In Hong Kong, when you go out to meet many small business owners and people who aren’t in the field of online marketing or search engine optimization, they may not know much about SEO. The very limited feedback you will probably get from the HK local businesses may be between ranking a website high up on Google and Yahoo, and getting free visitors/customers to your website. This is not wrong at all. But there is way more in SEO, local SEO (for a specific market such as Hong Kong), mobile SEO, etc.
How would you explain SEO to a beginner (in very simple words)?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the most effective and least expensive methods among all the digital marketing methods. This is especially true for small businesses to do digital marketing in Hong Kong. With SEO, you will have a specialist, or a SEO company optimized your business website. You will expect Google to decide whether your site can add value to the end users of the search engines.
If your site’s overall quality does pass the evaluation, when people resides in HK do some specific keyword searches that are related to your website or product, some of the pages on your site may start showing up at the top of Google’s search results organically. At least, that’s the best scenario your business site in the first round assuming all the basic SEO work has been correctly implemented.
The implementation would involve the technical and structural updates to your company website. Additionally, the actual written content that goes onto your website matters to Google as signals for Google to better understand the category and sub-category of your site. For example, if you are a Hong Kong local company selling mainly “green widget”, you would expect when a person on Google’s HK site searches “green widget” or “HK green widget” your site should appear on page one of Google’s search results page.
What is the importance of SEO for your Hong Kong local small business?
First of all, Search engines are the workhorses on the internet. In HK, over 80% and perhaps up to 90% people use Google when doing keyword searches. SEO when implemented on your company website will help boosting the ranking of your website on Google. In return, your site should in theory appear in many more keyword searches (that are related to your product). This will definitely improve your business in terms of product sales or at least lead generation.
You may use other means of digital marketing to reach new Hong Kong audience or customers including the use of social media or email marketing. They are also effective methods that will eventually get you the new leads or customers who you need. But building up your new customer stream through the search engines is important. SEO adds a total different dimension of lead generation to social media or email marketing.
