Search Engine Optimization for Small Businesses
The phrase Search Engine Optimization, also referred to as SEO has become more widely talked about when discussing online business. SEO statistics states Google alone reported almost 2.3 trillion searches in 2019 with 70% of marketers preferring SEO over paid-per-click results. Business owners who are looking at expanding their online presence are investing more in SEO and seeing the benefits. If you’re in the process of creating or updating your website, or wanting to increase your revenue, SEO can help. Let’s take a closer look at small businesses and what a website and SEO can offer them.
Online Presence of Small Businesses
As with websites, small businesses come in all shapes and sizes. Globally there are millions of small businesses, including approximately 200 million very small businesses according to GoDaddy. Small businesses are typically defined by their number of employees, for example very small businesses have five or fewer workers. GoDaddy reports 41% of very small businesses are owned by women and 39% have been in business for three years or less. Unfortunately, 59% of these businesses report they do not have a website and are missing out.
A website is a great avenue to connect and engage with your customer base, as well as bring in revenue. When asked why they didn’t have a website, 21% of business owners cited a lack of technical expertise. The good news is there are more readily available online SEO resources for small businesses to easily expand their online presence. 55% of very small businesses intend to create a website within the next two years. SEO can help take your website and business to the next level.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Creating a website is one of the first steps towards having an online presence. The next step in connecting your website with potential customers. This is where SEO comes into play since most traffic comes from search engines like Google. SEO bridges your website and online customers by helping them find your website when they search online. SEO expands your online network by reaching more visitors who are looking for what you have to offer. SEO utilizes up-to-date methods to connect more quality organic visitors with your website and bring them to you. The main objective is to improve your natural ranking on organic search engine result pages (SERP). By targeting SEO and utilizing it, you get the upper hand to make you more competitive with your competitors.
How Does SEO Work?
One of the biggest benefits of using SEO is that no fee or payment is required. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo have programs specifically designed to crawl web pages and online content at no charge. These crawler programs look for specific items and content that are relevant to consumers who are searching the web. The programs then store this information in an index, catalog it and use it to rank each website they crawl. The more items and relevant content you have, the higher your natural ranking is on a browsers SERP. A higher natural rank brings more organic traffic to your website along with potential new customers and increased revenue. Now that we’ve reviewed how SEO works, let’s find out what your website SEO rank is.
How to Find Out Your Websites SEO Rank
There are two main ways to find out where your website ranks on SERPs.
1. For small business websites, it can be as easy as using incognito to search for your website using the desired keywords. Using incognito is a must with this method as it removes any personal preferences collected that may skew the results.
2. For larger businesses or websites with a large number of web pages, using an SEO analyzing program is best. For example, SEO Analyzer by Neil Patel and Woorank both have options to try out their analyzer for free. These companies also have a paid option that offers more bells and whistles features.
Now that you have an idea of your website ranks, let’s look at some ways to improve your ranking.
6 Essential Items to Make Your Website More SEO Friendly
The internet and technology, including SEO, are constantly changing. Here is a quick checklist of six essential items to keep in mind when building and updating your website.
- Are your overall website and web pages search engine friendly?
- Is your content applicable and relevant to consumers?
- Would others want to link to your website or content?
- Have you incorporated relevant keywords, terms, and phrases on your web pages and in your content?
- How is your user experience?
- Have you included any meta tags, such as a title?
Are your overall website and web pages search engine friendly?
This is the most important thing to keep in mind when creating and updating a website. Can search engine crawlers find your web pages, access them and read them? Are there any page errors or internal links, such as navigation, that need repair? If search engines cannot find your website, access it and read it, the rest of this list is irrelevant.
Remember, crawlers cannot index, catalog and rank websites they are not able to find due to internal link errors.
Is your content applicable and relevant to consumers?
Creating high-quality content that is current, relevant and share-worthy is one of the top two factors search engines look for. On-page content can include items such as images, posts, articles and videos. Staying in touch and engaged with your customer base can help create content that applies and appeals to them. Keep content current by updating it regularly, which Impact states can lead up to a 106% increase in organic traffic.
Remember this includes new content as well as freshening up and republishing old content with a quick update.
Would others want to link to your website or content?
Would they share it or cite it on their websites or social media? This is the second top factor search engines look for when evaluating a website’s ranking. The most important type of links are ones that originate from outside your website, also referred to as backlinks. The more backlinks you have pointing to your site, the higher your ranking can be.
Remember that backlinks need to be quality natural links from websites that the search engine deems as trusted.
Have you incorporated relevant keywords, terms, and phrases on your web pages and in your content?
Do your research first and find out what the relevant keywords, terms, and phrases are before adding random ones. This is also another opportunity to ask questions and get to know your target customer base better. Impact states the most effective SEO method reported by 57% of marketers is on-page content. Moz Keyword Explorer and Google Trends are great resources for researching keywords and keyword trends.
Remember to ask questions. A good place to start is with your standard who, where, what, why, when and how.
How is your user experience?
Another question to ask yourself, “Is your website user-friendly?” Creating a website with web pages that are user-friendly can increase overall visits to your website. This can also lead to more time spent on your website and more pages viewed per visit. This alone includes three of Google’s top four ranking factors. Mobile-friendly is also a key component to consider, especially with reports of 52% of all global traffic coming from them.
Remember to consider things like loading speed for different devices from desktops and laptops to phones and tablets.
Have you included any meta tags, such as a title?
Search engines may include on-page factors such as titles and header tags in your websites code when determining its’ rank. It is typically recommended that a title be added to each page. These can be very helpful for customers, but keep in mind that they do not weigh heavily with search engines.
Remember most search engines are looking primarily for relevant content and backlinks.
Where to Go from Here
Want to learn more about SEO or web design? Have a question or comment? Need some assistance? Visit Visualwebz.com. We have been offering SEO services and small business web design since 2008.
