Small Businesses Go Digital – Popular SEO Practices in 2019
Is it too early to review online marketing trends followed by small businesses in 2019? Not at all, especially if the only goal in your mind is to make your small enterprise an instant success.
Moreover like they say, “the only thing constant is change,” and the internet is such a platform where marketing dynamics and its impacts can change overnight, literally!
Clutch.co, a data-driven field guide to business buying decisions surveyed about 529 small businesses to know more about their SEO and PPC strategies in a bid to understand these ever-changing dynamics.
Their findings reveal the various practices that small businesses have undertaken in order to be seen and heard online more prominently.
The report from Clutch.co sketches the current scenario which furnishes stats that are indicative of just how proactive even small business owners are with regards to their digital marketing.
Here’s an elaborate analysis of the findings of the report:
36% of small businesses have an SEO strategy in place. An additional 23% plan to have one in 2019.
It might surprise you but 63% of small businesses have already jumped on the Social Media Marketing wagon. 54% of them already have mobile-friendly websites and a good 51% invest in Keyword Search to help their businesses organically rank on SERPs.
Content Marketing for SEO has also seen a 16% increase from last year. That’s 48% of small businesses that have taken up the activity to boost sales and overall visibility.
The active investments made by these businesses aren’t going to waste either. Traffic generated from search engines accounts for 25% of this investment and is the primary metric they use to track and determine the success of their SEO efforts. 19% of this traffic is being converted and is drawing leads for the business.
A good 14% of the total investment fetches them backlinks too, further boosting their efforts to reach a wider audience through credible sources that recognise their product or service.
Today’s Small Enterprises are fully aware that they need to be self-sufficient in order to thrive and in doing so are encouraging and hiring their own resources for SEO.
A substantial 54% of small businesses today contend their positions on SERPs with in-house SEO teams as opposed to the 28% that still do rely on SEO agencies.
This helps them monitor and modify campaigns to work more efficiently minus any delay or distractions, in turn making their digital marketing practices more robust by the day!
Despite the wide scope of SEO and Social Media Marketing services, success rates and reach; about 60% of small businesses are still found to invest in PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. The reasons for this include:
- Since it’s a paid service of advertising, it’s a sure-shot way to ensure that the search engines display advertisements among the top results.
- One only has to pay the search engine when someone clicks on the ad or when tapping on the ad results in a conversion, and not otherwise.
- You get to be as creative with the ad copy as possible without bothering about keywords, etc.
- PPC’s precise targeting of audiences based on parameters like location, allows small enterprises to flourish in their particular region, rapidly.
- PPC’s are almost immune to the changes brought by search-engine Algorithm updates.
However, investing only in PPC marketing can be highly expensive – an aspect small companies can’t afford. This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Social Media Marketing have come in handy.
Such an exponential attraction towards SEO and Social Media Marketing is assumed to be the sum result of –
- The internet becoming more and more accessible;
- People (of various demographics) spending more time online;
- Google algorithm updates becoming increasingly precise, innovative, diverse and social-media-centric.
- SEO enhancing the chances of your website to appear in the top results of multiple search engines instead of just one.
- SEO encouraging more organic or genuine visitors/conversions which in-turn increases your business’ credibility and ROI.
Evolving online marketing strategies as per the latest internet trends make sense for small businesses and mark their success as it is these very shifts that ultimately reflect and also redirect the online behaviour of their target audience.
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