SEO: The Biggest ROI for Local Businesses

On Friday, I received one of the best text messages I’ve ever received. Let me give you the backstory. A friend, we’ll call her Carol (not her real name), runs a tiny catering business. She’s just trying to get it off the ground and hasn’t done any marketing at all. On a whim, I spun up a website and added some content to it. One of our team helped design it. Ultimately, it took just a few hours. And then we starting doing SEO. We optimized the site for search. And we’re already seeing results. This is the second lead the site brought in this month – and we’ve barely even started. I don’t actually know how much Carol will charge these clients, but let’s say it’s $10 a person. For a 100 person event, she just closed a deal worth $1,000. For one day of work on her side business, that’s pretty good. The truth is, I see results like this all the time. As much as I love Facebook ads, PPC, and social media (trust me, they all have their place), one of the biggest ROI opportunities for local businesses is SEO. Why? Simple:

1. You don’t have to pay-per-click. That means you get far more exposure for less money.
2. It seems less sales-y. When you use PPC, you virtually always hit someone with a strong offer out of the gate. While that often works, it can come across as sales-y. With SEO, people feel like they are discovering you. They don’t feel like you’re trying to hard sell them on your service.
3. It’s an asset. The moment I stop paying for PPC ads, I stop getting value from them. Not so with SEO. Good SEO makes your website more valuable in the long run.

If you have the patience and a little bit of money to invest, SEO is one of the best options for a local business. People are already looking for your product or service. Getting to page one on search can mean thousands and thousands of additional dollars to your business every month. And that’s a game changer.