Why entrepreneurs need SEO for their online ventures

Importance of SEO for online businesses

It sounds a cliched statment that entrepreneurs need to do some SEO stuff for their online ventures, but the veracity of this statement makes it imperative that it is preached repeatedly. As an entrepreneur, if you are starting up and making your presence felt in the market, you need to have a tall figure in the virtual world. Even if the nature of your business is real-time and physical, you need to create a web presence that allows the targeted users to reach out to you quickly.

Attracting a loyal audience to your website is best achieved through top search engine listings. (Source: Forrester Research Media Field Study)

As for an attractive and optimal web presence, the website design is of prime importance, entrepreneurs can’t ignore the value of SEO for their business sustenance and growth.

But still, why SEO?

As an entrepreneur, you are trying to reach out to your market with a potential solution–it could be a product or a service. Just like for a research paper, there are some keywords or key phrases around which the concept of your business revolves. You need to understand that the users will reach you through major search engines by typing those keywords and key phrases. The present figures suggest that close to 93% of internet users take the route of search engines to websites (source: Forrester Research). The art of finding the relevant keywords and key phrases for your business can be exploited by you and your team or by the SEO company if you think you should take professional help.

As far as the mentality of online users go, if you are ranking higher on a given keyword, your brand image automatically shoots up. So, even for your brand’s presence in the minds of users, you need to stand up tall in the search engine ranking for some relevant keywords to your business.

Some steps to start with SEO for your business

Before opting to go for some professional services offered by multitude of companies sitting in every nook and corner of this earth, try to understand simple facts about SEO.

You should understand that the focus should be on organic SEO services and not on quick-fix solutions that can guarantee your website’s higher visibility within 10 days and dump you on the 11th day. Search engine optimization happens over a period of time!

Moreover, try to make sure that only white-hat SEO methods are used. These methods are recommended by major search engines and allow your website to promote without attracting any penalizing action. Try to follow some simple steps:

1. Get to know some relevant keywords to your business. The keywords can have multiple words and there “key phrases” could be a good term.
2. Try to understand the global and local traffic on those keywords in the exact search. This will give you the cue to prioritize the key phrases if you found a long list. You will have taken a major step if you finalized what keywords/key phrases you want to target.
   
3. From here on, start consulting with some knowledgeable person or ask for professional service to get a review of your website from SEO perspective. Your website may require certain tweaks to make it search engine friendly.
4. Try to figure out the possible ranking that can be achieved for targeted keywords/key phrases and the cost-time analysis to achieve this target. Just remember that nobody can predict what time-line is needed. It would only be a guess and estimation.
5. Think realistically. Are you ready to spare some budget for this activity. This might not increase your traffic 10 folds initially. It might not bring you revenue for a long time. However, once you achieve good ranking, you can hope to grow as a brand and as a website where users find their desired objective.

The step of finalizing an SEO company requires a full-fledged article and we will discuss that in a separate one. If you want to know more or discuss more about your SEO needs, I would be open to do it. Contact me through email or on various social networking sites for discussion. Contact details can be found on the upper sidebar.