SEO for Small Businesses - Why SEO Content is better than PPC
SEO for small businesses – which approach is best?
When you’re starting or running a small business, online visibility is key to helping you grow. 80% of small business owners say online presence is the most important aspect for generating leads and sales.
You can achieve an online presence in a few ways.
- Create a website
- Set up social media accounts
- Advertise on other websites or search engines
- Establish a profile on an online directory like Yelp or an industry-specific directory like Checkatrade
Creating a website to give you an online presence is usually the first choice for business owners so that people searching can find you and, hopefully, make a direct purchase or an enquiry.
But having a website isn’t necessarily going to get you found. You need to ensure that your content can be read by search engines like Google and Bing, so that people looking for the services and products you offer will end up on your site.
If you’re busy running a small business, you’ve probably already considered the best way to get your website content visible and bring in customers. Pay Per Click (PPC) adverts on search engines have no doubt been one of those options — you can set a budget and see your website visible on page 1 of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) within days.
It’s a quick way of being found and can yield good results.
But what about SEO content for small businesses? SEO content for your website is anything from the pages you have (Home, About, Services, Products etc.) on your website to blogs, case studies and news that have been optimised with relevant keywords and phrases so that people searching can find them.
You may or may not have considered SEO content to help your business’s visibility.
But there are very good reasons why you should consider it before you opt for PPC.
SEO content makes financial sense for small businesses
A recent article by PPC Geeks says that small businesses spend anywhere from £100 – £10,000 per month on Google Ads. For small businesses starting out, even the lower end of the budget can be a stretch, leaving the top end unthinkable.
“PPC is a whole new skillset that you need to learn, manage, maintain and constantly optimise. You’re competing with companies that have much bigger budgets, much deeper skill sets and have the time and energy to dedicate to it. Ultimately, you’re throwing money away,” says Daniel Plume, Content Lead at Stryber.
Once you’re reliant on PPC advertising to help you rank, it can become difficult to reduce your spend.
For existing small businesses, marketing budgets are also being stretched thinly, thanks to economic challenges, with average budgets falling by 15% in 2024, according to a Gartner survey. This leaves small businesses with an important question: where should you spend your shrinking marketing budget?
While the exact figures vary, well over 50% of consumer purchases start with an online search – for a service or a product. And for local searches (people looking for a service or products close to their home), this figure is even higher. So, being visible online is an essential place to focus your marketing budget.
But knowing exactly where to focus your budget for online visibility is crucial and evidence suggests that SEO content is a much better investment for small businesses than PPC advertising.
Small businesses get better ROI with SEO content
Aside from financial benefits, you’ll spend once on every piece of SEO content and it will deliver time and time again, SEO content also benefits your small business in plenty of other ways that PPC can’t.
A recent report from FirstPage Sage shows that the average conversion rate for SEO content is 2.4% compared to 1.3% for PPC.
For some industries, like financial services, this conversion rate skyrockets to 7.3% compared to PPC. It’s not surprising that industries ranking higher for conversion with SEO content are ones where consumer trust is essential (legal services, manufacturing and medical devices) for conversion.
“Investing money in an SEO-trained copywriter with the skills to analyse what people are searching for in my niche/industry/sector and build out detailed, human-written, effective copy and content which captures those search terms and brings people in is best practice,” says Plume.
“It shows that you understand what people are searching for and are responding to those search terms by writing useful, helpful copy to help them solve those queries, answer their questions and bring them into your world. You’re also demonstrating expertise, and that all has a compounding effect over time.”
In fact, FirstPage Sage advises most of its clients to spend 75% of their search budget on SEO content thanks to this compounding effect and its increased return on investment compared with PPC advertising.
SEO content brings the right website traffic to small businesses
You might be more inclined to choose PPC because of the speed at which you’ll start seeing results. And while it’s true that you can rank within days for PPC adverts and start seeing an increase in traffic to your website, you can end up with the wrong kind of traffic.
PPC requires in-depth knowledge, with consistent monitoring to remove phrases and keywords that aren’t relevant. If this doesn’t happen, you can end up with visitors on your site looking for products and services you don’t offer, but your adverts said you did.
And this makes for a yucky customer experience with a high bounce rate (they’ll disappear off your site before you can blink).
Plume advises that focusing on good quality SEO content is a better way to guarantee improved customer experience and your chances of conversion.
“Producing better quality content, consistently, with a relentless focus on communicating directly with your audience is unquestionably the path to follow. When you know your content is effective, then you can start to put money behind its promotion because you have the authority to compete with brands with deeper pockets.”
As a small business, you’re also in a unique position. More and more consumers want to purchase from small businesses, according to a report from Capital on Tap, so creating a trustworthy and unique online presence is a more reliable investment than PPC, where you risk alienating your audience if you don’t get it right.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that the new AI-generated excerpts that you see at the top of Google’s SERP pages, take content from websites and not ads. So, you can boost your chances of appearing at the top by focussing on SEO content.
How to start building SEO for small businesses
If you’re a small business and you’ve been considering PPC advertising, then SEO content is a much better investment now and for the future.
Here is how you can start creating sustainable SEO content for your business that will enable your growth through trust and visibility.
- Start using keyword research tools like Moz, Semrush or Google Keyword Planner to understand what your audience is searching for.
- Optimise your existing content for relevant search terms and keywords.
- Explore where you can add additional content to your site, using the keywords you have identified, to build your visibility and authority.
- Google yourself and see where you rank and benchmark yourself with your competitors.
- Consider hiring an SEO content writer to help you create high-performing content
Remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint
It can be tempting to opt for quick wins when you’re running a business. But SEO for small businesses is about creating a long-lasting, trustworthy experience for the people who find you.
And SEO content will win that race every time.
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