How important is SEO for start-ups in 2024?

Quality Traffic

SEO is a powerful digital marketing tools that is very important to small businesses today, as it helps to attract visitors your website that are interested in what you provide. Unlike handing out a leaflet in the local shopping centre car park, you are reaching your audience when they are specifically looking for products or services you offer. This means they are more likely to engage with your content, possibly making a purchase, completing an online form, or subscribing for your services. 

Competitive Edge

The biggest challenge you face as a start-up, is that there are already established companies in your industry, probably even in the same local area. The benefit of search engine optimisation is how it evens out the playing field, enabling small businesses to outsmart their established competitors by optimising their website. Part of a comprehensive SEO strategy is competitor analysis. When you know what digital marketing tactics your competitors are doing, along with where they are excelling, and where they are falling short, you have an instant advantage. You can tailor your SEO strategy to capitalise on their weaknesses, giving you a competitive edge.

SEO for Start-Ups Statistics

As a start-up, you are probably on the fence on whether to spend a small amount of your budget on online marketing. Maybe you think you can do it yourself. With our extensive industry experience, we know that starting a new business is already time consuming, are you really going to have the time to manage your SEO campaign? We have listed some statistics below, giving you a better understanding on the importance of SEO for start-ups:

• More than seventy five percent of users do not go beyond the first page of search results, showing the importance of an effective SEO strategy that pushes you to the first page of results
• Organic SEO has shown an average click through rate (CTR) of close to twenty percent, outperforming paid results. The CTR is the number of clicks you gain through search results, translating into the number of visitors that arrived on your site by clicking a link in a search results, showing you that SEO is essential in driving traffic to your costs without having to pay per click 
• Did you know that if your website takes one second longer to load, it can reduce your conversion rate by a staggering seven percent? In order to improve user experience and reduce bounce rates you need a fast loading website, which is an important part of technical SEO
• SEO offers a good return on investment with companies seeing returns of up to two times more on their SEO spending, when compared to traditional marketing methods, such as billboards, newspaper, and television advertising. This is very attractive to start-ups who need to maximise their budgets
• Organic traffic conversion rates tend to be higher than those where you pay for advertising space. SEO tends to have a closing rate of approximately 14.5%, where outbound leads only have a closing rate of 1.7%. 

Conclusion

If you are a start-up that wants to achieve success in a competitive market, then SEO is essential to help you achieve your goals. SEO helps achieve sustained growth, helping you connect with your audience, while boosting brand visibility and awareness. Genie Crawl has extensive experience working with start-ups, helping you gain a footing, putting yourself in front of your audience when they need you, helping to achieve long term results. Give us a call today to find out how we can implement SEO into your marketing budget today.