Can SEO help offline businesses?
The majority of businesses in the real world, from restaurants to accounting firms, have some form of physical local presence, and the bulk of their customers exist within a certain proximity of their location. Search engine companies realize this, and there is a growing focus on providing results that are location-aware. For example, logically a search for Chinese food in Manhattan shouldn’t show restaurants in New Jersey in its primary results.
Search engine optimization is the process of improving your website’s rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). The process consists of a range of tried and tested – and sometimes experimental – techniques that capitalize on the way that engines assess a web page’s relevance for a given query. Since the majority of web sites don’t optimize their sites this way, it can provide an highly effective way to leapfrog a competitor’s site, regardless of their size.
Many traditional bricks and mortar businesses underestimate how many of their customers are using the Internet to find them. Potential customers do use search engines to discover local products, services and businesses, and increasing your visibility on Google, Yahoo! and Bing will help them find you. For businesses that operate primarily in the offline world, if there are a dozen competitors in the same geographic area as yours, using a few search engine optimization techniques can help bump your website to the top.
One of the factors that companies frequently overlook is that your position in SERPs is the single major determinant in whether potential customers find your site. In the list of SERPs, research shows time and again that more than 90% of users never look at results beyond page 1. If you are competing with 12 other companies and your site ranks in the last 3, this will place your business on page 2, where less than 10% of users will ever look. Consequently, it’s more important to appear on page one than number one. Using SEO to improve your rankings, even if you only place in the top 10 results, places your listing on page one.
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