Make it to the office by 9 am. Answer all your client and customer emails from yesterday. Delegate the day’s tasks to your employees. Get to work on your projects.
These are just a few of the jobs a small business owner has to do in a single day.
And with so many jobs already on the go, it might feel like it’s impossible to even think about learning how to handle your business’s website search engine optimization.
However, SEO doesn’t have to be complicated or overwhelming.
Below, we’re looking at the basics of SEO for small business owners.
Keyword Research
When it comes to search engine optimization, knowing what your potential customers are looking for online is the very first step.
By understanding what potential customers and clients are searching for on search engines like Google or Bing, you’ll be able to know what keywords to use on your website.
You can use tools like Moz’s Keyword Explorer or Google’s Keyword Planner to help make keyword research as easy as possible.
Using these tools, you’ll start by inputting one or more keywords relevant to your business and its products or services.
Then, the tool will scan the internet to find out how many people are searching for these keywords, as well as providing you with a range of similar, relevant keywords that you may not have thought your potential customers were searching for.
Keyword research can be a bit complicated. But basically, you want to look for keywords that are searched for often and those that have lower levels of competition, which means they are easier to rank for.
This initial step is often the most complicated and time-consuming aspect of SEO.
But once you’ve narrowed down a list of relevant keywords with high search volumes and lower competition levels, you’ll be ready to move forward with the next steps of optimization.
Site Optimization
Now that you know what keywords to use, you’ll need to get these keywords onto your website.
Unlike humans, search engines don’t have eyes, and therefore, they see and understand websites much differently than we do.
Rather than seeing the visual elements, search engines read websites by deciphering their HTML code.
Therefore, by properly implementing your keywords into the right areas of your HTML code, you can make your site more visible to search engines.
Now, I know this may seem complicated, especially if you know absolutely nothing about coding websites.
But the good news is that most website builders, or CMS tools, make it easy to input keywords into the right areas of your site’s code.
The most important places you’ll want to use your keywords are in:
- The text information on your website
- Blog posts
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- URLs
Create logos and graphics for your website with a free logo app like Logo Creator.
Backlinks
Finally, backlinks are the last component of your search engine optimization.
Backlinks are links on other websites that point back to your site’s web pages or blog posts.
Essentially, these links work like votes of confidence from other sites, telling search engines that they can trust your website and the information conveyed on it.
And search engines like seeing websites that have a lot of backlinks.
So in that sense, the more backlinks you have pointing to your website and its pages, the more likely search engines will be to rank your content higher in the search engine result pages or SERPs.
SEO Basics For Small Business
There’s no doubting the fact that much more goes into a full-blown SEO strategy than what we’ve covered here today.
However, when you find the right keywords, place them in the right spots on your site, and then back it all up by obtaining as many backlinks as possible, you’ll quickly start seeing more traffic landing on your site from the search engines.
And who could say no to more free, organic traffic?
Article by: Grace Frazier
