What is SEO and why does your small business need it?
2,548,000 small and medium-sized businesses currently exist in Australia, representing 98% of the current businesses operating in the country. However, these businesses are left behind in the race for digitalisation and still prefer more traditional ways of advertising their products and services. Unfortunately, as the world is moving faster towards online shopping experiences, with 76% of local searches on mobile resulting in the visit of a shop’s physical location, it is important for small businesses to make themselves noticeable online. That is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) comes in. Today we will explore the question: What is SEO and why does your small business need it?
What is SEO?
“SEO stands for search engine optimisation, which is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results. Because organic search is the most prominent way for people to discover and access online content, a good SEO strategy is essential for improving the quality and quantity of traffic to your website.”
Search Engine Optimisation is not a miracle solution, comprised of one strategy that you can apply over and over on your website to make it rank at the top of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It is a complex system, which has not been completely cracked, because Google (obviously) would like to leave a bit of mystery floating around its algorithmic decisions. The Google search engine famously uses more than 200 ranking factors to decide which webpages are worthy of being displayed in the first few search results. Ranking highly is a competitive business and not every website will succeed all the time. Nonetheless, there are a number of known best practices out there, which can help you improve your business’s ranking. Let’s uncover how search engine optimisation works first.
2. How do search engines work?
Once your business website is created, your goal should be to reach your customers and potential customers where they currently are in their buyer’s journey. There are few search engines used by the world today, the most popular ones being Google and Bing. As I know Google much more in depth than Bing, I will focus on Google in this post. Search engines are basically giant libraries which use an algorithm (spider/crawler) to help them sort through the millions of sites found online. Whichever webpage answers the question or query best (and is the easiest to uncover) will be recommended to a user looking for a specific result to their query. Google and Bing look through millions of pages, collecting information (crawling) and cataloguing them (indexing). The practice of Search Engine Optimisation is therefore aiming at making the search and understanding of webpages easier for crawlers.
3. Where does SEO come into play?
When a user types their query or keyword into Google, a number of results appear. These can be shopping results, paid results, location results or organic results. SEO comes into play in the organic results section, as you can see on the image below.
You have probably already used Google at least once in your life (if not, how are you accessing this post?) and clicked on the first link that came up to find an answer to a question. It is really rare for users to scroll past the first Google results page. Therefore, it is extremely important to put in as much SEO effort as possible, as ranking highly on the results page will provide you with a lot of visibility and web traffic. Otherwise, you risk missing out on potential customers whose attention you could have caught by optimising your website for the Google Search Engine. Now comes the big question: what is in it for you? Let’s go through the benefits of SEO for your small business.
4. What are the benefits of SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation can appear quite tedious and time-consuming, which is obviously not optimal when you are caught up in the daily rush of things. Nonetheless, the gains from SEO can by far outweigh the drawbacks (if done right). Here are the most important benefits of SEO for your small business:
Website traffic: The higher you rank, the more discoverable you will be for users. And the probability of them clicking on your link over other lower-ranked links increases immensely.
Trust and Credibility: Users will trust websites more, if they don’t appear to be paying for their engagement.
Customer engagement: Only 63% of Google searchers go to the second search results page and click on a link. This means that users will be much more engaged and actually look through your webpage if it appears on the first search engine results page. SEO will help you rank higher and push users to engage with your content more.
Lead generation: Creating trust and credibility through targeted SEO practices can generate easy business. Optimising your webpages will make sure that you do not have to go look for potential customers, as they will be more likely to reach out to you.
Budget: It doesn’t cost you anything, apart from a time investment (or if you hire someone to do it for you). Putting in place proper systems to ensure that the work is less tedious. is the way to go to reduce your time cost.
As you can see, preoccupying yourself with search engine optimisation is an occupation filled with benefits for your small business. Of course, SEO is a time-consuming activity and will not provide you with short-term results. However, the key principles and core components of SEO have not changed over the years, which means that if you start putting in place best practices from the get-go, your website will have better chances to be discovered in the long run. Now let’s talk about the three pillars of SEO and how you can work on implementing them on your small business website today.
