The Small Business Guide to SEO

SEO

Oct 17

In this blog post, I’m going to break down everything you need to know about SEO as a small business owner. We’ll be covering…

Why Is SEO Important for Small Businesses?
What Is SEO & Why Should You Care?
The Small Business SEO Checklist
What Is Technical SEO?
What is On Page SEO?
What Is Off Page SEO?
How Can Small Businesses Use SEO?
Affordable SEO Help for Small Businesses

Why Is SEO Important for Small Businesses?

Let’s use an analogy:

If you had a brick-and-mortar shop or a physical office location, you would have to do certain things to make it a hospitable location for your potential customers. This could be interior design, layout, visual merchandising, paying property tax and utilities, cleaning the windows, and vacuuming dust bunnies.

SEO is the digital version of that. It’s good housekeeping for the internet, making sure your website is a user-friendly space. Focusing on SEO is cleaning your website windows and getting rid of your digital dust bunnies.

It’s a necessity, not a nice-to-have.

What Is SEO & Why Should You Care?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of optimising our websites to increase our visibility in search engines. It’s part of “search engine marketing”, which also includes paid advertising, like Google PPC.

The fantastic thing about SEO is that customers come to you for free. It sounds too good to be true, but it’s not.

Potential customers go to a search engine and type in an expressed want or need, and then the search engine tries to find the most accurate pieces of content to present to them.

When we “do SEO”, we are simply helping Google understand what we do using language our customers use and then reaping the benefits.

It’s a customer-centric form of marketing because we start with the wants and needs of our customers and go from there. The content we create for SEO can also make all our other digital marketing a LOT easier.

So SEO is free (yay!) but requires some legwork (boo). It has a reputation for being full of jargon, so most business owners have had it on their to-do list for months or years, but it’s the digital equivalent of eating brussels sprouts because you know they’re good for you even if they make you gag.

Download The SEO Basics Checklist now & get access to the marketing freesource library

What Is Technical SEO?

There is a technical process to publish your website in results to potential customers.

The search engine crawls your website, analyses the information, and then puts it into its index.

They need to access your website's data easily to do this effectively. The process is vast and fast, so any technical issues that are confusing or slow will be missed or skipped over.

Google is basically like a massive library, so when they "index" something, they are categorising it and putting it in their giant library of website pages.

When we do technical SEO, we ensure that our websites can are accessible by search engine bots, which will often fix issues our website users may be experiencing when they visit our sites, too!

Ultimately, when search engines give us guidelines for how our websites should perform, they give us best practices so that the experience of users who visit our site is as excellent as it can be.

If our website loads slowly? Search engine bots won't necessarily see our content, but website users may get bored and navigate away.

If our website doesn't have an up-to-date security certificate? Search engine bots will be suspicious, but website visitors might not feel safe using our sites either.

If we have a lot of pages with crawl errors (like 404 errors), then search engine bots will reach dead ends, and so will our website visitors.

Search engines aren't trying to catch us out. They're encouraging us to create a good experience for our website visitors, which will ultimately grow our businesses and our visibility online.

What is On Page SEO?

On page SEO is to do with the content & HTML of a website’s page and content: things like our titles, headings, meta descriptions, image alt texts, and the written content of a page.

We often build out our content with keywords in mind and want to ensure each of these areas has our page’s primary keyword in it.

Copywriters are people who create content for your online presence. Some copywriters have a really good understanding of keyword application and can help with that side of optimising your content (I’ll share more about copywriting in future episodes). Katie Ramsingh and Martha Moger are two such copywriters!

As you’ve seen in this post, SEO goes way beyond keywords! And On Page SEO has much more going on than just our page’s HTML-containing keywords.

On page SEO is also to do with the structure of a website, including the hierarchy of content and how your website’s pages link to each other.

If we take duplicate content as an example: Every single page of our website should contain unique content, but there are multiple versions of our web pages, especially for eCommerce sites, so on page SEO is making sure that these things are resolved structurally in our website’s code as well as in the content.

Additionally, on a more advanced level, we have code elements like Schema that help search engines understand the context of a web page, which is a crossover between our technical and on page content.

What Is Off Page SEO?

Off Page SEO refers to any action you take “off your website” that will impact or improve your SEO.

It helps us optimise ranking factors that aren’t directly related to your website’s domain.

Google’s search uses PageRank, which looks at the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to a particular web page when deciding where to rank that page.

So when we think about off page SEO, one of the main outcomes we are trying to achieve is having other websites link to us, which is basically like vouching for us or telling Google they trust us.

For small business owners, the work you do in digital PR will be very helpful in building up links and brand mentions for your business in a natural way. Check out Lucy Werner and PR Dispatch for great small biz support in all things digital PR.

There are different links, which is too much to go into for today’s episode, but the main thing you need to remember is that you mustn’t pay for backlinks, or you will end up with a Google penalty.

Off Page SEO is more easily thought of as digital brand management - how are people talking about you in customer reviews? What are others saying about your brand on the wider web? What is your brand’s social media presence like?

Social media does not have any link-building benefit, but making sure our profiles appear in branded searches can be great for building trust with users. There are many knock-on benefits to sharing your content with a social audience that can positively impact your SEO.

Off Page SEO is really about building your brand intentionally online and can be integrated with other parts of your overall marketing strategy.

How Can Small Businesses Use SEO?

As a small business, it’s worth putting the time and effort into optimising your SEO.

First and foremost, great SEO makes it easier for people to find your business. At times, it can feel like our niches are completely oversaturated. Getting your SEO in order should be a priority if you want that competitive edge.

Additionally, a fast and well-structured website will create a more user-friendly experience for any potential customers. And if your website is a pleasure to use, then it brings the customer that much closer to possibly buying from you!

Affordable SEO Help for Small Businesses

If you’re looking for an affordable way to improve your SEO, I’ve got some resources for you!

SEMRush Blog

While SEMRush itself might be a little out of reach for some people, the SEMRush blog is a valuable resource full of case studies, tips and tricks to help you improve your SEO knowledge and execution.

Moz

Moz’s free SEO tools are super helpful for SEO newbies and help make SEO feel more accessible. You can check your ranking against local competitors, as well as use MozBar to look at the metrics of any website you visit.

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is a website crawler that has both free and paid plans. Simply put, it helps you improve your SEO by auditing your website for common SEO issues and telling you what needs fixing.

Get a website audit

I offer mini and mega website audits where I assess things like technical performance, content structure and quality, and brand presence to identify what you can do to improve your website and SEO.

Book a website audit with me today

I want an audit

Don’t forget that SEO is an ongoing process – it takes time and effort to see results.

Be patient, stay the course, and keep implementing those best practices into your marketing strategy. And if you need help, don’t be afraid to ask me a question in the comments or on Instagram!

If you’re ready to get going, then tell me what you’re going to do this week to boost your small business SEO!