Five Reasons Female Founders Should Focus on Search Engine Optimisation in 2024
At the time of writing this post, we are heading towards a brand new year at breakneck speed. If, like many small business owners, you’re using this time to assess and improve your marketing efforts for the year ahead, we’re here to make the case for making SEO your primary marketing focus in 2024.
The world of digital entrepreneurship is constantly changing and evolving, and it’s likely you’ve heard the term ‘SEO’ bandied round as a buzzword more than once. But "SEO" is so much more than just a marketing buzzword — it's a powerful tool that you can harness (yes, even if you’re ‘not techy’) to boost your online visibility and grow your business.
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What is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation for it’s full name, is the process of optimising your website pages to rank higher in search engine results. Great SEO means that your dream customers can search for a solution to their problems online and be presented with your website, right at the top of their search results.
SEO involves strategically optimising your online content, from about pages to blog posts, with the goal of making your brand more visible to those actively seeking what you have to offer. It involves a range of practices, from ideal customer and keyword research, to building quality backlinks and creating regular new content; all with the goal of telling search engines, "Hey, I've got valuable content here!"
Why is SEO an important tool for small business owners?
For female founders operating online, SEO isn't just a useful tool; it's a game-changer. We all know that online visibility can make or break a business, and solid SEO is your golden ticket to getting more visible online than ever before. Search Engine Optimisation is the key to ensuring that when potential customers search for products or services you offer, your brand is front and centre in their search results.
It’s also important to note at this stage that your website is one of the only marketing tools that you actually own. You are in full control of the content and how it’s displayed, no change to the algorithm will impact how your website performs (unlike social media platforms) and it is much better protected against hackers and thieves. By focusing on SEO now, you’re making a very smart and safe marketing decision that will continue to benefit your business for years to come.
While SEO can sound daunting and technical, it’s important to remember that it’s really just marketing. While climbing the search engine rankings is incredibly important; SEO is also about crafting an engaging digital strategy that aligns with your brand story, values, and the unique offerings that make your business special. SEO is the secret ingredient that transforms your website from a mere online presence to a dynamic marketing tool that attracts, engages, and converts your target audience.
In this blog post, we'll be digging deep into the five key reasons SEO should be front and centre of every female founders 2024 online marketing strategy.
#1: SEO doesn’t need daily input & management to be successful
When it comes to SEO, your digital marketing efforts don't disappear into the abyss after 24 - 48 hours like your standard social media post. The greatest thing about SEO is the longevity it gives your online visibility. A search engine optimised web page or blog post will continue to bring in traffic and engagement for months, years, and maybe even decades! And the best part? With a little bit of focussed work each week (seriously little, we’re talking 30 mins to an hour) your content will grow all on its own with zero day-to-day input from you.
Another amazing benefit of SEO: you don't have to be the trendiest trend follower or spend hours trying to out-engage everyone in order to be a success. You can relax and forget about the social media hustle and bustle. SEO is a far more laid-back approach to online visibility that doesn’t care if you’re using trending audios or showing your face enough. SEO is all about timeless marketing principles that stand strong against the ever-changing algorithms and preferences of social media platforms.
SEO marketing thrives on simplicity. Basic research, understanding your customers, occasional valuable content and you're in the game! You don't need a PhD in digital marketing or full-time hours to dedicate to seeing results. Just get to know your marketing basics, understand your audience, build in some relevant keywords, do what you do best and voila! You're on your way to front-page fame without any smoke and mirrors.
#2: Running a business is largely a numbers game, & SEO brings in far bigger numbers
Conversion rates refer to the percentage of people that take an action on any given piece of content. For example, if you write a blog post that has a call to action to a lead magnet at the bottom and 3% of the people that read that blog post click the link to the lead magnet, that’s a 3% conversion rate.
So, here's the deal: the standard conversion rate for most product and service pages dances around 1-2% (this is massively simplified for ease, there’s a lot of variety in these numbers). This means that you need 50-100 sets of eyeballs on any given product or service page to score a sale or enquiry. Sure, you could absolutely hustle on social media for those clicks, but that's a lot of work.
Let’s say you use Instagram as your primary marketing tool. An average reel might snag you 500 views and maybe 3-4 profile visits. Out of those 3 or 4, maybe 1 person will click through to your website. Now, you could focus on making 25 Instagram Reels per week and congrats, you'd be looking at a whopping 20-25 website clicks per week. But how long would it really take to create 25 high-impact reels each and every week? Too long, we’d say!