5. What are the three types of SEO?
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is the most commonly known type of search engine optimisation. It comprises practices such as content and source code optimisation in order to increase your website’s visibility on the search engine results page. A good on-page SEO strategy helps search engines offer users high-quality content for their particular query. Webpages with good on-page SEO contain following characteristics:
Unique content
With trustworthy insights,
Designed in a user-friendly manner,
Thoroughly researched and sourced
And is aligned with users’ search queries
What does that mean for your small business?
To start optimising your small business website for on-page SEO today, review your website for:
Title tags and sub-headings: are you using hierarchy in your content? Are your main headings tagged as H1 and H2? Are you using numbered lists?
Images and videos: have you resized your images and videos to ensure consistency before uploading them? Have you used the image compressing tool TinyPng to ensure your images aren’t taking ages to load? Have you added image descriptions to each image you are using in your blog posts?
URLs: is your URL structure consistent with the title of your blog post? For example: laetitiascorner.com/what-is-seo for this article called “What is SEO and why does your small business need it?”
Internal links: did you encourage users to go check out other blog posts and link these in your article? Did you refer users to certain services or products you offer and link these on your page?
Keywords: are you using relevant keywords in your headings and content body? Have you researched which keywords your readers could be looking for on the topic you are writing about?
Off-page SEO
Off-page search engine optimisation is not necessarily always dependent on your efforts. This type of SEO refers to actions outside of your website which are helping build your website’s credibility and authority through the validation of others.
What does that mean for your small business?
Off-page SEO is not always easy to build up. Here are a few steps you can take today, to improve your ranking:
Link out to other websites: are you trying to link out to other industry websites to attract their attention?
Guest blogging: have you reached out to high authority websites to write a guest blog about a topic you’re an expert in?
Press distribution: have you reached out to your local newspaper to put out a press release about your business and new website?
Technical SEO
This type of SEO is used to improve a website's readability, making it easier for search engines to crawl. This practices provides a good user experience and ensures that users will not find your site exhaustingly hard to navigate.
What does that mean for your small business?
Technical SEO can be challenging to put in place if you do not consider yourself particularly tech-savvy. Luckily, there are a few steps you can take to at least improve your technical SEO:
Page load time: have you run your webpages through PageSpeed Insights to detect any loading issues? Have you compressed your images and ensured that you are using only necessary components on your website?
Mobile-friendly design: have you checked how your website looks on mobile? Is it an easy-to-use design or can you improve it by rethinking your layout?
Keyword cannibalisation: have you checked if your blog posts are competing to rank for the same keywords? Could you merge two pieces of content together so that they allow search engines to choose only one page for a set of keywords? If not, have you researched which other keywords your content could rank for?
Crawl or indexing error: have you added your website to Google Search Console in order for the search engine to even detect your website? Have you created a sitemap for your website to make it easier for crawlers to find their way around?
Bonus: Local SEO
Local SEO is key for small businesses. This is a practice which will allow your customers to find you easier on Google Maps or through your “Google My Business” profile in their local area. Local SEO is based on the completeness of your profile and the public perception of the services or products you offer.
What does that mean for your small business?
To improve your local SEO, it is very important for you to sit down and optimise your Google My Business profile, which entails adding following elements:
Business details: business name, business location, business hours, contact methods, business images
Products or services: descriptions, images, prices, ways to buy or book
Responses and reviews: ask for reviews, respond to customer messages in a timely manner, create a Q&A and regular business updates
Conclusion
As you saw from this post, Search Engine Optimisation is a complex mix of practices which needs to be tackled day after day to see long-term results. It requires a considerable time investment to be done well. Nonetheless, it is important to get started and as time goes by, you will find quicker ways to structure your SEO processes. The benefits far outweigh the drawbacks, trust me on that. Search Engine Journal has created a very helpful Small Business SEO Checklist which can help you focus on the beginner steps needed to get into the optimisation habit.
If you ever do require a bit of help with your new website build or your SEO strategy, I am more than happy to help. Send me a message at hello@digitallylc.com or head to the Digitally LC contact form here.
Don’t forget to check out my post on how to write a great blog post in 6 easy steps!
I hope this post was helpful and I can’t wait to see you start your digital marketing journey!
Have a great rest of your day! x
