Getting found on the web amidst the existing ocean of content can be a Herculean task! And this is especially difficult for startups because of the cutthroat competition from established businesses, who use their deep pockets to dominate the online space.

But this is where Search Engine Optimization can save the day by offering you an affordable opportunity to build your visibility and recognition on the web. SEO is an organic method to get qualified leads that involves the optimization of your website and its content to ensure that it appears higher on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

SEO involves both on-page and off-page optimization techniques that ensure that search engines quickly index and display your content at high positions whenever relevant searches are done. This boosts the traffic to your website and the viewership of your website content, hence helping you raise your conversions and sales. And all this comes at little to no cost!

It usually takes 4-6 months to see significant results in an SEO campaign. Around 3 months in, your search result ranking starts rising, taking organic traffic up with it. It then takes another few months to get enough high-quality organic traffic that gets you qualified leads and sales. And it can take many more months to get high traffic and sales!

SEO clearly takes a long while to deliver results but using the right techniques is likely to get you good results eventually. Of course, you may get faster results by running huge advertising campaigns with lucrative offers. But this is impractical for most small to medium-sized businesses.

SEO campaigns can bring you impressive results at very low costs, hence boosting your marketing ROI drastically. But you must set long-term goals and maintain patience to make it work. You just have to trust the process when it comes to SEO!

SEO is a prolonged process with gradual results. But it is very sensitive to changes, and the smallest errors can lead to delayed or compromised outcomes. This makes it essential to measure the performance of your SEO campaign constantly to make timely course corrections.

So, you must apply SEO tools to measure these key factors that indicate the performance of your SEO campaign-

• Organic traffic
• Keyword ranking
• Click-through rate
• Time spent on page
• Conversion rate
• Website authority over time
• Performance on core web vitals (page speed, time to load, and stability)
• Search Engine Result Page visibility and position over time

The tools you can apply here include keyword research tools, website audit tools, backlink research tools, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, traffic analysis, etc. You may also go for SEO toolkits that integrate multiple tools for higher convenience.

Following the measurement, you must interpret the results and make immediate improvements in your SEO campaigns to ensure the best results. But SEO is not everyone's cup of tea! If you still find SEO tedious and fruitless, you can just outsource all the hassle to an SEO marketing agency.

Yes! SEO techniques help small business owners create fast, robust, and user-friendly websites that rank higher in search engines. And this, in turn, helps bring more qualified potential customers (or leads) to their sites and eventually increases conversion rates. In fact, SEO is especially instrumental for startups and family-owned businesses, who can easily apply organic SEO techniques to boost their online visibility instead of going head-on with industry giants in ad campaigns.

Some SEO techniques that a traditional/family-owned business can apply easily and affordably are-

• SEO website content writing
• Website optimization for core web vitals
• Backlink building and internal links
• Search intent optimization
• Content structuring and formatting
• Url optimization
• Sitemap creation and indexing
• Multimedia optimization
• Directory submission
• Social bookmarking
• RSS Feed Submissions
• Guest posting

Applying the right combination of SEO techniques will help you generate high-quality traffic over time. You will achieve qualified leads which you must convert to buyers to raise sales. You can do this by adding high-quality content on your landing/product pages and applying various sales-boosting strategies. However, it all boils down to offering high-quality at reasonable rates, without which even the best SEO campaigns will not convert to sales.