It’s one thing to know what SEO is, but it’s another thing to know how it works for small businesses. According to Wikipedia, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a webpage in a web search engine’s result. In other words, it’s a way to help you rank higher in search engine results. Did you know SEO controls around 75% of search volumes and gives you an extra edge over other competitors?
Why Is SEO Better for Small Businesses Than Any Other Marketing Strategy?
- If you’re worried about cost, SEO is probably the best marketing strategy for you. Posters, signboards and television ads all seem like costly marketing strategy that lose attention daily. The world is a global village and most things revolve around the web.
- SEO drives more traffic to your site. According to Imforza, 75% of users don’t go past the first page of search results. Boosting your online presence is a good step to growing your business. The higher you rank, the more clicks you get and the more clicks you get, the more potential customers you have, which means you make more sales and earn more money.
- Organic Clicks, a Charlotte SEO company, points out that SEO can be used in conjunction with social media. It helps you know how users feel about your business or brand, helping you learn what strategies work to grow your business.
How Do I Get the Maximum Benefit from SEO as a Small Business Owner?
Improving your search result ranking is not a one-time affair, it’s a process that steadily improves your ranking. Here are three steps to boost your SEO performance.
Improve Your Content
- Do not copy content from elsewhere, as doing this can reduce your rankings.
- Provide useful information, not robotic-sounding content written for search engines. The main goal is to bring human beings to your site, so make your content engaging and interesting. When they actually get to your site, they should be happy with what they see.
- Write articles that are between 1,000 and 1,500 words as they have been found to perform better in SEO. According to a study carried out by Moz and BuzzSumo in 2015, articles of about 1,000 words were found to receive more shares and links than short articles.
- Use unique images to support your content. Using unique images make your site stand out. Using copied images can link the image to over 100 sites!
- Post different content on the different pages of your website, Google can penalize you for posting similar content on multiple pages. Posting new content can also increase traffic on your site by 111%, according to Backlinko (2016).
- As you create your content, you have to market your products alongside or else people will have a hard time locating your website.
Keyword Research
- It is advisable to attach one keyword to each page, because Google ranks web pages and not websites.
- Research to get keyword ideas. You can get keyword ideas from friends, customers, business partners or from general web visitors; they all look at your business differently.
- Use keywords the right way. Keywords perform their function when they are in the right place and used in the right amount. Avoid padding your webpage with keywords.
- Use keywords that are relevant to your content so it is quicker to rank them. Using the wrong keywords will reduce the number of visitors to your site.
Link Building
Link building is a popular SEO technique which involves getting links on other websites to your own website. Search engines use links to crawl the web pages, extract the content of those pages and add it to their index. Link building is one of the hardest SEO techniques, but if done well, it can put you ahead of others. Link building can help build your brand and give you some sort of authority in your niche by asking other people to increase your brand awareness.
Does SEO Have Faults?
There are two drawbacks to SEO marketing that you should be aware of:
- SEO doesn’t give quick results. It takes time and effort to get to the top, depending on how committed you are. You have to balance doing SEO and running the business you’re trying to advertise.
- It puts your fate in the hands of search engines. Paid search ads cost more but give you more control over how and where your ad appears, unlike SEO.
How Long Does It Take to Grow My Business with SEO?
There is no algorithm to calculate how fast SEO will have an effect on your business; it depends on a lot of factors. High quality content and link building are the two most important factors that improve your SEO ranking. Another important factor is the age of your website; old websites are more trusted and likely to rank higher than new websites. New websites can also achieve high rankings, but it takes more time than old websites.
Your rank is also determined by how often you publish new content, the number of quality posts on your site, originality of your content, content length and the number of external links to your site.
By now, you should have a strong understanding of what SEO is and how it can be instrumental in turning your small business into a large business. SEO takes time and effort, so it’s good to be able to see the fruit of your labor. Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools are useful for monitoring site traffic and measuring your progress.
