In today’s business landscape which put great focus on search engine optimization or SEO, there are companies like Walmart or Home Depot—the top guns in their industry—who almost always occupy the top half of the search engine results pages (SERPs). Then there’s the smaller ones who aren’t quite in the big leagues yet.

Among the small-scale players, the reasons why they still aren’t doing SEO vary—from speculating that the services of a professional Dallas SEO company are a “waste,” to being simply unaware of the potential benefits of SEO and other various online marketing approaches. They also tend to think that only big businesses need and use it. However, that assumption is false. Anyone can employ SEO, regardless of the nature of the industry or company size. It’s about using certain marketing tactics to help consumers find your company faster. Specifically, SEO gets websites to find their way to the top of organic search results.

The major search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, have bots that “crawl” the web to search for keywords that consumers usually type in when looking for information, products, or services that they need. A site with sound SEO is likely to be picked up by these crawlers and ranked favorably in subsequent unpaid search results. It is fair game, so that even small businesses aren’t excluded from doing SEO—they’re perfectly qualified to compete with the elites to the top of the SERPs; it’s all about the skill in planning one’s online marketing strategies and their execution.

Once these small businesses get in the SEO game, here’s a rundown of the perks they can expect.

High ROI – Local Dallas SEO firms like the Online Marketing Tree provide know-how, experience and other resources that most companies do not possess to optimize their websites and other media platforms effectively. Compared to other forms of online marketing, SEO delivers an extremely high ROI. If done correctly, SEO can bring non-stop organic traffic whose benefits may be commensurate to, if not supersede, the quick results of paid online advertising campaigns.

Excellent brand awareness – SEO works like this: if Dave’s Donuts occupies the top SERP spot, then people would consider it the best place to get donuts. Web users unconsciously tend to trust the topmost links in SERPs; even if they’re not buying at the moment, they’re bound to bookmark the link so they could return to it another time.

It works – SEO works if employed with the right research and integration of SEO components in all marketing strategies—from coding to linking, design and content optimization. With sound SEO strategy, a company can expect consistent traffic to its website, regardless of the constant shifts in algorithm updates of the search engines.

(Source: 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Compete With Giants In SEO, Entrepreneur, October 21, 2014)