Twenty eight million corporate enterprises in the United States now classify as small businesses, with 22 of them incorporated as single employee corporate entities. That’s 22 million entrepreneurial trailblazers trying to make a name for themselves in a creative space that lacks an efficient product or service. This number may surprise you, but an estimated nine million Americans are self-employed as of last year, and chances are you are one of these trailblazers or hope to be very soon.
Once you have established your brand and found your place in the market’s need, the question that every business owner must ask themselves is this: How do I engage with enough of my potential clients? That is the essential consideration that everyone hoping to turn a profit must ask.
The need for paying customers outweighs any other temporary crisis that may arise in your newly established workplace. And once you have created enough hype around your brand, the need to retain the loyalty of those clients who have already bought from you outweighs even that of new customer acquisition.
The titans of industry have figured this essential truth out. Walmart, Amazon, even Netflix employ huge marketing teams to expand the presence of their business to as many potential buyers as they can. The math is simple— the more people you have looking at your product the more buyers you will turn.
While throwing huge sums of money at ads, radio spots, and billboards works for companies with a seemingly unlimited budget, this approach likely won’t work for you. Growing a business isn’t easy, and you will often find yourself trying to maximize your cash at every turn. But growing brand recognition doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive.
The first thing you must know to compete in anything is the ruleset that governs the game—for online marketing, that means search engine optimization. You may not think that this is important, but it serves in a similar realm as traditional marketing efforts at a fraction of the cost. Google’s search engine has become dominant in the lives of internet users all over the world.
An estimated 3.2 billion people engage with the connected world through regular internet access to look up a
Search engine optimization is the process whereby you boost the ‘relevancy’ of your page based on likely searches for topics similar to
Domain authority is a marker of relevancy pertaining to the entire content of your site’s presence online. The higher it is, the more hits you will get when searchers type something related into their search box. By optimizing your content, you increase the likelihood of being seen online, which provides three immense benefits.
The first is a hook for potential new customers. By maintaining high domain authority, your page will often appear near the top and will receive more clicks than lower rated pages. As well, by maintaining this position you can remind current customers of your services when they search for similar items, much like a billboard on the highway drags well-known business entities to the forefront of your attention as you drive past.
Finally, by increasing your content’s hit rate on search engines, you are able to expand your presence beyond searches that narrowly focus on your brand or its competitors. This is why your searches for that new iPhone likely also display computers and televisions. This puts your brand in the mind of potential buyers in advance so that they will think of you first when they do require offerings from your market sector.
Search engine optimization is the future of branding, and if done right can both cost you less than traditional marketing and drive business to your site far better than the alternatives.
