This blog post will help small and medium size business owners to understand the importance of SEO for small business. After reading this blog, you will also learn the importance of SEO optimising your website, particularly why you need to learn SEO yourself even though in long run you may want to outsource the activity to an agency.
How SEO Works for Small Business?
Every year thousands of new business are registered across the globe. So you may be able to guess, the open competition in the market and why it is important to be able to aggressively perform marketing activities to come in front of your potential customers. Hence it is important to have an online presence in the form of a website representing your business.
It is also important to drive the traffic from the search engines like Google and Social media to your website. This can be done using variety of methods like performing Google Ads, Social media ads and Search Engine Optimising your website for success.
In this blog, we will focus on why it is important to perform SEO on your website and most importantly why you should learn to perform basic SEO yourself even though you may have technical SEO experts to perform hard to perform activities regularly.
After initial business setup, you may find yourself getting busy with various business activities. But it is equally important to learn and understand how your customers are interacting with your business through your website and SEO for small business can help you achieve just that!
Let’s now look at the main reasons why you need to learn to do the SEO optimization of your website yourself.
Table of Contents
Why SEO is Important for Small Business
SEO can help small and medium business alike and help rank the website to reach more potential customers. Below are some of the ways that explain why SEO is important for small business and how learning SEO can help the growth of the business.
1. Helps in creating websites that rank high:
It is important that your website ranks high in google search when people search for a service or product similar to your offerings.
And let’s face it, that most people searching for services, won’t even go past the first page to look for services. So, it’s important to create websites that are optimized with content and images that can rank high in the search results.
By learning to perform basic SEO activities, you can tweak your website content including new blogs or articles from time to time without hiring an SEO expert for trivial things. It also means that your content does not remain unoptimized for a long time if you don’t find time to hire an expert. Also, you can tweak your old blogs from time to time based on the search trends, add fresh content to it and share with your users.
2. To Increase the Search Visibility of the website:
In order to increase the search visibility, its important that both on-page and off-page SEO is done well following the terms and conditions of major search engines such as Google. This is also called as White hat SEO.
While you can do on-page SEO by writing the meta title, meta description, and optimising the page with relevant long-tail keywords, off-page SEO is the cue sent by your website audience through various activities performed in the website.
When done right, your audience sends such signals to google by using the social share button to share your quality content on social media, visiting your website or blog using social link, by brand mention and others. The combination of on-page and off-page SEO activities can help your website rank high in the search pages.
Also, learn how content plays an important role in SEO and digital marketing as search engine optimising your website needs a lot of great content that is primarily created for your audience to benefit and optimised for web to show to the right audience.
3. To Increase Organic traffic to the website:
As the term suggest, organic traffic are the visitors to your website that come from search in the search engines like Google. While organic traffic to the website means more authority and is cost-effective in the long run, you may also choose to run ad campaigns from time to time with specific goals. Since running ads all the time is not a feasible solution, its important to know about SEO and perform specific SEO tasks on the pages including publishing high quality content, infographics, images and videos, that can naturally rank high and appear in the first page of the search. In conjunction with the right keywords in the description and call to action you can convert the website searchers to your website audience and increase the CTR, click-through-rate of the website.
4. To increase the Conversions Rate on your Website:
If content is king, conversion is the parameter to measure success. And both of these go hand in hand. Writing and sharing great quality keyword optimised long content is a way to signal google about the information present on your website. When done right, high quality content along with on-page and Off-page SEO strategies can help Google show your content to the right searchers by matching it with the user intent. The search user intent is the search query that they use to look for information in the website, so its important to show up high in the results in front of the target audience for relevant searches.
Writing better content and sharing them on the web in different forms helps in establishing authority and trust which helps google to signal and show the pages to the searchers. Good conversion ratios is one of the primary goals of SEO and when your website is able to show up high in the search results, the click through ratio, CTR to your website automatically increases thus increasing the chances of conversion in terms of sales of products / services.
5. To Increase ROI and Revenue:
If your website has relevant high-quality content, then it’s a good opportunity to increase ROI by attracting more potential customers to the business. Buy just having good quality content on the website does not mean you will get lots of visitors. It is important to research good quality long tail keywords that are low in competition to use them throughout and SEO optimize the pages. This will help the pages in ranking up when users perform search operation relevant to your search keywords.
It is true that researching topics with high search volume, and keywords with low competition and writing content can take up a long time. The reason behind investing your time and efforts is to have high return on investment on the contents on your website in terms of more potential customers.