Now, picture this: you spend just 1 hour a week giving your keywords, blog posts, and backlinks some optimisation love. Fast forward a few months, and you could well be looking at hundreds of clicks per week. Yup, you read that right—hundreds! All from that one simple hour a week. Once you know where to focus your efforts, SEO is a super laid-back marketing tool that doesn't demand too much time but still delivers the goods.
One final thought on this before we move onto point number 3, regularly working on your SEO will massively improve your relationship with your website. Once you feel more capable and in charge, you’ll start creating better pages and content. This means you're more likely to shout about your website, share it, and guide people there regularly - which will continue to boost your SEO score! It’s win win.
#3: SEO puts your website right in front of people who are actively searching for what you’re selling
When we focus on SEO as our main source of marketing, selling your offers becomes effortless. Because people on search engines are already looking for a solution, there's no need for any of those cringe-worthy sales tactics. Forget about 'warming up' your customers, educating them on their problems or battling their objections — SEO is all about effortlessly connecting your offers with the right customers who are already ready to buy.
Now, it’s important to continue our above point on conversion rates, because this is where SEO truly shines. Believe it or not, the conversion rate of people who stumble upon you through organic search is up to a whopping 10 times higher than those on social media. Yup, you heard us right—10 times higher! Because people you connect with through search engines are already looking to buy, each click is 10x more likely to convert to a sale.
If constantly selling on social media gives you the ick, SEO is the perfect place to focus your 2024 marketing efforts for sleaze-free selling.
#4 SEO allows you to market your business more broadly
If you’ve ever listened to a social media guru, you’ll know that they largely recommend sticking to one or two calls to action at a time so as not to overwhelm your audience. This means you have to ‘pick’ something to direct people to (this could be a product, a free download, a workshop etc) and stick to that one CTA for days or weeks at a time. Obviously, if you have a lot of different things to sell and promote, this isn’t an ideal strategy.
Thankfully, SEO allows you to shake off these restrictions and promote a wider range of your offers at any one time. Because each page, blog post and resource from your website will be promoted as unique links on Google, you can funnel traffic to all of them at once without it being confusing or overwhelming for your customer.
Let's touch on the importance of page goals and dedicated keywords in SEO. Each of your pages should have its own unique goal and set of keywords, meaning you can be visible on hundreds of different search queries. Picture this: your business showing up organically for various different searches and still providing excellent value to your user! SEO makes that happen, giving your website the power to be seen by a wide array of potential customers, each searching for something unique.
#5 Focusing on improving your SEO will help you create higher engaging content across all platforms
Creating new content for various different platforms every week, coming up with brand new ideas, learning new ways to say the same thing… it’s a lot. Thankfully, by making the decision to focus on SEO as your primary marketing tool in 2024, you will actually create better content across all your online platforms.
One well-crafted blog post can easily be transformed into many pieces of high converting content in a fraction of the time! Say you devote a few hours per month to creating a single high value blog post on your website that is well-researched, keyword-rich, and tailor-made for your target audience. Now, that's already going to win you big SEO points, but there’s another benefit as well.
You can take that amazing blog post and section it off across various platforms. By breaking your blog post down into high-value social media posts like reels, carousels, intros for Linkedin, captivating YouTube videos, and key snippets, you’ve turned one blog post into a months worth of content! Without having to come up with a single new idea! By getting intentional about your high level long form content, you create a ripple effect that benefits your smaller content pieces and saves you heaps of time on content creation.
Once you start focusing on SEO, you create a content domino effect, boosting engagement and visibility not just on your website but also across social media and other marketing channels too. And the cherry on top? You're not even doing any additional work to achieve it!
The fact is, very few of us got into business ownership to become a content creator, and yet that is so much of what the job becomes. By getting intentional about where you focus your marketing efforts for maximum return, you can save yourself precious time, make more impact in your community and build a more successful and profitable business.
Ready to grow your business using SEO?
Take a look at Soar, the bitesize SEO course created especially for busy female founders. In as little as 30 minutes per week, Soar guides you through the search engine skills required to start boosting your visibility, gathering enquiries and selling your offers consistently through your website.
