Boost Your Small Business: Essential SEO Steps for Beginners
Business owners often ask for Search Engine Optimization like it’s something we keep on a shelf and can put in a bag for them to take home. While crucial to success, the reality is more complicated, so let’s break it down:
Why you need SEO:
You want to make more money, so you need more sales. One essential path to more sales is being more visible, organically, on search engines so that potential customers see your website, click on the links to your website, and then hang around on your website long enough to make a “buy” decision.
What SEO is:
Search engines, of which Google is the main player, exist to deliver the best answer to a User’s query. Optimizing for search means that your website is indexed by the search engine and ranked according to how well it answers that User’s query.
There are three elements that help with ranking:
- On-page SEO which means optimizing your website content and structure.
- Off-page SEO which is using backlinks and social engagement to build authority.
- Technical SEO which helps search engines crawl and index your website better.
How to start SEO:
Like all aspects of your business, know your goal first to measure progress toward success. Decide what you want SEO to do for you, whether that’s brand awareness, increased website traffic, or improved sales or lead generation.
What homework to do first:
Before you can optimize for search terms, you need to know what those terms are. While free or low-cost tools can help, this is a time-consuming project for someone already busy running their business. Consider getting help from an SEO expert with access to paid-for tools to find keywords that have good search volumes but moderate competition. That would include long-tail keywords which are hyper-specific, but tend to be less competitive. Research your competition, too, to find out what is working for them and which words they might be neglecting so you can incorporate them naturally into your website’s content.
When to ask for technical help:
If getting into the code of your website is daunting, this is a good time to talk with your tech professional. Share your list of search terms and ask them to update your site's title tags and meta descriptions. These appear in search engine results, so you want them compelling enough to attract clicks. Ask your tech pro to structure your web page content to use your primary keyword in the H1 tag and related keywords in the H2 or H3 tags.
Streamlining your website’s URLs is another way your tech pro can help, as well as adding internal links to guide users and search engines to the other valuable content on your site. Also work with them to create descriptive file names and alt tags for all of your site’s images. Not only does this improve accessibility, but it also provides additional SEO value.
Other ways that your tech professional can help improve your SEO is by submitting a site map, configuring the robots.txt file correctly, and fixing any broken links.
How to increase the value of your content:
Especially in this age of AI-created content, relevant content of high quality is crucial to providing a valuable answer to your User’s query. Concentrate on writing creative and useful blog posts that address your prospective customer’s interest and create new content regularly. Try a variety of formats such as images and videos as well as blog posts for better engagement. And don’t forget to use your search terms in a natural way to let both your Users and the search engines know you are the best answer to their query.
There’s more – much more – to Search Engine Optimization, but these are the fundamental first steps to building a strong foundation for your website. Keep in mind, too, that SEO is a long-term strategy, and results take time. If this seems overwhelming right now, professional assistance can take all this on for you so you can concentrate on what you do best. The Sprocket team has long been building and optimizing websites for clients and we’d love to partner with you, too. Just give us a call to talk it over!
Photo by Pixabay
Kate Gingold
I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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