But it’s worth noting that Google continuous to change its algorithm that decides whether to display your content at all or not. Also, of those that are crawled, some may appear in the top pages and others may not.
In such cases, how do you get ROI on your contents?
By investing in the right SEO strategies to make more pages show up in the search results is the way to go. By learning to research who your competitors are, how they are interacting with customers and what the customers are looking for, you can present your business in front of the right potential customer and help them with their problem. This can help increase your website traffic and in turn increase your return on investment.
6. To Learn to Read and Interpret Analytics Report:
Google Analytics is one of the most comprehensive tracking tools that helps in getting insightful data to your website. You can learn how your website user and app users use, react and engage to your website content.
You can get insights to visitor traffic, reports of marketing campaigns, search statistics, traffic sources and more that can be reported on daily, weekly or monthly basis. The amount of data and information that google analytics can provide is incredible specially for the reason that it is available for use for free. Learning to access and analyse google Analytics report can help you gain meaningful information about the performance of the website landing page / interface, user behaviour, time spent on the website, pages navigated and bounce rate. The information in turn can help in optimizing the pages for better user experiences and conversions.
Knowing your business like the back of your hand is one thing, but it’s also important to know the industry leaders and your competitors well. This helps in understanding the keywords that they use to rank and sites where they get the backlinks.
By following the trails, you can understand the types of content that are usually successful and help optimise your webpages for success. You can then reach out to those websites or similar sites that are interested in similar content and request for backlinks to increase the website traffic and establish authority.
7. To Identify Website Visitors and User Behaviour:
Before beginning any marketing activity, it is important to identify your buyer persona or describe your target customers for your business. This is important, because as you progress, you spend time, energy and money building website and undertaking several online and offline marketing activities to draw more customers to your business and you want to spend your resources attracting only those who are fit to use your products / services.
In the long-run as a business owner, you would also like to track if your content is reaching the right audience and whether those coming to the website are the right potential customers, who will buy your products/ services. So, you need to learn to interpret analytics tools to identify who your website visitors are, their locations (also important if you are a local business and targeting only local customers) and their behaviour on the website.
What metrics you should know to track your business success?
There are several important metrics or areas that one needs to understand to gain a thorough knowledge of SEO for small business to implement the right strategies. It is important to understand the areas that affect the visibility of the business in the search results and fine tuning them to show up to the right target audience.
How to Learn SEO?
Start with gaining insight and learning about the below mentioned areas that have a significant impact in the visibility of the website in the search results by the target audience.
These areas are simple yet very important in the success of the SEO strategy of your small business and can help in significantly improving the web search visibility and traffic to your website.
1. Organic Website Traffic:
Organic website traffic is made of those website users who find your website link in Google search result after performing a search operation and decide to click on the link by reading the compelling text or the description (also called meta description).
By tracking the organic website traffic you will understand the efficiency of your on-page search engine optimization. The pages that are very well optimized appears right on the top of the search results on the first page. You must be also aware, that in most cases the searchers don’t go past the first or second pages of the search results. So if your results are on the 3rd, 4th or 5th page, you are not getting any traffic.
2. Click-Through Rate:
Your click-through rate can give a fair idea if your page description is compelling enough. Optimizing the meta description is an important part of the on-page SEO and one must pay attention to include keywords within it and including a call to action to entice the users to click through to the link to the website. While you will also be able to see the number of impressions made, but clicking through the link to the website can only give conversions. Hence, the click-through rates can indicate where search users are perceiving the information on your page to be useful or not.
3. Keyword Rankings:
It’s important to know how the keywords you want to rank for are performing in the search results and where you rank when compared to your competitors. Ideally, you would like to rank for as many high-volume keywords as possible on the first page and would like to bring more and more pages to rank up high. This can benefit you by reaching more users when they search for a product/offering similar to yours. Using several tools available in the market, it is possible to track the movement of those keywords up and down compared to the competitor keywords. This can help you bring changes to your SEO strategies to bring in better results.
4. Domain Authority:
Your domain authority or DA is the authority or credibility of your website as perceived by Google. This is in comparison to other websites in the same domain or industry and depends on factors such as:
- Age or maturity of your website and
- Links earnt from other websites (backlinks)
DA can be easily monitored using tools like MOZ and SEMrush and can give a good indication of how well is your off-page SEO performing and whether your website is establishing itself as an authoritative website where people can get valuable information.
