Why does a service-based business need online presence?

All the different types and scopes of businesses need Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), but service-based businesses find it more difficult to survive in the digital competition. For such businesses, designing a functional SEO strategy is the key to establish strong online presence, credibility, and audience trust. SEO comprises of several functional and visual elements which are significant for a service-based business to gather more traffic and increase chances of conversions.

A few such elements include focused keywords, meta descriptions, great user experience, faster loading pages, and alike. All of such factors add to the strengthened position of a service-based business among the competitors.

Following are the detailed reasons for why a service-based business needs SEO:

1.    Content Marketing

Service-based businesses mostly focus on their brand awareness through content marketing. While it seems to be the easiest marketing strategy, it needs a lot of effort to be really effective. As a business, you need to pay great attention towards the keywords your competitors are emphasizing on. It becomes important to include your services, locations, and other such factors in your content.

It requires good content marketing and SEO skills to incorporate these keywords into basic content as well as meta description, titles, and headlines, etc. Also, SEO tells where you should place what type of content. As an emerging trend, service-based businesses are also creating visual content such as images and videos. It is important to maintain a balance between written and visual content on your web pages.

This way, SEO contributes greatly to content marketing. It helps shape your strategy and make improvements according to changing trends in service-based business industry and digital environment.

2.    Structuring your web pages

As a service-based business, you must know that it is not possible to incorporate all your information, services, contact, and reviews on a single page. Your website needs to be divided into several web pages. As each of those pages has something new to offer, it should be well-structured.

A well-structured website allows ease of navigation and greatly adds to user experience. SEO dictates how web pages should be structured, how much information should be delivered, how to describe your services, how should negative space be utilized, and how should your offer navigational pathway. All of these are simple and basic SEO requirements, which, when incorporated, deliver beneficial results for service-based businesses.

3.    Simpler URLs

Here’s another significant benefit that SEO renders for service-based businesses. It helps design simpler URLs. Such URLs are easy to search, locate, and understand. Simply by clicking on a URL, you know where it is going to lead you.

This is especially important when establishing marketing and ad campaigns. As internet users click on URLs you have provided, they are most likely going to convert into potential customers.

For example,

www.abcservices.com/services/kitchencountertops is a simple and easily understandable URL. As the user click, he knows what kind of services he is going to come across. As SEO asks businesses to follow such practices, all of these simple things add to the overall better usability and sales.

4.    Effective link building

Link building is a critical factor that SEO puts great emphasis on. However, most people think that link building is important for product-based businesses only. It is time to realize that service-based businesses can equally benefit from link building. This enhances the need for SEO for service-based businesses.

Through link building, you can introduce your business and the services you offer in a better way to your audience. A number of bloggers and content creators write and produce content on different types of services. Linking your web pages to such an informative and productive website can make your business reach a wider audience. While the content offers benefits of a particular service, your business can deliver the needs.

Moreover, link building helps you establish credibility among content creators that attract more traffic and have more followers. This way, it helps in brand awareness and credibility.

5.    Increased traffic

One of the major concerns of service-based businesses is that they do not attract high traffic. And so, it isn’t very easy to generate leads and get conversions. As traffic is the first step, SEO helps focus on the traffic you receive.

Through focused keywords, good layout, easy navigation, and effective marketing campaigns, SEO increases your ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). As you rank high on a search engine, more visitors will be coming to your web pages. This increases the traffic by large, which in turn enhances your leads and conversions.

6.    Data collection and analysis

SEO offers effective and comprehensive data collection and analysis. It compels service-based businesses to gather and interpret data through Google Analytics and other data analysis tools and software.

As product-based businesses have a great focus on these tools to improve their sales, service-based businesses can also increase their profits by adopting such tools.

As you gather, interpret, and analyze data, it explains where your website needs improvements. Also, you can run several tests that SEO recommends, such as A/B Testing, that offer valuable insights into the final results of a campaign even before you launch the campaign.

7.    Better customer service

Last but not least, customer service is an important aspect of a service-based business. Visitors judge service-based businesses over the reviews and testimonials their customers have to offer. Better your customer service, the more the number of customers you attract.

Without excellent customer service, you might receive enough traffic, but you will never be able to get enough customers. Thus, SEO is important to manage your customer service and make it better every passing minute.

Final Thoughts

SEO has great importance for service-based businesses. From content marketing to customer service, it plays a crucial role in managing your web pages, content, traffic, conversions, profits, speed, reviews, and whatnot. If your business is service-based, it is time you start focusing on a sound SEO strategy. It delivers better profits and a higher ROI. This way, you can stand ahead of your competitors.