What is SEO and How it Helps Small Businesses

How important is it really to see the name of your business website on search engines? Very important, actually. Landing on Search Engine Results Page or SERP can spell the difference between a profitable website and otherwise. 2.2 million searches are being done daily. To be visible on the results pages, even to rank highly, is something that SEO is for.

A good SEO gets you organically featured on premier search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and even Amazon or YouTube. Businesses are all about location, location, location. Online is a location, and if you have visibility, profitability is not far behind. In a world where updates are essential, even your emerging marketing will base their purchase on the first few search results they see, and that’s where you need to be. 

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is quite like a science of ranking high on a search engine’s unpaid or organic listings. It is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of web traffic by increasing how visible a website is web search engine users.

SEO helps you drive your content to its fullest potential. It guides you on how to optimise your website to get it included in top results for targeted keywords or key phrases. An SEO marketer needs to be updated with the latest algorithm factors that search engines use to keep qualifying or ranking well in SEO. You also need to understand market behavior and growing trends because they do affect trends in search intent and the like. 

Keeping track of all this helps your business grow steadily and significantly. SEO is an ongoing process, not a one-time thing. It’s best to keep learning, keep refining, and keep improving your SEO strategies to stay relevant and useful for the market. 

How SEO Helps Small Businesses

1. SEO Provides a Structure for Improving Your Website’s Construction

Search engines use algorithms and spiders (little programs) to crawl through all websites and their content on the internet. If your website isn’t well-constructed and is inaccessible, unnavigable, and irrelevant, these crawl bots will deem your website of no value to online readers. 

Optimising a website’s SEO helps you avoid this dilemma—both on-page and off-page. On-page SEO involves all front-facing aspects of your website that connects you directly with your audience. It includes your content, your User Interface or design (UI), titles and tags, keywords, and the like. These factors are controlled by the publisher. Off-page SEO involves back-end operations that provide the structure for the website and consists of elements influenced by readers, visitors, and other publishers. 

For example, webmasters should restructure their site well so the search engine’s spiders can efficiently crawl between each page. Webmasters should recode content into the coding language, HTML, that is valued by search engines since it improves User Experience (UX). It will also help if you include inbound links on each webpage connected to other pages on your website. In this manner, search engines can identify what other pages are relevant and can be of an excellent resource to your readers. Secure backlinks also add credibility to your site and show search engines you are helping your readers find relevant and essential information quickly. 

Meta descriptions for each webpage improve user experience. Meta descriptions or meta tags are found beneath your page link on SERP and provides a snippet of your content in about 60 characters or less. SERPs add this whether you’re aware of it or not. Since this also serves like a free advertisement, better control the way your meta tags appear. The more a meta tag is clear, the more clickthroughs your website gets, also measured by SERP algorithms.

2. SEO Helps Small Businesses Build Credibility

Trust is a critical factor for all businesses, both newcomers and established ones. It’s one of those things that you cannot just get with a good PPC ad or lofty product ads. Credibility is established in many ways, and SEO is one of them. With careful planning, you can optimise every element of your website to ensure your website is regarded as high-value and trust-worthy. Well-researched, well-written, and original content can be one of those, for example. 

Another example of how SEO helps you establish building blocks of trust is through quality management of your website. Ensuring that your network is cyber secure from hackers.

When all these SEO strategies come together, it helps your brand and your website gain a trust momentum, that you need to nurture consistently. In cases of situations that can potentially break the trust, SEO also provides guidelines on how to mitigate such situations and preserve your credibility. For instance, if your site experiences any malicious attacks or data breach, respond right away to protect your users’ identities. Send alerts to your network if necessary, and deploy the best in your team to stop the attack and secure the website. Users know that things like this happen even to the best of websites, but your response rate and duration will tell them lots about how much you care and how secured they are on your website.

Building trust and authority as a website accrues over time. Consistency and commitment are crucial in keeping credibility. It includes a lot of effort and patience. Still, once users trust you and become loyal to you, the value you bring to them goes on a deeper, more sustainable level as well. 

3. Local SEO Means Increased Engagement, Traffic & Conversions

When your website is not really serving a global market, it’s best to concentrate more effort on local search traffic. Instead of spreading efforts and resources thinly, why not intensify your SEO on a specific vicinity or even a demographic that your website or brand targets to serve in real life. Local SEO brings more success this way to SMEs or small to medium-sized enterprises.

Your content needs to be relevant then, to your local area. You need to include backlinks and citations in your locality.

SEO strategists should put to good use its brand’s Google My Business listing, Knowledge Graph panel, and social media profiles. 

Take heed of the following tips to do great with Local SEO: 

• Don’t ignore the user and peer reviews.

Guard your reputation by minding user reviews, whether positive or negative. Don’t just respond to positive reviews. If you take time even for valid rants and complaints, users will see that you care to meet their needs and improve the quality of their experience. Be careful of trolls, though, that are not legitimate users and are just out to defame and rile conflict up, for whatever malicious intent. If you think you are being spammed, then apply necessary security protocols immediately. Be aware of reviews as well on third-party sites that your local community trusts. Yelp is a great example of this. If you monitor these reviews, comments, and suggestions, it actually serves as a free promotion, especially since you want your brand to be a mainstay in the community. 

• Prioritise organic search because it is a primary source of website traffic.

Organic search is often pivotal in the sales funnel, which leads to more severe users to complete a conversion or engagement. Quality local SEO and a high-quality website is a great mix that can catapult a page to become very visible and desirable.

• Optimise your uniqueness to attract MORE customers.

You need to have the edge to stand out in the digital world, where approximately 380 websites are birthed by the minute. That’s fierce competition. Businesses that have SEO-optimised websites generate more customers and grow twice as much as those who do not use SEO marketing strategies wisely. 

• Make your website user-friendly.

Aim to create a faster and smoother browsing experience for your users. Go for a well-structured and uncluttered website that compels a visitor that came casually to dwell longer. This lowers your bounce rates, increase your page views, and helps you reach higher customer satisfaction. This makes search engines satisfied as well since they are programmed to serve high-quality information to their users that address their most pressing concerns.

• Make your website mobile-friendly.

Since almost 67% of the world’s population (5.29 billion out of 7.75 billion people) use a mobile device, make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. That means content can adjust to whatever device it is viewed on, without compromising its quality. Websites that are easy to read and navigable get more engagements and conversions.

Conclusion: Bypass Competition with Good SEO

In a very competitive and ever-changing market, having good SEO that can help you grow your website and even sustain that growth is a must. It’s no longer a luxury but a dire necessity for a website if they are serious in attracting more customers to their website from organic search intent. So bypass the competition today and give your website that much-needed edge with good SEO marketing strategies.