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8 Biggest Reasons why SEO is important for Small Businesses in Kenya

In Kenya, search engine optimization or SEO has become the most consistent marketing strategy in making the brands grow by amplifying their strengths via social media, websites and other internet platforms. This is because most consumers often start their search on the Internet for the vast majority of their needs, and their journey usually begins with search engines like Google. In turn, small businesses can improve their search results ranking and the odds of being found by its target audience through SEO. To this extent, we notice that in 2021, many SMEs and start-ups have a demand for SEO because the internet has proved to be the most ideal place marketing. 

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Why is SEO important?

While you’ve heard that SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a useful and necessary digital marketing tool, you may not be exactly sure what SEO entails in this day and age to business. SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. A higher ranking when someone searches a term in your industry increases your brand’s visibility online. This, in turn, gives you more opportunities to convert qualified prospects into customers. Many SMEs in Kenya are flowing designing their path using SEO models, by hiring social media managers, SEO engineers, web optimizers so that they can increase interactivity in the connectivity sphere.

SEO is important because it keeps the search results fair. It reduces the ability to manipulate these results as much as possible, so that the sites appearing for each search are there because they deserve to be there. Hard work and a website that appeals to visitors correlate with high search engine rankings, so if your site meets these criteria, you’ll have a better chance at showing up in the results.

Users trust search engines, and achieving a top spot in search engine rankings signals to searchers that your site is a credible source. The higher you rank in results pages, the more clicks and traffic your site will generate. SEO also improves user experience, making it more likely for customers to become repeat buyers. And SEO is cost-effective. Competitive industries can spend large amounts of money on paid website traffic. Of course, you can still purchase ad space, but if you’re working with a tight budget, SEO is a great way to drive qualified traffic to your site without directly paying for it.

How does SEO work?

SEO consists of multiple strategies, actions, and best practices, all of which have the end goal of improving your website’s position in search engines—which is why it’s called “search engine optimization.”

There are two kinds of SEO: on-page and off-page. On-page SEO consists of anything you can control on your own website to improve your rankings. This refers to things like site speed, keyword presence, header text, and so on. On the other hand, off-page SEO consists of anything done on other websites that may influence your rankings. Generally, this only refers to links.

It takes time, knowledge of SEO, and successful implementation of the desired on- and off-page SEO factors to optimize your website for high rankings in search engines. If the collective power of your site or an individual page’s SEO is more powerful than all others, with regards to a specific query, you’ll rank #1.

Because SEO involves so many ranking factors, you can think of the #1 site as winning a triathlon of sorts. In a real triathlon, the winner of the running portion is not necessarily the winner of the entire race – and so it is the same with SEO. The site with the most links, the most pages, or the most visitors is not necessarily the #1 site. Their overall performance determines who comes out on top.

Benefits of SEO to your Small Business in Kenya.

“SEO”, the Monster you cannot avoid in online marketing. But what are the benefits of SEO to your business, that it’s such a common term? The internet is filled with statistics and metrics that only serve to support the fact that SEO is a must have for all business regardless the size or the industry served. Here we go;

  1. Reach your greater audience.

Did you know that google records 3.5 billion searches daily? Majority of you would be clients do an online search before making a sale decision or visit your physical store. With such statistics it only make sense to make sure your get your SEO right.

  1. SEO delivers qualified traffic/ leads.

In Kenya, with a well done SEO, your business website improves on ranking and this result to more qualified leads bearing that nearly 75% of user click on the first page results. If you’re not getting leads from SEO then you need to revisit your strategies and find out why, because somebody else somewhere is certainly eating into your share of the PIE. In fact metrics show that 14% of close rates are from inbound SEO leads compared to 1.7% that you get from outbound marketing (following up customers, cold emails, or calls).

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  1. Improves User Experience on your website.

Users will spend a lot more of their time on your website if the experience is much better, remember the more time they spend on your site the higher the chance you can convert them. Having a fast loading site, great images, great content and structure enables your users to interact more with your site and this is what search engine sites are looking for to get you to rank.

  1. Build brand awareness.

When your SEO works for you, you get to create brand awareness and credibility of your business. In fact it grows your customers once they find you in related keyword search by them. When you link appears more times it tend to get clicks and this generally means your brand will be treated different with your user. Unlike paid Ads which are dependent on amount of cash invested SEO offers 24/7 exposure with no cost incurred for any click on your site.

  1. Even Playing Field

SMEs in Kenya with SEO, it doesn’t matter if their competitor is better equipped than you. If your SEO is better than theirs, you’ll always beat them to ranking on google and that means eating into their share of online leads. Search engine ranks site based on the relevancy of the search query and your website content, if you’re relevancy is better that your competitor, be it the average competitor or the Giant corporation, you’ll appear higher on search result than them.

  1. Creates a Long-term Marketing strategy

Like wine, SEO gets better with time. You get to grow your link profile, content growth and also traffic as time goes by. Having great keywords that work for your business for long run can go a long way in improving your site performance. Unless there is change in google ranking factors or your competitors are working hard, you’ll still maintain your spot.

  1. More clicks compared to PPC

Compared to PPC, SEO related leads tend to gain more clicks. The fact that PPC links get to be placed higher on search engine result pages, nearly 71% of all searches click on page one of google tend to be organic results rather than Paid Ads.

  1. Improve website speed

One of the biggest reason Kenyan websites suffer higher bounce rate is because of speed, with so much to choose from online a slow loading site negatively affects its user experience and thus suffer higher bounce rates. Having a well done SEO improves so much on your speed and this enables retention of users thus reducing your bounce rate and this will increase your chances of conversion.

SEO is a great way to grow and generate leads online. The opportunities for you brand growth out there are limitless and given that SEO offers level playing field, it creates an opportunity to keep your competitors in check regardless how better equipped they’re. It’s time for many start-ups in Kenya to embrace this in pursuit of future Techno-relevance.

 

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