While most marketing relies on businesses reaching out to their customers, SEO helps customers find businesses directly when they're searching for related information online.
What's not to like about the idea or ranking higher towards more keywords then? Well, there's SEO and "inflated SEO".
If you're a small, solo, side or starting business, your SEO matters more than you think.
SEO is a process that helps search engines (such as Google) analyse the relevance and authority of the information published on your website to determine it's rank towards related search queries.
SEO matters a lot for small businesses because:
Your customers are online, and they decide if, when, what & to whom they want to buy online: 80% of Australian households purchased something online in 2022, driving national year-on-year growth to 12.3%.
75% of Internet users never scroll past the first page of search result
93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
46% of Google searches are for local businesses, and 72% of searchers visit a local store or company's premises within 24 hours of the search.
3 SEO do's
Google's algorithm analyses a page's relevance and authority to determine the Search Engines Results Pages.
You can help the algorithm and help yourself with these three easy SEO tips every small, side or solo business owner can implement himself:
Listen to your audience to rank to the keywords they are searching.
Post content aimed at answering the questions your customers are literally searching for (more about the importance of listening to your audience on the first Got 10' min newsletter on LinkedIn).
For local businesses, make sure your website features a page with your business's name, address, and phone number and create a Google My Business profile.
Going further:
You can help Google analyse the relevance & authority of your content by finetuning your titles, your urls, adding in a metatag & naming your images or graphs, and describing them in ALT Tag
TIP: HubSpot has a beautifully crafted SEO starter pack available to download for free.
DON'T get tempted by the sirens of "inflated" SEO
"Inflated SEO" is part of what is officially known as "black hat SEO" and one of the biggest mistake small business owners can make.
Moz, one of the highest authorities when it comes to, well, domain authority and SEO, defines "black hat SEO" as the "techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines."
Why does it matter to you? In its beginner guide to SEO, along more intentional and technical don'ts, Moz also recommends against creating pages with little or no original content.
Like the sirens, it can attract busy business owners thinking it's a shortcut to ranking higher and sooner towards relevant search queries. Spoiler alert, it doesn't work; quite the opposite. It ends up losing them precious business by turning off customers or worst, even get them de-indexed from search results.
How can you make sure your SEO is working for and not against you as a small business owner?
Smaller businesses have a unique superpower 🦸: they 're best placed to be close to their customers.
So use your superpower and listen to your audience to produce content that use their language, match their interest, and answers their questions & pain points. That's the best way to ensure what you post will resonate with them.
ezy 🧡
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