How to Increase your website’s SEO for people who don’t know SEO
As a small business owner, you have probably heard of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, but if you have little idea what the means or how it can help your business, keep reading! This article is for teaching basic SEO for small business owners.
First things first, what is SEO?
In short, it’s a combination of strategies that will increase your website’s visibility in search engines through organic (non-paid) searches. It helps to increase the user experience. It brings your people most likely to become paying customers to your website.
How does SEO work?
Search engines send “web crawlers” to your website and gathers information on your website. It evaluates content and the “behind the scenes” coding. It uses this information to assess the quality and value, and assigns a ranking of where it shows up on a search. Every time you make changes to your website and create new ranking “signals”, those crawlers re-evaluate your page. This can be good or bad, depending on what said changes are.
It is important to note that search engines algorithms change, and SEO is an ongoing, fluid process.
Why does SEO matter?
Search engines like Google and Yahoo are the biggest and best sources of website traffic. There are over 644 million websites on the internet, according to Netcraft. SEO helps your website reach the customers you are trying to get by allowing search engines to navigate through all the websites to find the best matches when a user types something in their search bar. Employing effective SEO strategies brings the right visitors to your page.
What are the SEO strategies? There are three basic strategies:
- Keywords
- On page SEO
- Off page SEO.
Keywords, or keyword phrases, are the search terms that people type into the search bar that are relevant to your business. As a small business, it’s important to be specific and use longer phrases, or long tail keywords. Shorter key words normally yield large chain businesses as a result. Additionally, it will boost engagement because your website will meet a user who is looking for something specific. For example, if you own a real-estate business, some keywords could be “homes for sale Appleton” or “real estate agent in Appleton.”
The first step is to brainstorm a list of keywords or keyword phrases that are relevant to your business and industry. You can also use a keyword research tool, here is a list of 10 free ones. The trick here is to be sure you use relevant words or phrases that your customer would use.
Quick Tip: Search engines automatically correct for typos, so don’t worry about that while building your keyword list.
On-page SEO involves all actions used to impact your search engine results, everything from content to technical aspects including
- Meta tags
- URL structure
- Headings
- Content
- Website size and speed
- Images optimization
Quick Tip: This is when keywords come in handy!
Off-page SEO involves all actions used to affect getting back links, or links from other sites to get back to your website. This includes:
- Social media
- Guest blogs
- Buying back links
- Exchanging back links with another business
Quick Tip: If you’re a World Headquarters member, collaborate with other members on exchanging back links!
How can you, as a non-technical savvy business owner, increase your SEO?
1. Use relevant keywords in your titles and sub-headings on your blog posts.
2. Avoid using auto-generated website titles. Instead of example.com/21p3erw43 use www.example.com/homes-for-sale-Appleton.
3. Use images, graphs, videos, and charts. Before imbedding on your website, re-name the file type. For example, homes-for-sale-Appleton.jpg.
4. Use internal links, linking to other pages on your website when it makes sense.
5. Use outbound links, linking to other relevant sources.
6. Have a social share button on your website; on each page and each blog post
7. Have a sitemap on your website. According to Google, if you don’t have one it won’t penalize you, but it’s a benefit.
8. Edit the snippet preview of each page and utilize key words. Example is below:
9. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
10. Provide quality content! Remember, user experience is quickly becoming the priority for search engines!
If you would like to learn more about SEO, let us know in the comments!