Why should small businesses invest in SEO before traditional marketing hacks?

The great, hipster central borough of New York, Brooklyn, is home to uncountable thriving small businesses. Over the years, the area from Greenpoint to Bay Ridge has fostered some of the busiest bars, restaurants, pubs, fashion and lifestyle stores, and startups. Outsiders face tough competition since native Brooklyn residents run most of these thriving businesses. These people have lived in the outer borough for at least one generation, if not more, and now they have monetized their excellent location. Owning a store in Brooklyn is a dream several new entrepreneurs foster today. Small businesses, new enterprises, and startups are looking for commercial real estate in Brooklyn because this location promises constant footfall and lucrative revenue. In short, it is a readily available brand that entrepreneurs want to leverage when they set up a new store. Sadly, thousands of other new businesses are trying to do the same; some have been working in the location for at least a decade. Competing with and outperforming them is impossible if you do not have the right toolset.

All businesses aiming to make it big in the coming years must consider their online presence and interactions with potential customers. However, garnering enough footfall online is not easier than getting passersby to notice your glow sign. Before the big inauguration, you must worry about the outdoor signs, the indoor décor and setup, the retail equipment, and the software setup. Still, these things cannot compensate for the lack of a robust digital game plan. On the web, you must optimize your presence for an exclusively Brooklyn-centric audience. You may be selling completely vegan cupcakes for office parties, birthdays, and anniversaries, but so are a hundred other bakeries in Brooklyn. Or, you may be offering lucrative discounts on hair treatments for a limited period, but you cannot guarantee that at least a couple hundred more salons in New York aren’t doing the same.

What will help you shine brightly at all times on the Google SRL?

At this moment, you must ask yourself, “what have I done so my clients and potential customers will see my name when they search for related products and services in Brooklyn”? Indeed, by implementing local search options and customer search relevance, Google has made it easier for local businesses to remain visible. However, that also means it has narrowed the competition down to you and other companies that offer similar services. As a result, when a person searches for “top bakeries near me” or “best salons near me,” the SRL will list all relevant businesses in the Brooklyn area. So, what is the guarantee that your name will be among the top three search results?

There is no guarantee, but a robust SEO strategy will improve your chances of getting ahead of the rest of the competition. Search engine optimization will keep your business website friendly towards search engine spiders. They can crawl your site, its nooks and crannies, and index the content for visibility. Today, website SEO is all about user-friendliness rather than technicalities. How well you perform on the SERPs depends on how much your visitors like browsing your website. Visit a reliable Brooklyn SEO website to learn about the UX.

Optimize for Google SERPs

Is your website content informative, educational, new, and entertaining? Content is one of the greatest assets of any site, and it boosts SEO too. Good website content depends on lucid language, plagiarism-free material, an easy-to-read and entertaining narrative, and keyword research. Keyword has always been important for SEO, but it has evolved, holding hands with Hummingbird and RankBrain updates. Stuffing your content with irrelevant keywords is insufficient to gain search engines’ attention. You need to use the keywords in the correct context and focus on synonyms and long-tailed keyword variants about your field of work. RankBrain has enabled Google to “understand” your content’s tone, purpose, quality, and message. Therefore, search engines with substandard articles and blogs with indiscriminate keyword repetition no longer work. Almost all SEO-friendly content pieces require dedicated keyword research tools, help from content creation teams, and content marketing strategies.

Remain Visible on the local search results

Almost a year ago, Google launched the “Hawk” algorithm update for local searches. The update has brought hope for new local businesses since it seems to level the ground for old and new small businesses. It has changed how the local filters used to work during the Possum update. Earlier, the Possum filtered out the less SEO-friendly results that shared the same Brooklyn address with a famous company so that only the distinguished name remained visible on the local search results page. Hawk is rapidly changing the organic traffic of these small and lesser popular business pages. It is increasing the visibility of local businesses in Brooklyn in geo-specific search results. So, if you share your business address with other companies, it is finally time for you to shine.

Pay attention to technical SEO

Next, you need to consider the findability of your web page, blog, and articles. Are you doing anything extra to become noticeable? Your blogs should contain meta tags, meta descriptions, title tags, SEO titles, SEO slugs, image and video descriptions, SEO-friendly URLs, and alt tags for the media. These are the technical bits necessary to optimize all types of content for search engines. Your content may be user-friendly, but you must not forget that there might be thousands of other websites with similar content topics and quality. These tags help search engine crawlers figure out the purpose of your site content. The presence of title tags, meta descriptions, and SEO titles define the purpose and scope of any webpage, making the CTR (Click Through Rate) higher than those without meta descriptions and tags. When you find your place in the SERP, your potential visitors will know what the ranking page contains.

Here’s the thing about SEO – it co-evolves and adapts just like any intelligent being on earth. Over the years, Google has matured to understand the differences between black and white hat techniques. SEO is the only way to get your site up-to-date with these quality control techniques of Google algorithm updates. Search engine optimization is not a luxury or an option for most small businesses and enterprises. Your Brooklyn-based business needs SEO to help break even in record time and remain profitable for the years to come.