All small businesses should be embracing online marketing. Here, our resident SEO consultant Leon Bailey Green, looks at the five benefits of embarking on an SEO campaign:

1. Drive Traffic
It’s all very well having a fantastic looking website but if nobody’s going to see it what’s the point? Your website isn’t just a tool for your current customers/consumers it should be used to gain new business.
SEO is a great way to get your website out there to new customers. Not only will it drive clicks from search engines like Google, you will also get clicks from links on other websites which have been built up as part of your SEO campaign.

2. Brand Positioning
So you’re not the biggest insurance company in the country, but how great, and reassuring for your customers, would it be for your brand positioning if you could appear next to the biggest?
The first page of search results for major terms is normally taken up by the bigger brands. If you embark on a well thought out SEO campaign, you could appear next to them.

3. Cost Effective
Paid search is a good way of getting visitors to a new website.
For many small businesses this method of search marketing is short term as it isn’t really cost effective. With 70% of clicks going to websites within the natural listings, you would get more clicks than you would with paid search.

4. Engage when the customer is ready
Search marketing is like no other in that you have the opportunity to engage with customers when they are ready to find you.

5. Competition
The days of relying on an advert in Yell are long gone. Your competitors, small and large, are all fighting for coverage online.
Ignore SEO and you’ll be left behind and your competitors will benefit from the increased amount of users logging on to find companies who provide your product/service.

Leon Bailey Green is an online marketing expert and friend of Score Communications. He has worked on SEO campaigns for financial, travel, fashion, recruitment and b2b companies, including Nestle, Bourne Leisure and Jobserve.
Click here to read Leon’s blog on everything from fashion to branding to celebs and parties!