In the first five parts of our Small Business SEO series I explained what SEO is , why it’s important to your business, how Google ranks content, how to build an SEO strategy, how to measure your progress and why local SEO is important to your business.Today I’m going to review the major talking points and talk about how to get started.
Simply put, search engine optimization is the ongoing process of improving a website’s visibility in organic search results. The goal of SEO is to help your website rank higher in Search Engine Results Pages, called SERPS. This will increase the number of visits your get from potential clients and increase your chances of converting those leads into clients.
In order to improve our rankings we first have to understand how Google ranks websites. Google knows that the user is looking for information, and it uses algorithms to predict the likelihood that a website will have the information the user is looking for. Google looks at 2 major factors, relevancy and authority to help make this determination about each website, and successful SEO uses proven tactics designed to help your website’s chances of ranking well.
Before we begin with deploying tactics, we need to develop an SEO strategy. At the core of our SEO strategy are three elements: website structure, content and backlinks. A poorly built website immediately puts you behind the 8 ball and hurts your chances of success. This has nothing to do with how the website looks, and has everything to do with how it’s coded and structured on the back end.
On top of that we must look at elements such as website navigation, links, url structure, page speed, sitemap and robots.txt files, and duplicate content. Content includes things like a web page, a blog post, a video, a client testimonial as well as other formats. Regardless, the search engine is going to look at all of the content of your website and decide whether or not it matches the users search query. It’s important then, that we use keyword research, a keyword optimization strategy and on-page optimization to develop optimal content designed for both visitors and search engines.
Finally, we must focus some efforts on increasing quality backlinks to our websites, which communicate a high level of popularity and authority to search engines.
In this 6-part series, I outlines the steps needed to develop and implement a search engine optimization strategy, but before you get started, I think you should ask yourself a very important question: Is my website ready for more visitors?
Search engine optimization is a marathon, not a sprint, and with this effort to drive more organic traffic to your website, you should ask yourself if your current website does an excellent job of representing the level of service and products that you offer. Visitors will immediately assign value to your service or product based on the impression they get from your website and you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Remember that any visitor is always one click away from leaving your website and clicking on the next search result.
Make sure that your website is coded property, and that you are using a platform that is capable of scaling and serving your SEO needs.
Your website is your hub, and is the place you spend the majority of your marketing efforts trying to get potential clients to visit – your first step is to make sure it is a good representation of your brand, it is easy to use, has the information your visitors are looking for and has intentional and effective calls to action.
Alright, so this concludes our Small Business Website SEO series.I really hope I was able to give you a good overview of search engine optimization, what it is, how it works and what you can do to help your business. If I did, please let me know by giving this video thumbs up, tweet it, share it, and if you haven’t yet, join the community by hitting the subscribe and notification buttons.If you have any questions about this video, please put them in the comments section below and I’ll do my best to help you.
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