SEO is a progressive technique that allows search engines to find and rank your site higher than countless other sites, in response to a search query. In short, SEO helps generate traffic from search engines. Is your website SEO-savvy? Let’s take a look at 5 reasons why small businesses should invest in SEO!

The following data below highlights recent SEO statistics as demonstrated in the DEV8 SEO Small Businesses Benefits infographic.

1. Website Accessibility

SEO ensures your pages are accessible by the search engines and your buyers.

• SEO can increase sales, leads and targeted consumer traffic on a regular basis.
• 50% of all SEOs claim to have a 70-100% success rate in converting leads to customers.

Search engines and consumers can find your website with:

• strong link building methods
• accurate site coding
• inclusion of specific keywords.

2. Positive Returns on Investment

SEO can help generate the highest ROI, compared to other marketing options.

• 40% of SEO campaigns achieve ROI returns in excess of 500%!
• SEO can help track and improve the ROI of your website, with:
  • A/B split testing
  • Google analytics
  • Google webmaster tools
  • conversion optimization.

3. Brand Recognition

Over 60% of users search sites on the first page of search engines.

• When websites rank high in search results, it’s a branding opportunity.
• When you optimize your site and add valuable content, consumers associate your brand with specific products/services.
• SEO can help a site rank high in local searches and increase brand exposure.

4. Keywords

The right words and phrases will attract targeted visitors to your site 41% of searches that are unsuccessful after the first page are refined by a different keyword search/phrase.

SEO employs keywords and phrases for potential:

• customers
• clients
• leads

…..resulting in targeted traffic and more sales.

5. Non-Stop Marketing

With the right tools, SEO can serve as a 24/7 global marketing opportunity.

Small businesses benefit from search engine optimization due to:

• full-time, site functionality
• accessible to consumers at any given time

63% of small businesses do not have a website and are overlooked by 5% of consumers who search for local businesses online:

• creating a website
• relating business content
• adding company details

….are simple strategies to increase sales and consumer base around the clock.

For those interested in jumpstarting your SEO tactics, visit www.dev8.net/ and employ expert SEO services to enhance your burgeoning business!

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If businesses are not optimizing for local search terms, they may be missing out on the vast majority of their possible traffic. Only about 15% of small businesses, or around nearly 2 million, have claimed their Google Place Page. These pages are viewed millions of times a day. Google also contends that 73% of activity online is in some way “related to local content.”

The following statistics reveal trends and opportunities for Local Brick and Mortar Businesses.

Year	Google Searches per Year	Google Searches Per Day
2012	1,861,500,000,000	5,123,600,000
2011	1,722,071,000,000	4,717,000,000
2010	1,324,670,000,000	3,627,000,000
2009	953,700,000,000	2,610,000,000
2008	637,200,000,000	1,745,000,000
2007	438,000,000,000	1,200,000,000
2006	328,500,000,000	900,000,000
2005	273,750,000,000	750,000,000
2004	219,000,000,000	600,000,000
2003	169,200,000,000	470,000,000
2002	91,250,000,000	250,000,000
2001	51,100,000,000	140,000,000
2000	22,000,000,000	60,000,000

Locating Local Shops via the Internet

• 97% of Internet users in the U.S. gather shopping information online, but 51% of those consumers “Shop Online” than “Purchase Offline.” Additionally, every dollar consumers spend online, five or six dollars will be spent on offline purchases that were influenced by online research.
• 70% of online searchers now use the Internet to shop locally for products and services, or will use local search to find local offline businesses.
• 54% of search use Internet search instead of the phone book, and the Internet is expected to soon surpass newspapers as a local shopping information resource.
• 90% of smartphone users look up local information, and 87% of these users subsequently call the business, visit the website or store, make a purchase or get directions to the business. 17% of mobile phone usage is attributed to looking for a store address.

A business’s address should be on every page of a company’s website in text format so it can be read by search engines. Bouncing off data from the infographic below, 49% of smartphone owners use their device WHILE shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, so they are poised to take advantage of vicinity based notifications and promotional offers.

