Almost as soon as you start researching getting your business on line, you will come across the term Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short. And then a lot of your friends will start trying to confuse you with technobabble about getting your business onto the front page of Google. But the ones you really need to be careful of are those who email you making promises to that effect.
Some will promise to get you onto that elusive front page for a one-time fee but they may be using techniques that Google does not like – such as linking schemes – which can get you banned. Others will not investigate your business properly and target the wrong keywords, driving irrelevant traffic to your website that will never convert. Still more will redesign your site without 301 redirects from the existing pages or focus on the metadata without doing any on-page SEO. This is why it is so important that your Small Business SEO expert comes with a recommendation from someone you know and trust.
What is Small Business SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation is the name given to the activity of making the content of any website readable for the bots that Google, Bing and Yahoo send out to crawl the internet for information. It is a form of website promotion.
Small Business or Local Search Engine Optimisation involves making Google and the rest recognise your website as the place to go for your business or product in your area.
As we said earlier, it’s important to identify which keywords your potential clients are typing into Google and the other search engines and then you need to make sure that those words appear on your site in all the places where the spiders could read them – the meta data, the image alt tags and as headers in the posts and pages. When they have crawled your website and found those search terms, the spiders make a decision about how relevant those pages are to whatever has been typed in by the potential customer and position your website in the correct place on their results pages – also known as SERPs.
How Can Small Business Marketing get me to the front page of Google?
The problem is that you can’t just rely on SEO to get your business to the top of Google any more. These days, you need to build a brand and market it furiously, which will require a complete rethink of your online strategy. Suddenly, you will need to learn about blogging and also social media marketing. You need to start building your profile on Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and YouTube and sharing your blog posts on these, as well as getting happy customers to write reviews online and sing your praises to everyone they come into contact with. This social sharing is becoming a key part of what the search engines look for in addition to what is actually on your website.
It is this combination of Social Media Marketing, Blogging and SEO which will make a bigger difference to your online presence than just rewriting your title tags or adjusting your keyword density. What is important to remember is that, whilst your website may be technically for search engines, it’ also needs to be the best it can be for your users, in terms of content and overall user experience. Small Business SEO means that you are effectively building two websites, both equally important to your future success.
