How SEO Complacency Can Keep Your Small Business Small

SEO Never Rests and Neither Should Your Business

“I’m OK with my business the way things are.” We hear it all the time. With 20 years of experience in the dynamic field of search engine optimization, the digital marketing team at SocialSEO has seen this fatal business error committed all too often. Surprisingly, we encounter this dangerous SEO complacency quite frequently from moderately successful enterprises.

The most successful and prosperous enterprises are those companies who stay on top of SEO changes, grabbing profitable chunks of market share with superior search engine rankings, and in turn, keep their complacent small competitors small. With the advent of cloud computing, new competition pops up every day. These upstarts can jump into the marketplace without the need for massive investments in computer hardware, and software as a service can have them up and running overnight. With a well-honed SEO strategy, they can level the online playing field in a way that can rapidly drive a complacent company’s online revenue from “small” to “none at all”.

The complacency mindset is not uncommon. These enterprises have carefully navigated through the risky red ink stages of the new startup, and the business is showing moderate growth and decent profits. Market share is acceptable and after years of tenuous growing pains there might be a tendency to fall into the complacent attitude best described as “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”

When a business is early in the launching phase, the importance of SEO is a no-brainer, but businesses at all stages benefit from SEO. Those who ignore it once a business is up and running are on the fast track to failure in today’s highly competitive markets. They already know firsthand the value of digital marketing and the positive effects a truly effective, professionally managed SEO strategy can have on growth, profit, and market share including the following benefits.

Benefits of Professionally Managed SEO For All Businesses:

• Increased sales-qualified inbound traffic, and significantly more conversions.
• Higher SEO ranking which today’s consumers perceive as higher respectability in the specified industry or marketplace.
• Establishes business credibility, through leadership and authority.
• Provides a 24/7/365 gateway to the company’s website and targets the exact consumers who are seeking the unique products and services your company offers. SEO has duration and versatility far beyond brief ad spots on TV and radio or print ads which get buried with yesterday’s newspaper.
• Improved user experience on your website which improves the ranking with Google and other search engines.
• Establish and maintain the web presence which will be able to grow along with the ever-increasing trend to online marketing. In 2016, 75%, more than 209 million consumers preferred to purchase online. That number is projected to increase to more than 230 million by 2021.

Ride the Leading Edge of the SEO Wave or Risk a Wipeout

Here’s the problem with those enterprises who have been lulled into SEO complacency by past success. They’re assuming that yesterday’s successful SEO tools will continue to generate the leads and rankings in the all-important Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) for years to come, and therein lies the fatal mistake.

Search engine parameters change daily. Ranking factors and the ranking algorithms, those complex formulas which determine rankings on the SERP, are continuously evolving. Keeping up with all of these changes is best accomplished by a dedicated SEO specialized technical team. Here are just a few ranking factors which have evolved through Google over the past few years as reported by Search Engine Journal:

• The “https” in the URL, denoting a secure server, became a ranking signal in 2014, and the move was further reinforced in 2017 with a major push to secure servers. A company which retained a traditional “http” URL could lose ranking simply because they are unaware of this fundamental change.
• In 2015, Google’s RankBrain brought artificial intelligence to the ranking system. This shifted the ranking of website content significantly, as the algorithm provided a more precise way of evaluating the relevance of the content to the actual search query. Freshness also became a factor so “stale” content, and the websites which still relied on it, could find themselves relegated to the unobserved wilderness of the low-ranking back pages of the SERP.
• “Mobile usability” came on the ranking scene in 2015. Older web pages, regardless of content, could drop in the rankings for failing to be mobile compatible. An adequately optimized website for laptop and desktop browsers could drop in the rankings by failing to keep up with the mobile consumer trend. Now, in 2018, mobile usability alone is not sufficient. Mobile page loading speed is a major ranking factor. The watchwords in the SEO industry are “Go mobile or go home.”

At SocialSEO Your Success is Our Success

In the dynamic world of digital marketing, it takes a team effort to position your business competitively and keep it there. Whether you’re a traditional “brick and mortar” company beginning a long overdue digital transformation to keep pace with the exploding e-commerce economy, or a growing enterprise which finds itself losing market share to the tidal wave of tech-savvy startups, the experts at SocialSEO are ready to get your digital marketing strategy up to speed. We can provide a no-cost audit to identify features that can be enhanced for higher SEO ranking, and we can analyze your online competition so don’t hesitate to contact our SEO Experts.