Any business can benefit from site optimization features to amplify the number of visitors to their site. SEO Experts at Dev8 specialize in local, nationwide and global wide searches to deliver both consumer traffic and conversion rates. Higher revenue starts at local marketing, so visit http://www.dev8.net/ to take advantage of search engine enhancements and jump-start your traffic today!

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Diversity plays a large role in a few key elements of your SEO strategy, namely anchor text, links, and keyword targeting. Let’s go over each of the 3 elements bit-by-bit, dissect why diversity is important for each, and explain exactly how you can go about ensuring more diversity in your SEO efforts.

1. Anchor Text

Anchor text falls under a few different categories:

1. Brand anchor text – your business and/or site name.
2. URL anchor text – your URL address linked, with or without http and www.
3. Keyword targeted anchors.
4. Notext anchors (images) and/or redirects

A healthy site’s top 10 most used anchors should be flooded with variations of brand anchors, url anchors, with maybe a notext anchor in there somewhere if a lot of banner or image links are used.

An unhealthy site’s anchor profile you’ll find has absolutely no brand or URL anchors and at worst will be comprised of 20 or so targeted short-tail terms and that’s it. You could at one time get by and do very well in the SERPs having a site like this and focusing your links on a handful of targeted keywords….not so much anymore.

You may argue, “but how then will Google know to rank me forif I’m focusing on brand/url anchors?” Google is getting smarter, a lot smarter. Recently on SEOmoz there was a White Board Friday about how anchor text’s importance may be overrated these days because Google is now taking into account the text surrounding the link for purposes of determining ranking influence. If this is in fact the case, then technically pointing keyword-laced links to your site may soon be a thing of the past.

Only time will tell if this concept becomes a reality for the SEO industry and in the meantime diversify those anchors… a lot!

2. Link Strategy

I remember years ago as a webmaster you could latch onto the latest super-effective link building strategy and ride it like wave right up to the front page.

These days, that kind of thinking will put you in dire straits once Google decides to devalue what you’re doing (or in a worst case scenario like the blog network fiasco, immediately start to penalize the strategy instead of making it worthless).

This is one of the reasons diversifying your link strategy is essential. Not only does it make your link profile look a lot more natural in Google’s eyes (and anything natural in SEO is the way to go) but it will also help shield your site from any adverse affects if any particular strategy suffers as result of an update.

I highly recommend looking at the latest high-quality link building methods and implementing ALL of them as part of your overall link strategy. Consider guest posting (time consuming and hard to scale, but worth the work), relevant manual blog comments, niche and/or high-quality web directories with some kind of manual approval process, social signals/links, and others…

3. Keyword Targeting

Even though keywords and anchor text goes together like 2 peas in a pod, I want to touch on keyword targeting here in a different context. More importantly, I want to talk about keywords and how they fit in to your overall keyword strategy.

More specifically, I want to talk about often overlooked long-tail terms. These are the keywords that get looked over because their volume is low, but there’s a few notable benefits to targeting these kinds of terms.

1. There’s a whole ton of them. Long-tail terms actually drive 80% or more of the web’s traffic, so it’s certainly worth paying attention to these terms when it comes to volume.
2. You’ll find more longevity in SEO with long-tail keyword targeting. In stark contrast to their more volatile counterparts, long-tail terms are easy and certain to rank for. If a major update affects how keywords are ranked, chances are you’ll be less affected than others and you’ll keep your long-tail rankings.
3. It’s more natural to target a boat-load of long-tail terms rather just a select few of short-tails. This ties in with the diverse anchor-text strategy I mentioned about above…you’ll implement a diverse anchor strategy without even thinking about anchors much anymore.
4. Don’t forget about conversion! Generally speaking, targeted long-tails have a much higher chance of converting a visitor than a general short-tail term.

The real fun part about focusing on targeted long-tails is they’re going to be a strong foundation for when you need to rank for more competitive terms later. Once your site ranks front page for hundreds of long-tails, all of a sudden it has become an authority in your niche and you’ll find ranking for more competitive terms a much easier process.

If this seems like a daunting process with a lot of intricate details, well it is. SEO is getting more and more complicated as the days go by. Talk to us and see if we can help.

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