Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is imperative to the digital presence of any service or e-commerce business. SEO can be confusing and nebulous to those unfamiliar with digital marketing and SERPs.
This post addresses some of the most frequently asked questions associated with the benefits of SEO to small businesses!
SEO FAQ Resources:
- Are SEO Costs Tax Deductible?
- How Can SEO Increase Sales?
- Does SEO Improve Brand Exposure?
- What are Good Analogies For SEO?
- What Is Keyword Research?
- How Long Does Organic SEO Take to See Results?
- How Long Does Paid SEO Take to See Results?
- How Does Content Help My Website?
Are SEO Costs Tax Deductible?
YES!
SEO and marketing costs are generally tax deductible for small businesses. The IRS outlines that ordinary and necessary marketing costs are tax deductible.
Ordinary and necessary marketing costs are defined as:
- An ordinary expense is one that is common and accepted in the industry.
- A necessary expense is one that is helpful and appropriate for the trade or business. An expense does not have to be indispensable to be considered necessary.
Generally speaking, businesses spend between 10-20% of their annual revenue on marketing services. Marketing and SEO help improve brand exposure and get the brand in front of the target audience.
How Can SEO Increase Sales?
Simply put – yes. SEO can, and does, improve sales across all verticals. The proper implementation of SEO on a new website or existing website is imperative to organic rankings and PPC rankings.
SEO helps establish content plans, build valuable backlinks, improve awareness, improve site speed, improve local pack rankings, and inform visitors and potential customers about the importance of an entity. It helps organize and structure a website so that users, and search engines, better understand the intent of a site and webpage.
All of these components contribute to targeting high internet search traffic. Properly optimized pages help attract customers using language important to a conversion.
So How Does SEO Improve Sales?
By improving a website’s content, backlink profile and search intent a business can organically climb the SERPs to get found by potential customers. The closer a website is to the top of the SERP page the more likely a searcher is to click on that result. Thats what SEO does.
When an individual submits a query to the search engine, many individuals will click on the top three results. By reaching individuals that have demonstrated commercial, navigational, informational or transactional searches – a website can reach it’s target audience through high quality content and a solid SEO plan.
What is EEAT and How Do I Establish EEAT?
EEAT stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It is a critical framework that helps Google understand the purpose of a website. By demonstrating EEAT, a website illustrates its breadth of knowledge regarding a specific industry, vertical, or topic.
Websites that are beginning to build their online presence need to establish EEAT. This is done by publishing highly authoritative content demonstrating a high understanding of the topic. Additionally acquiring links from reputable, highly authoritative outlets within the same industry and tangiently related industries is helpful.
By acquiring user-generated reviews, case studies, testimonials, authoritative content, reputable backlinks, and good technical SEO – a website can improve their EEAT footprint.
Does SEO Improve Brand Exposure?
Yes. A properly organized and optimized SEO campaign will help improve brand exposure. There are a number of ways that SEO can help including:
What Is a Pay Per Click Campaign?
Pay per click campaigns (PPC), are promoted listings that can appear on several search engines and social media platforms. Two of the most popular are Google and Facebook. These listings appear at the top, or bottom, of a search engine result page (SERP) for a given query or keyword.
PPC campaigns have pros and cons, depending on the keyword, the costs associated with PPC campaigns can range drastically from a few cents to a few hundred dollars or more per click. However, for new campaigns the brand exposure and leads generated from PPC campaigns can result in huge returns on a small business’ ROI.
Think of PPC as renting digital real estate, once the monthly budget has reached its limit, the platform will stop running the ads. Ads can be limited to certain times of the day/week and year depending on the campaign’s needs. Conversely, organic SEO is more similar to owning digital real estate, while it is important to enhance and improve content over time, organic rankings have a longer lifespan compared to PPC campaigns.
PPC and Organic SEO are closely related as Google scores each ad and landing page for the ad. If the landing page is not relevant to the query, Google will likely demote the poor ad. It is important to find a marketing agency that understands the interconnectedness of paid and organic SEO.
What Is Organic SEO?
Organic SEO is imperative to the health and well-being of any service, information, or transactional website.
