your customer drives down the road, looking out their window towards the business park where your shop is located. There’s a shoe store next door, a couple of restaurants, a nail salon, grocery store, and then ah, a toddlers clothing store! Just what they were looking for. So they pull over, park, and walk in to your store. After perusing your isles for a bit, they find some of the things they were interested in buying. Now, there were no other toddlers clothing stores in sight, so of course they complete the purchase and go on their way.
Now, imagine you own the same business, but this time, instead of a physical storefront, it’s a website. Your customer hops on their favorite search engine and does a search for “toddlers clothing.” However, this time, instead of the handful of non-competing businesses, with yours being the only toddlers clothing store, their search returns over 1000 results of nothing but toddlers clothing stores. To help them narrow their list of choices even more, the search engine only shows 10 of these businesses, with the rest hidden behind a “next page” button. New websites or existing non-optimized websites generally rank around 100+, meaning past the 10th page of results. And in fact, 75% of people never scroll past the first 10 results. Statistically speaking, this means your customer would NEVER find your business!
If a customer driving around town at random, finding your business is like finding a needle in a haystack. Then a customer searching online at random and discovering your site without an SEO strategy is equivalent to finding a needle in a needlestack!
So now you might be asking “how do I get my business discovered online?“
Great question.
It all starts with an effective SEO strategy. And in the case of a business looking to increase traffic to its physical storefront, or service location, an effective local SEO strategy..
By finding out what customers are searching for, we follow the web-traffic, and place your site at the top of those results. As a result, customers find your site naturally, and you reap the rewards of fresh new leads on a regular basis.