Today we're going to jump right in and address, is SEO worth it for small businesses? So you've heard me talk many times about SEO and search engine optimization and how it can help your business grow. But maybe you find yourself wondering if it is even a good option for you as a small business owner or a solopreneur. I want to let you know it is a fantastic option for you and it presents. It's the greatest opportunity from a marketing standpoint. And I want to make sure that you understand that from today's podcast episode. This is Rachel Lindhuygen, the host of the Simple SEO podcast. I'm so glad that you are back here with me today. So let's talk about search engine optimization and whether or not it's worth it for a small business. As you know, I believe very strongly it is. What I want you to understand. Is it SEO or search engine optimization is more than just something you do on your website. It is a strategy. It is a marketing channel. It is something that you do that can impact your business overall. It can drive people to your website, which will help you Build your email list and generate leads and sell more products and services. And because it's organic, it's free, you're not paying for ads to bring those people to you. So the money that you earn, you're then able to hold on and save more of that money as profit rather than having to pay for ads to get that traffic. So as a small business owner, You may wonder whether it's worth it. Will it even work? I often have people ask me, will it work for my niche? It will work for your niche. It doesn't really matter what niche you're in. Search engine optimization will work for you as long as there are customers in your niche. There are people who are searching for information related to your niche. SEO will work for you. If there are no customers in your niche or there's nobody searching for information related to your niche, your business isn't going to thrive because there's nobody who wants what you have. So we really do want to make sure as long as there are customers, SEO is going to work for you. It is an option. So as a small business owner, What exactly do you do? So you know you've got a website, right? Or if you don't have one, hopefully you're building one. You're going to have content on that website, meaning you're going to have pages. You'll probably have a homepage, an about page, products or services, and maybe location or contact information. If you want that information to show up in Google or other search engines, then you need to optimize it. Because if you don't do SEO on those pages that you create, Google doesn't really understand what they're about. And so they're less likely to show your website to new people who are searching. Especially because you are a small business, your website is probably not super authoritative. Your website is probably relatively new, not well known, it probably doesn't have a lot of links to it, and it probably does not have a high domain authority. Domain authority is a score 1 to 100. Most of our small business Websites are going to be like one through 20. It's seldom that you're going to find a very small business with a domain authority score over 20. Your domain authority is not a score given to us by Google, but it is a score that we can see from some of the SEO tools. And it's an indication of how likely your website is to rank for a given keyword. So as a small business owner, you're probably going to have a low domain authority. There's nothing wrong with that. It just means that in Google's eyes, your website is not super authoritative. So if you pair a low domain authority with a website with no SEO on it, you're really going to have zero visibility. But if you pair that low visibility with SEO that's done properly and good keyword targeting and the right content that helps your customer, you actually have a chance for more visibility. So, as a small business owner, it's really important to understand all of this and to really understand what keywords your website has a good chance of ranking for. And I hear people say, ranking for, I've also heard people say, website deserves to rank for. And I don't like using the term deserves, deserves or deserves to rank for, but I also think it makes sense in this particular instance. If we talk about. A keyword. Let's say we're talking about tennis shoes. As a small business, does my website deserve to rank for the word tennis shoes over someone like Foot Locker or Nordstrom? I don't. Because in almost every case, Nordstrom or Foot Locker or a big site like that are going to have more authority. They're going to maybe have more options, more background, more information, more inventory, etc. than like Rachel's Shoe Store with one location. Um, so that's part of what you need to understand is Google is going to really favor the sites that are more authoritative. Now if you are a small site, but you've done great keyword research and you have done correct optimization and you have a good strong SEO content foundation and you have a good SEO content strategy in place. Then you're able to potentially rank for more keywords, which will give you more visibility in the search results. So even if your site is not super authoritative, if it is authoritative in your niche and your SEO is done better than your competitors, then you have a really good chance of outranking your competitors and showing up more often and having your website be the one that people find. The other thing I want you to think about, especially as a small business owner, If you are a local business, meaning you service a local area or you have people come to your location, you have a brick and mortar business, then you should also be doing SEO on your Google Business Profile listing because hey, There are times that those map listings will show in the search results before your website will show in the search results. They show up high on the page. We don't really care. I mean, realistically, do we care if a potential customer clicks on the map listing and finds us versus they click on our website and find us? Either way, they found you. Either way, they've gotten to your business. So I want you to really understand as a small business, SEO is very important to you. It can be a huge advantage from a competitive standpoint because if you do start doing SEO, you come, you join me in simple SEO content, you learn how to do this and you create that content foundation for your business. Meaning you're podcast episode or podcast show notes page each week. You're targeting keywords that your website has a good chance of ranking for, you are then bringing people into your world. They're finding you. But more than that, you have more opportunities to rank and to show up in the search results. And that gives you a competitive advantage within your niche. You really don't want to just depend upon everyone else to not do it right for you to be able to show up. You really want to be the one who sets the precedent and shows them, yes, I can do this. I have a client I've worked with for seven or eight years now. Fantastic client. They are a small business. They have one location. They're in a suburb. They're a preschool. They have done amazing with SEO. We have their Google business profile, uh, optimized, so it does show up, it does rank, but more than that, we have created content that supports their business. It helps their ideal customer, which is the parent of a child between about 18 months and five years old, because those are the people who are going to be looking for a preschool. We have all sorts of content that answers All sorts of questions for those parents. And it's all optimized. It's all targeting keywords that they can rank for. And they rank. They rank and rank and rank. They have so many keywords ranking on page one that it drives a ton of traffic for them. Last year, about 60 percent of their leads came from what we were doing from an SEO standpoint. They came from our rankings on Google. I want this for you. I want you to be the one that your competitors are trying to catch up with, rather than being the one playing catch up because someone else in your market started doing SEO. When we started doing SEO on their website, They were the only ones doing it. So they had this huge competitive advantage, which made it much easier for them to rank and they're not a super authoritative site. They don't get thousands and thousands and thousands of visits every month. They get a really good number of visits that are highly specific that are their targeted customer. Their domain authority Only somewhere between like 10 and 15. So they're a small business website, but it works. They have competitors now who have started doing SEO and you can tell they're trying to catch up, but that client who's been doing it for years. They still own the results because they've been doing it for years and Google continues to reward them because they've spent the last seven or eight years really building that connection with Google and building that trust and creating that great content and being that great resource for their community. So yes, SEO is worth it for a small business. If you are a small business owner and you are ready to learn how to do this, I want you to join me in simple SEO content. You can take the free class. It's on the website, edgetargeting. com. Take the SEO 101 class. That's going to give you some information about the course. It's going to talk to you about the bonuses. It's going to give you the discount for the enrollment. I want you to go ahead and take that today so that you can get that discount. Get the chat GPT bonus, get the Google business profile bonus, and then join me in Simple SEO content so we can start doing this for your business because SEO will change things for your business. Let me show you how.