Top 5 Most Asked Questions About SEO From Small Businesses

January 10, 2021

in Q & A, SEO

Throughout the years of helping small businesses on SEO in New Zealand, we have been asked by many business owners about SEO when they first approach us.

Most of the small business owners have minimum knowledge on SEO and are not sure how SEO could help their businesses.

We thought it would help if we summarise and list out those questions here.

Below are the Top 5 most frequently asked SEO questions and our simple answers.

Table of Contents

#1. What is SEO?
#2. Why SEO is important for business?
#3. SEO vs. PPC? Which is better SEO or PPC?
#4. How SEO works in 2021?
#5. Does Small Business need SEO?

#1. What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.

It is a discipline with complex processes that aims to make your website more friendly/approachable to search engines like Google, Bing and so on.

The ultimate goal of SEO is to help your website ranks higher in search engines and drives organic/free traffics to your website.

The more traffics your website gets, the more potential customers engage with you and eventually purchase your product or services from you.

#2. Why SEO is important for business?

When Google determines the ranking of a website on the search result (SERP), Google looks at a variety of different factors.

They are basically looking for content that is relevant to the user’s search query.

One of the benefits of getting higher ranking on the SERPs is building brand awareness.
Your website/brand is considered as popular and trustworthy when your website keep appearing on the first page of the Google’s SERP.

With high ranking and good SEO, your website automatically bringing in more customers without spending on paid advertisement. By increasing the traffic to your website, it eventually increases your customer base and boosts sales.

Thus, SEO has become a critical component to the online success of businesses.

#3. SEO vs. PPC? Which is better SEO or PPC?

This is a big discussion on itself.

Briefly, SEO is organic listings which is Free while PPC (pay-per-click) is a paid advertisement with costs involved for each click. Both marketing strategies have its own pro and con.

Which is better? It really depends on varies factors. e.g. your goals, marketing budget, performance, industry.

A simple analogy would be water (traffic), water tap (PPC) and rain (SEO).

Water from the water tap (PPC) is not free while rain water (SEO) is free.
With the water tap, you could easily control the amount of water you need by turning on/off the water tap while with rain water you can’t really control how much rain you need.
When you turn off(stop paying ads) the water tap, you get no water instantly whereas with rain water, you won’t dry up the moment you stop paying.

So, do you prefer the water from the water tap or from the rain?

Our suggestion, get both (PPC & SEO) if possible.

For more information, refer to Google’s article on SEO vs. PPC.

#4. How SEO works in 2021?

SEO is getting more and more important especially since 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

Lots of activities have been transformed to online space. Local businesses have to find various way to get business and interact with customers over the internet.

As part of SEO strategies, focusing on user and search intent is the key to success.

Google is already showing what is the most relevant content to serve the user’s intent.
Going forward, it would be more sophisticated to keep up and provide information to users.

#5. Does Small Business need SEO?

Either small business or established million dollar business, SEO is definitely vital for all businesses.

SEO is a huge opportunity specially for small businesses. Failing to incorporate SEO into your marketing strategy is almost like gifting free money to your competitors.

Proper SEO delivers a high ROI over time which is extremely important for small businesses.
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy, but you will see great results if it’s properly implemented from the start.

We have helped a lot of local businesses around New Zealand to achieve great SEO results. Contact us now.