If you’re a small business owner and your website appears in Google search results when someone types in your brand name, you might think you no longer need to do SEO, but you’d be wrong for three reasons:
First, small businesses want to be found on search engines by new customers. If these customers knew your business name, they wouldn’t be new.
Second, the vast majority of people searching for products and services offered by small businesses tend to search by the name of the product or service, not the name of the business. Therefore, if your business isn’t ranking online for these terms, you’re missing out on a ton of potential customers.
Third, sites that rank on the first page of Google get the majority of these potential customers. In fact, up to 92% of traffic goes to Google’s first page results. So, unless your business ranks first in search engines for all the terms people primarily use to find a business like yours in your area, you need to do more SEO.
What is SEO?
The first two letters of SEO stand for “Search Engine.” Google is the most well-known and widely used search engine in the world. In fact, excluding China, Google accounts for 91% of searches worldwide . Of the remaining 9%, 5% of searches are conducted on Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. Search engines are like modern libraries, but rather than keeping copies of thousands of books, they know where information from billions of websites is located and are capable of finding millions of results. Whenever you type a query into a search engine like Google, it scans every page in its index to serve you the most relevant results.
The “O” in SEO stands for “Optimization.” The optimization part of SEO is about ensuring the highest possible ranking for your website and its content in search results from people who are interested in your site and its products and services. This is achieved by sending search engines like Google the right ranking signals so they judge your site to be relevant and rank it as high as possible.
How does Google determine organic results ranking?
Google uses an algorithm to determine the ranking order of free results. Google is constantly changing, updating, and refreshing this algorithm to improve the quality of the results it serves. SEO is all about keeping up with these changes and providing Google with everything it needs to rank your site well.
How does SEO work?
To achieve good rankings in Google through SEO, you need to work on different aspects of your online presence. The first thing to do is to ensure your website is configured correctly so that Google can find it and index its content as quickly as possible. This is called technical SEO.
What is technical SEO?
This involves ensuring that your site’s technical configuration meets search engine expectations. This approach primarily focuses on improving your site’s functionality in two areas: crawlability and indexability.
Crawlability: How easily a search engine can access your website.
Indexability: How easily search engines find and index relevant information on your site to answer user queries
Another important aspect of technical SEO is mobile accessibility. This involves providing visitors and search engine crawlers browsing your site from a mobile device with an experience that is at least as good as if they were browsing from a desktop computer. It’s also important to note that your site should also offer a good browsing experience on all major web browsers, especially Mozilla, Google Chrome, and Safari. If you don’t consider these factors, your site may remain inaccessible to a large number of visitors using smartphones, which would have a direct impact on your site’s search ranking and traffic. Other key areas of technical SEO include:
Domain name optimization
Optimizing the site code
Optimizing title tags and headings
Optimizing site loading speed
Image optimization
SEO keywords
Once you’ve made sure Google can find and index your site’s content, you need to make it appear in searches that are most likely to attract customers and visitors to your site. To do this, you need to find the words your potential customers use when searching for your products and services or related topics. In case you haven’t guessed, these words and phrases are called keywords.
How to find the best keywords in SEO?
Finding the best keywords for your SEO strategy isn’t just about choosing the most searched-for words. You need to do some research to identify the most appropriate keywords for your business. In addition to the number of people searching for a term, you also need to consider keyword competition and relevance. Ranking on page one of Google for a keyword that generates fewer searches is much more valuable than ranking on page five for a keyword that generates five times more search volume. Therefore, make sure you target keywords for which your site has a good chance of ranking—that is, keywords for which competition isn’t too high
How to target keywords with SEO content?
Once you’ve found the right keywords to target, you need to create pages on your site and incorporate those keywords into their content to give your page the best possible chance of ranking for those terms. SEO content refers to any content—words, videos, or images—that site visitors see and that search engines like Google index and display in their results.
Content optimization refers to developing content that helps improve your pages’ search engine rankings. It involves creating and organizing your site’s content. To create effective content that will improve your site’s SEO, you need to consider three main factors: keyword planning strategy, site layout, and copywriting.
Since search engines like Google read your site, the words you use on your pages play a decisive role in their ranking. Of course, to hope to reach the top of the results pages, your site must also be well-designed and offer a user-friendly and intuitive interface. Therefore, optimizing the technical aspects of your site is not an option.
On-page SEO vs. Off-page SEO
When seeking to develop an effective SEO strategy, many SEO experts have chosen to divide the different aspects of SEO into two groups:
On-page SEO
On-page SEO involves optimizing web page content to better meet the needs of search engines and users. Some of the most well-known methods for achieving this include optimizing metadata, headers, internal links, and URL structure.
That being said, on-page SEO isn’t just about inserting keywords into your page’s HTML code. It also includes working on the following elements:
User experience
The bounce rate and the time visitors spend on the site
Search intent
The loading speed of your pages
The click rate
Off-page SEO
In general, off-page SEO refers to SEO activities that don’t directly involve your website. So, while editing the content of your pages is on-page SEO, setting up a Google My Business profile is off-page SEO. This action isn’t directly related to your website, but it also allows you to optimize your online presence to achieve better Google rankings. Other off-page SEO activities include link building, social media presence, and local SEO. A large part of off-page SEO is creating channels that drive traffic to your site.
On-page and off-page SEO are closely linked and complement each other. To get the most out of your SEO strategy, you need to focus on link building, your branding, and your company’s online profile. Your website can be as optimized as possible, but if people have a poor impression of it or don’t want to visit it, you’re unlikely to succeed.
