Why SEO Matters for Your Small Business
Why focus on SEO?
As an online business owner, you’ve likely heard about search engine optimization (SEO), but may wonder why it’s important, or impactful, for your business.
Every day, your time is spent juggling many competing priorities. SEO is yet “another thing” to add to an already-busy schedule. But it’s really something you should be conscious of, as it has a long-term impact on: a) how people find your business online, and b) what value you can add for your customers.
What is SEO?
So, what exactly is SEO? SEO (search engine optimization) simply refers to improving your website visibility in relevant Internet searches.
Let’s say you sell custom-made jewelry online. To improve how your website ranks, you need to actively work on ways to increase your visibility in search results. One way of improving your visibility in Google (and other search engine) rankings, is by talking about what aspect of your custom-made jewelry makes you unique. What’s a key differentiator about your product vs. a competitive product? How can you position your brand in a way that stands out from similar brands? What can you talk about on your website, or blog, that highlights how your jewelry is different? Can you share unique stories about your design process? How do you make these stories come to life on your blog or website, and share them on social media or your email newsletters?
No matter what you’re selling (a product or a service), SEO plays a crucial part in helping people find your business at all. Whether it’s local SEO, which focuses on location-based searches, or more technical SEO, we recommend you look at everything you’re doing online (and offline) to see how you can further improve overall visibility for your business.
How does SEO actually work?
In its most basic form, search engines use bots to “crawl” websites - going from page to page, according to algorithms that then rank pages. What affects rankings are specific factors like relevancy (what results show up in Google for example, based on a certain search query that best answers a specific question), your domain authority, and more.
Search algorithms will prioritize websites that have a level of authority, and that answer search queries in a relevant way. Over time, you can build on your domain authority by doing a lot of proactive research into what questions your customers will potentially ask, answering those questions in your website and blog content, and getting relevant PR (which also helps signal that your business is an authority in a specific industry).
How do I know what to optimize for SEO?
It can be overwhelming to think about all the different facets of SEO. But one thing is clear: it’s not enough to “just” have a website, and hoping people will land on it.
In order to rank online, the basic things you need to focus on are:
Proactively creating, and updating, website content*
Making optimizations to your website structure (also monitoring your overall page speed for desktop and mobile!) and landing pages,
Doing regular keyword research
Maximizing local SEO efforts to help customers (and prospects) find what they’re looking for near home
One key content tip*: Always create content with your audience in mind, and answer your customer’s most pressing questions. Doing keyword research, and thinking about what your customers want, is key in this process.
Some “bad” SEO advice online might tell you to add as many “keywords” as you can into your content, this is actually a sure-fire way to get penalized by Google. As you write for your blog or website, do so in a natural way, and do it with the intent of providing useful and relevant information for someone, whether they’re familiar with your brand or not. When you’re building out your content for your blog, you’ll want to be mindful of linking back to relevant internal product pages or services, too. This process is called internal linking, and it’s an important step that signals to search engines that you’re continuously adding more information. Another important step is to link to reputable, external sources that can speak to the topic with authority. For example, if you’re writing a post about food safety, linking back to the FDA would be highly relevant to a reader.
There are also (technical) SEO steps to consider, like creating mobile-friendly, SEO-optimized landing pages when you’re directing someone to visit your website from an ad, or social media. We’ll be sharing more updates on technical SEO in future posts.
Now you may be thinking, “Okay, but isn’t there a much faster way to rank online?!” The bottom line with SEO is: while there is no “quick fix” solution, you can expect long-term results. It’s an investment that over time will see long-standing results.
Tools for SEO
While SEO may feel daunting, there are tools that can help you make it easier, and streamline your efforts.
Keyword search
Before you begin writing any new content, you’ll want to review existing content. What can you update to make a landing page or blog post even more compelling? Are you creating internal links back to other relevant landing pages on your website? As you start thinking about new topics to write about, we recommend researching potential keywords that your website can rank for. There are different keyword tools out there to help you, and we recommend this one for some preliminary research.
Blog + SEO tool
If your website operates on WordPress, there’s a great SEO plugin called Yoast. Use Yoast when you’re composing blog posts, as the plugin adds suggestions for things like your SEO page title, meta description, image alt text, and more. All of these components of SEO affect how you are “discoverable” online.
Online research
Are you curious what people are talking about related to a certain topic? There’s a tool called Answer the Public that lets you brainstorm potential content ideas. This can help you with blog post ideas, and other content development for your website or marketing efforts!
Here are some other awesome tips for boosting your small business with SEO!
While you can try to tackle some aspects of SEO yourself, we understand that it can still feel overwhelming. If you’re looking for help with SEO efforts, or want to think more about your content strategy for your blog or website, book some time with us during our consulting sessions.
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