5. Bounce Rate (Pages Per Visit and Time Spent on Website):
Bounce rate metrics shows the percentage of your website visitors leaving the page without visiting another page. This information can be easily seen in Google analytics and indicates if the website visitors to your website is finding the information relevant to their expectations. A bounce rate less than 40% is excellent, whereas a bounce rate of 70% and above would need you to optimize the webpage content and meta. Also, interlinking other important pages for the visitors to take action like sign up or registration or contact form will help to ensure they navigate to other pages and take action before leaving the website, thus reducing the bounce rate considerably.
6. New Backlinks:
Tracking the new backlinks will give you a fair idea if your website content is reaching out to the audience and whether they are liked and shared by your website visitors. Providing social share links on the website is important and can help your website visitors to share the link if they like it. Such activities help google understand the social cues and help to rank the pages up higher in the search results. Furthermore when people find your website content interesting and relevant they would like to link back to your website for similar content on their website, which helps you establish more credibility and help increase your domain authority (DA). So, you would always like to keep track of all the backlinks to your website encouraging high quality-backlinks while removing low-quality or spam backlinks.
7. Page Load Speed:
Your webpage loading speed is another important factor that you must learn to track as people tend to quickly leave slow-loading pages looking for information elsewhere. Every piece of content that is uploaded into your website including content, images, videos, themes, plugins and scripts makes the website slow over some time. So, it is recommended you keep a track of your web page loading speed and take actions from time to time to ensure that both desktop and mobile loading speed is within 3 seconds.
8. Conversions:
Measuring the conversion of your website visitor to converting to customers is an important part of the analytics and you must learn to track the conversions right from the google analytics console. Identifying the percentage of customer conversions from visitors to customers is important to understand the overall success of your SEO strategy thus pointing areas of improvement.
9. Page Indexing:
It is important to know exactly how many pages are contained within your website and whether the pages you would like to show to your visitors are indexed. It means the pages that are indexed by Google are considered to be containing quality and relevant information that can bring value to website users. If for example, you have 15 pages on the website, but Google is indexing and showing only 10 pages in the search results, then you know that information on your other pages are not visible to the search users for taking any actions. This knowledge can help you perform specific tasks or seek help with indexing the pages.
10. Source of Traffic:
Direct Traffic / Direct website Visit:
This traffic is usually made of users who come straight to your website by typing the URL into the browser. Direct traffic is only a small fragment among the sources of traffic.
Organic Traffic (From Google Search Results):
This is the traffic that you try to attract by putting in your SEO efforts. The organic traffic to your website comprises of users who are unaware of your business and looks for products/services on the website search, when your website links appear in front of them right on the top, by competing with other service providers. The organic traffic to the website generally makes up the largest segment of the website traffic.
Referral Traffic:
The traffic to your website through the referrals is usually the second large segment of the traffic source. This traffic source is directed to your website by sharing your website link on several other websites. The referral traffic is usually comprised of visitors who discover your website link in various external websites like social media, guest posts, directories and others.
Pay Per Click Visitors:
PPC or Pay-Per-Click website visitors are acquired by running Google Ads from time to time. The PPC visitors to a website are usually very small in number and contributes to nearly 10% of the website visitors.
11. Type of Visitors:
It is also important to understand the visitor type or behavior on your website. Broadly, the website visitors can be classified as:
- New Visitor
- Returning Visitor
By analyzing the audience type in your Google Analytics dashboard, you will be able to identify the percentage of your website audience as new visitors or returning. While Google search results and referrals from others will bring in most new visitors to your website, you can attribute the returning visitors to the newsletters that keeping them coming back looking for new content on the site.
In a nutshell, it is important to keep a track of the user types to identify if your SEO strategies are working as planned or whether they need tweaks to bring in more visitors to the website.
As a part of your SEO strategy, you will be advised to write high-quality content to engage the audience and share on social networks to increase reach and customer base. This can help in content distribution, increasing the shelf life of the content, bringing more traffic to your website, increase brand recognition and indirectly helps in increasing the effectiveness of the website SEO.
Now, it’s important to understand that the number of likes or impressions on these social shares is one thing, but it is even more important to track whether your content is read and further shared by users with their circle. Since you would share the content on your website as a link on other social accounts, you would like more and more people to follow the link to your website, read the content and further share it. So, it is important to track the performances of your activities on social channels to identify how the users engage with your content.
So what are you waiting for? Get started today and create actionable goals that you can follow. Learn more about your business presence online and how users interact with your business digitally, so you can take better-controlled decisions.
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