It is very commonly known that small businesses invariably find it more difficult to implement SEO compared to their bigger counterparts. In fact, with Google making innumerable changes to its algorithm, many experts believe that it is progressively becoming even harder for SMBs to succeed at SEO. A brief look at some of the most common reasons why small businesses find implementing SEO and getting returns out of a big struggle:
Less Amount of Money Available
The lack of money remains the biggest stumbling block in the implementation of SEO by small businesses. Even though generating ROI is the only reason why companies invest in marketing and advertising, it is well known that unless the spend gets to the tipping point, the return will not be positive. Very frequently, it is seen that the PPC campaigns undertaken by small companies do not generate a positive ROI until such time the investment rises to a certain level. In many ways, SEO also witnesses the same phenomenon – the more money you can devote to SEO, the better will be the returns. When it comes to spending power, the bigger companies have a far larger budget that they can use to hire more staff, engage experienced consultants, build great content, and wonderful web design.
Less Time Available
In the typical small business environment, the marketing team is lean, which generally means that everyone has multiple tasks to juggle with and it is not possible for anyone to devote himself solely to SEO. As everyone knows, SEO can take a lot of time- optimizing web pages, writing great content, securing backlinks, promoting assets, and testing the efficacy of communication is not an easy job. According to https://www.forbes.com, frequently updating the website with fresh and updated content is important for encouraging visitors to keep coming back. Most small businesses are forced to either doing a superficial job or neglecting SEO completely. As can be appreciated, this results in an under-optimized website with poor SERP rankings.
Colliding Priorities
In small companies, because the available resources are limited, SEO-related tasks always tend to get relegated to the bottom of the lot because there are usually more critical things that need the attention of the staff. As a result, even if the people are well-intentioned, generating good quality content, writing a blog post and other vital SEO tasks never get done. As may be evident, SEO cannot ever be a luxury that you will indulge in after you are through with everything else on your agenda. This is the reason why small companies do not make much headway with SEO and big companies have a dedicated SEO team that is not distracted with other tasks.
Keeping Up with the Changes Is Harder
Because small businesses are short-staffed and not in a position to have dedicated SEO personnel, it can be really difficult for a person who is multitasking to devote enough time to keep up with the rapid changes in the search industry. Unless the person is devoted only to SEO, it can be challenging to know the latest updates released by Google that could have an impact on the site ranking and to learn about techniques on countering the drop in online visibility. The problem with overworked SMB marketers is that they are so caught up trying to keep abreast of the developments in their own industry that it can be impossible for them to follow the rapidly evolving trends in SEO. Engaging a
specialized SEO agency can be an effective way of getting around this problem.
Google Is Positively Biased towards Well-Known Brands
Even though it is a common complaint that Google has a favorable disposition towards bigger brands, the raw reality is that is it indeed brand power that motivates everyone. Google will always rank bigger brands higher in the SERPs, all other things being the same simply because it is well established that users are inclined to click more on website links of brands of which they are more aware. Therefore, if a small business wants to target the same keywords as the big brands, they will have to work that much harder to establish that their content is equally if not more relevant to the searcher’s intent and their scare time. It is also proven that small businesses will perhaps never be able to beat the big brands for many of the branded keywords.
Bigger Businesses Have More SEO Experience
Big businesses were rarely born big; indeed most of them started small and became huge over a long period. Generally, the length of time that they have been in business plays an important role because they have been learning the tricks of SEO for so much longer than the typical small business. Not only do the younger websites lack the domain authority and the backlinks profile but also they are relatively inexperienced in understanding the complexities of SEO. This is the prime reason why small businesses find it more difficult to rank well for competitive keywords. Bigger companies have the advantage of their experience to figure out what will work and what will not and; therefore can repeat their successes more.
Small Businesses Have Smaller Websites
Not only is the website of a small business newer but also it will generally be smaller with less number of pages and content. This means that there is less opportunity for inserting target keywords and consequently fewer chances of getting god ranks. One of the reasons why the bigger websites get a larger volume of organic traffic is that they have far more search queries for which they can potentially rank. Again big companies have the resources to deploy for creating more content and a larger range of products and services to showcase in their bigger websites.
Conclusion
The large list of the negatives associated with small business SEO will beget the question of whether SEO is still worthwhile for them. However, it is very clear that if you want to have a website to drive revenues, you will need to take the effort of implementing the bare minimum SEO. Without SEO, users will never find your website and you will lose out on the organic traffic potential even if you have other marketing methods available.
