SEO for Business Growth: Tips to Expand Your Business

Facilitating business expansion is always challenging, whether launching a new product/service, entering a new market, or partnering with another company. It typically involves many unknowns and tasks that might feel hard to solve. Yet, it’s possible to support this process through wise SEO for business. 

What is the role of SEO in business growth? And how can you use it to start scaling now? In this guide, we’ll answer these questions and share hands-on tips!

What Is SEO?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a synergy of on-page, off-page, and technical improvements to your site. The process requires a well-balanced approach from the content and reputation, which aim to increase the quantity and quality of organic traffic you receive.

Most online interactions between consumers and brands begin in search engines like Google when consumers look up a company or product/service they’re interested in. SEO deals with bringing sites higher in search engine result pages (SERPs) that consumers see after their queries. So, basically, it’s about getting your site in front of your target audience on the web.

Role of SEO for Business Growth

Regarding business expansion to new audiences and markets, SEO can become a cost-effective and powerful tool for stimulating faster growth. Here are the main perks it can offer you:

Increasing visibility to reach new audiences

As the biggest search engine, Google perfectly reflects the real power of SEO by generating over 85 billion monthly visits in March 2024. The company’s yearly search volumes are estimated to be trillions, making it a potent medium for reaching your audience. Indonesia surprisingly ranks 4th among Google Users by Country in 2024, with 4-5 billion monthly visits, making it valuable for business expansion discussions.

Driving targeted website traffic 

SEO isn’t about getting you seen in just any search results. Instead, it targets specific queries that align with your organization best and that your potential customers are using. Hence, it helps you drive targeted traffic from users interested in your company, products, and services.

Enhancing local and global market reach

Through geo-specific keywords and local optimization, SEO helps companies enhance their visibility in local searches and attract targeted audiences. Building a presence in specific geo markets can be easy, even if your business is elsewhere. A global SEO strategy that uses international keyword targeting, multilingual optimization, and link building can help expand into global markets.

Building brand authority and trust

Earning the trust of new audiences is one of the primary but complex tasks in business growth. By helping you consistently appear at the top of SERPs, deliver excellent user experiences, receive reviews, and gain backlinks from trusted sites, SEO can help you build authority in the markets you’re expanding to and facilitate faster growth.

Providing data for smarter growth decisions

Lastly, since SEO is a dynamic and ongoing process, it can supply the data you need to inform your expansion. Namely, you can gain insights into unique behavior patterns and local market trends by tracking SEO metrics. Data like this can help you fit into the new market faster and align with the needs of local audiences.

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Tips to Benefit From SEO While Expanding Business

To use search engine optimization to your benefit and let it aid your expansion, it’s crucial to develop an SEO strategy tailored to growth and considers the specs of entering the Indonesian market, particularly.

Below, we’ve gathered some core tips that should help you make the most out of your efforts:

1. Focus on the Right Keywords

Keywords are the queries people enter in the search bar to find the information they need on the web. Targeting and integrating these queries into your site and content helps you appear in search results for those queries, bringing target website traffic. That is, keyword research is actually at the heart of SEO.

If you’re aiming for expansion, there are a few tactics you can leverage depending on the type of expansion you have in mind:

• New market expansion: If you’re growing your business by entering new markets, you may want to focus on geo-specific queries relevant to your target market. If you’re a SaaS company expanding to Indonesia, consider local keywords like “SaaS Indonesia” or “SaaS company Indonesia.”
• New product/service expansion: If you’re expanding by introducing new products or services, concentrate your keyword research on identifying queries pertaining to your offerings. Emphasize their unique features and benefits, such as “[product/service] benefits,” “cheap [product/service],” etc.
• Growth through strategic partnerships: If you’re growing through partnerships, you should focus on branded keywords, such as “[Your Service] + [Partner Service].”

Depending on your expansion plan, look for relevant keywords using tools like Google Keyword Planner. Detect high-potential queries by search volume (mid to high) and competition (mid to low). And don’t forget to target your queries based on the location where you want to grow so that you reach the right audience.

