Survey: 55% of Small Businesses Invest in SEO

Small businesses continue to turn to SEO as a marketing tactic, but new research suggests that they struggle when it comes to showing an ROI.

Clutch recently surveyed 351 small businesses to learn how they invest in SEO, as well as how they benefit from this tactic. The results found that 55 percent of small businesses now invest in SEO, which is a 3 percent increase from last year.

“Every business is a viable candidate for SEO, unless they absolutely don’t require business from the public and they are a referral-based, discrete, or relationship-based business,” said Kevin Tash, CEO of Tack Media.

About half of those surveyed (56 percent) invest in social media marketing, 46 percent are optimizing for local search, and 37 percent are conducting on-site optimization.

To determine their SEO success, 21 percent of respondents track the number and quality of links back to their site. To accomplish SEO initiatives, 38 percent rely on in-house resources, 38 percent on freelance, and 35 percent on SEO software.

The main metrics marketers have been using to measure their SEO success are number of quality backlinks (21 percent), web traffic (19 percent) and leads/conversions (19 percent).

SEO Challenges and Marketers

As marketers look to find more success through SEO, research indicates that on-page content is helping B2B marketers find their footing.

According to the “Search Engine Optimization Tactics Survey” from Ascend2, the majority of respondents (57 percent) said that on-page content was the most effective SEO tactic, followed by keyword research (50 percent) and link building (46 percent).

However, link building (52 percent) was the most difficult SEO tactic for marketers to execute.