Organic SEO involves a number of strategies to improve a site’s visibility within search engine result pages. This does not include paid advertisements. The goal is to demonstrate EEAT and answer search intent to capture high-level traffic and improve conversions from search engines. With a multipronged approach of on-page, content additions and improvement, technical SEO and link-building organic SEO sends the signals needed to improve website visibility.
Organic SEO builds trust in both users and search engines and provides long-lasting impact on a website’s wellbeing and visibility.
What is Local SEO?
Simply put local SEO is SEO that is performed on a local level. Whether, state, region, county, city or zip code – local SEO is intended to improve rankings for businesses in local and hyperlocal markets.
Google Business Profile (GBP) and Bing Places are the largest local SEO business directories. However, there are countless other directories and local SEO avenues to increase local traffic. Over time, these directories may become outdated resulting from business relocations, phone number adjustments and buyouts.
A local SEO expert ensures that a website, directories and business profiles are properly optimized for local keywords. Local SEOs verify Name, Address, Phone (NAP) number consistency with services like Yext or SemRush’s local SEO tool across the web. Additionally, interaction and disputes with customer reviews are an important component of local SEO. A local SEO can help dispute fake reviews and reviews that are against a search engine’s terms and conditions.
What are Good Analogies For SEO?
There are a number of good analogies for SEO. Some of the easiest to comprehend are the car analogy and the fitness analogy:
The Car Analogy & SEO
Think of your website as the body of a vehicle. While the body of a vehicle can look nice and have a great body wrap or paint job, these are simply aesthetics.
A healthy SEO campaign is the engine of the vehicle. It makes the website go. Content is the king of a business’ presence and the PR, linking strategy and speed of the site send imperative signals to search engines. There are a number of components within the engine that all need to be aligned for proper optimization.
The Fitness Analogy & SEO
Think of the human avatar as the body of a website and fitness and a healthy diet as the SEO. Any business owner needs to focus on the fitness of their website and what goes into the website to ensure the website is getting impressions, driving traffic and ranking for competitive queries as their main competitors.
Many people do not understand the important variables and factors that large search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo use to rank websites.
With SEO in mind, the fittest and healthiest diets (links) have a huge advantage against their competitors.
SEO helps bring the fitness mindset and healthy diet of inlinks and outlinks to a website. Without SEO, a website stagnates and will miss out on huge swaths of impressions and traffic to a targeted site. The website is the body and SEO is the mind and muscle of the body.
What Is Keyword Research?
Was your business’ website copy developed with SEO in mind? If not, the website may be experiencing a number of keyword cannibalization issues that are negatively impacting a website’s wellbeing.
Keyword research helps organize the intent of a page. An experienced SEO researches pertinent keywords and forms content around that research. Different keywords have different variables associated with them – some are much more difficult to rank than others.
During the keyword research process, SEOs identify keyword opportunities to drive traffic and improve conversions. This is done through SEO tools and competitor research in distinct markets.
How Long Does Organic SEO Take to See Results?
SEO can cause angst for some business owners as it takes time to see results. However, when an experienced SEO company is hired, organic results can improve quickly. Sometimes in as little as 72 hours but should begin to see results within one month of implementing an SEO plan.
However, this question is nebulous and different to provide a one-size-fits-all answer. Different keywords have drastically different volumes, difficulties, and resources needed to obtain the desired results.
How Long Does Paid SEO Take to See Results?
Paid SEO or PPC – is much faster compared to organic SEO to see conversions (also called events).
Once the campaign, ad group, and ads are approved the ads begin to show within 24 hours.
Similar to organic SEO, there are a number of metrics that are plugged into the ever-changing search engine algorithm. The ad quality score is a good barometer for how search engines value an ad. While the debate is there regarding what is “most” important, quality scores can significantly help a marketer and a business running a PPC campaign identify ads that work. A relevant landing page and good CTR are large contributing factors to quality scores. These factors improve conversions in a PPC campaign.
How Does Content Help My Website?
Google – and other search engines – value EEAT. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. To demonstrate EEAT, a healthy content plan that targets transactions and informational queries is imperative to earning business and climbing the ranks in organic SERPs.
It’s important to hire an experienced copywriter that specializes in copywriting for SEO. There are a number of key components that are needed to be added to a website to help both the web visitor and the search engine understand the intent and purpose of a page.
