5 Reasons Why SEO Is Still Crucial For Offline Businesses

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is able to give a boost to the online presence of any business. By using effective SEO strategies, a website can rank high and reach more potential customers. Nonetheless, SEO is not only important for businesses that sell their products online. It is also essential for offline organisations that offer their products exclusively through brick-and-mortar stores or other channels (e.g. through conventional mail). Below are the top 5 reasons why SEO is still crucial for offline businesses.

1. Increase Awareness

SEO has a high potential to increase consumer awareness of an offline businesses and indirectly promote the products distributed by them. Today, most customers go online to get access to information about the goods and services they desire to purchase. Hence, the internet is the primary source of information even for products that are traditionally sold offline. An offline business can start a website and promote it through SEO. When the website begins appearing on various search engines, the awareness of customers will be improved and they will be attracted to the physical stores of offline businesses. An offline company can benefit from SEO even without having its own website. Just listing on popular online firm profiles such as Google My Business will help an offline company to appear in Google search results.

2. Building Trust And Credibility

Trust and credibility are crucial for both offline and online businesses to stimulate their sales in the long term. SEO is of great help to become a trusted and credible organsiation in the eyes of consumers, as optimised websites appear on the first pages of search results and tend to be more frequently visited. SEO professionals work on many things to increase the authority of a website, and significantly contribute to encouraging positive user behaviour, building quality backlink profiles, generating optimised content, and processing machine learning signals. Completing these tasks by means of SEO will also help in arousing greater trust and credibility. At the same time, regular marketing activities and SEO are rather complementary, not mutually excluding.

3. Improvements In Local Search

The local population usually represents customers of small offline businesses. They visit nearby stores for making small purchases as they cannot travel to distant outlets. Hence, ranking on local search engine results pages (SERPs) is important to effectively reach local customers. However, these are immensely competitive since popular search engines including Google and Bing constantly update their local listings to serve their customers well. The adaptation of maps and location-based services on mobile devices has increased the importance of local search. As a result, technology companies tie them together to provide suggestions to customers. For this reason, offline businesses can benefit from the growing influence of local search results only by having an effective SEO strategy in place. Neglecting local search by offline businesses will result in the loss of potential customers who live close to the stores operated by offline companies.

4. Get Insights Regarding Your Customers

A key yet often overlooked benefit of SEO for offline businesses is that it provides valuable insights regarding customers and their preferences. Tons of information related to potential customers who are searching for company-related data can be gleaned from free SEO tools such as Google Analytics and Search Console. These tools store information used by customers to search for businesses and products online. So, offline businesses can have access to information related to their customers analysing location, search terms, language, time of the day, frequency of searches, etc. This information may turn out highly valuable for an offline business that generally does not have enough resources to invest in data collection and customer base surveys.

5. Impact On The Buying Process

SEO can also help offline businesses to positively influence the whole consumer buying cycle because most consumers do substantial internet research before coming to a physical retail outlet. Specifically, SEO tactics can be utilised to disseminate information about new products and services, new features added to existing products and seasonal discounts available to customers. To put it simply, SEO will increase the brand visibility of an offline business. If right information is shared by offline companies on suitable internet platforms (e.g. Groupon), businesses with low internet presence can gain immensely from this strategy in the form of increased sales.

Having and promoting online presence is crucial even for offline companies, as the internet has almost replaced other media, which consumers rely on for finding information on new products and services. If a wise strategy is followed, SEO can help businesses operating in the offline environment to build a stronger competitive advantage in comparison with their online counterparts. The largest advantage that could be gained by a brick-and-mortar business through investing in SEO is having a well-optimised website for search engines ready when it wants to start selling its products online.

About the Author:

Ellie Richards is an online Marketing Manager for PhD Writing company Original PhD. She specialises in research, content and article writing on various topics, including Education, Marketing, and Technology.