2. Leverage Backlinks to Build Authority in New Markets

When facilitating business expansion, whether launching a new product/service or entering a new market, you always need to earn trust in your product or brand. Doing this may be hard, but SEO can help with link building.

Backlinks from trusted sources act as votes of trust, helping you look more credible in the eyes of your prospects and search engines alike. They can help you drive leads and market your brand to your target markets. So it would be best if you absolutely used them to your benefit.

To make the most out of link-building, consider assessing your current domain trust first. Domain authority checkers, for example, one by SE Ranking, can help you analyze the website’s relevancy, non-spamminess, and traffic dynamic to assess its overall authority. After assessing it, you can detect reputable sources, such as industry blogs and local media, in your new target markets to develop a link-building strategy.

After determining the list of relevant sites, start pitching your articles, product reviews, press releases, and other types of content (depending on the type of source you’re targeting). Also, don’t hesitate to create listings in global and local business directories, such as Google Business, Yelp, Business-Indonesia, EIBN Company Directory, and others, to gain even more backlinks. 

This is especially important when scaling in competitive environments like Indonesia, where the IPU (Indonesia’s Business Competition Index) has grown by 0.04 from 4.87 in 2022 to 4.91 in 2023 and continues to grow.

3. Local SEO Role in Business Growth

Local optimization is making your business visible in local search results, including those on Maps. It’s an essential part of digital marketing when it comes to entering new markets, as you want your prospects to know that you’re operating in their area.

Here are a few ways to do this:

• Optimize the shopping experience for your products: Implement schema markup that emphasizes important product details like price, availability, and reviews. Local business structured data helps Google enrich your company’s appearance in search and tell prospects more details they might be interested in. Enhance shoppers’ experiences in new regions by listing your store on Google Business Profile and Google Merchant Center with details like locations, hours, and contact information.
• Rank in local and regional searches: Additionally, you can boost your local visibility by optimizing for specific local and regional searches. To do this, you want to be listed in relevant directories and keep your business profiles accurate and up-to-date. You also want to target area-specific keywords and develop targeted local content and landing pages.

4. Build Content Around New Customer Needs

When it comes to using SEO for business growth, content plays a pivotal role as it enables you to get visible in search results, drive audiences’ attention, and convert leads into customers, hence establishing growth.

To use content to drive organic traffic, you need to understand the needs and preferences of your prospects in a particular niche or area. You can do this by analyzing your own customer base and your direct competitors. 

After understanding your potential customers’ needs, you need to define how your product/service can solve their problems and generate high-quality, informative, and well-optimized content that emphasizes customer benefits. Be sure to diversify your content formats for greater engagement, optimize it with relevant keywords, and integrate clear calls to action for conversions.

Suppose you’re expanding through partnerships or joint ventures. In that case, you can also generate shared content, such as case studies showing prospects how your products or services complement each other and bring double benefits to consumers.

5. Amplify Your Strategy by Tracking Competitors

When you’re seeking business growth through new product/service launches or entering new markets, it may initially feel unclear how to establish and market yourself in a new niche. And that’s where monitoring competitors can really help.

To use this to your benefit, identify the key competitors that operate in your target markets or offer the same goods you plan to launch and closely watch their digital marketing and SEO strategies. Thorough competitor research can enable you to identify gaps and opportunities and learn from other companies’ experiences to develop your effective strategy. 

You can also analyze competitors’ content performance and understand why certain content improves or loses positions and traffic. Moreover, competitor research can help you see how other brands expand into new markets and promote new products to understand their keys to success or reasons for failure.

Summary

As you can see, SEO has a huge impact on business growth. SEO can help you break into new markets, launch new products or services, support your partnerships, and attain tangible results when handled right.

After reading this article, you have an easy yet helpful step-by-step guide on how to scale your business through search engines. Start using these tips now to dominate SERPs and drive more organic traffic in the future.

This article is written in partnership with SE Ranking