As a relatively new marketer, how can I explain SEO to my clients so that they understand the benefits? I service micro businesses.

Answer 1

You can help your clients better understand SEO by tying it to increased visibility and more sales. With more of their web pages showing up high in search results, by publishing web page content that clearly states what they offer and why they should be the preferred business to solve a pain point, they'll convert more prospects to customers.

Run a quick crawl of the site to get a feel for the technical issues that are blocking crawling and indexing, and show them how you can help them fix those problems to allow search engine crawlers increased access to their pages.

Hopefully by the time your clients retain you, they have a working website. Show clients some keyword research results with volume and competition to get them excited about the possibilities of creating content that prospects understand.

Do a little bit of competitive research and analysis, and show the clients where their competition has weaknesses, and how you will make your client stronger in those weak areas.

Give an example of a GA4 report and Google Search Console, plus any paid SEO tools you use, and demonstrate the power of data visualization to show them improvement over time.

If the micr business depends upon people visiting a brick and mortar location, local SEO is critical, so be sure to do some homework on their local search results visibility and talk about business directory listings, such as Google, Yelp, etc., for them to have increased chances to show up in local search results.

Be passionate, respectful and enthusiastic. Let them know they can show up higher in search results with some work.

Answer 2

I like to walk clients through scenarios they can relate to, for their specific goals and type of business.

For example: "you're walking around looking for a place to have a drink. The bar that would been best for your specific drink wants (wine) and proximity (downtown) isn't popping up on google so you don't find it and they loose your business. The bigger the digital footprint (SEO) of the downtown wine bar, the bigger the chance of someone finding the bar on a digital search.

The bar should have had a Facebook page with proper address and google my business page that matched the address so google would have categorized them appropriately. If the bar would had posts on social, an online menu on platforms, or blogs about wine downtown on their site the bar would have popped up on your search."

Expand from there with other SEO help.