Want your business website to rank where it matters? Get yourself to the top of the SERP with this handy guide, specifically designed with startup SEO in mind
Back in 1990, the very first search engine was born. Its creator, Alan Emtage, christened it Archie – ‘archive’, without the ‘V’(ingenious). Together, Emtage and Archie made digital history, pioneering what would later become one of the most influential inventions of the digital revolution.
Eight years later, Google was founded.
Now holding 90.46% of the global search engine market share, Google is very much the leader of the search engine pack. And, if you want your business website to rank where it matters (i.e. the number one spot on the search engine results page), then you need to get the knack of some handy SEO hacks.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and refers to the creation of highly relevant, searchable content for your online resources. It means understanding what your customers are putting into Google, and adapting the digital side of your business to fit with their query (known as the user intent).
This process combines many different strategic elements, including research, audits, dedicated tools, and online resources. From making sure your imagery is up to scratch to creating content that really stands out against the competition, SEO is a multi-tool strategy that’s essential to digital marketing mastery.
For such a complex, yet vital element of any digital marketing campaign, we’ve created this comprehensive guide to every aspect of SEO. Read on for an all-you-can-eat buffet of SEO goodness, with insights from other small business owners and easy tips that’ll make your SEO a standout success.
This guide covers:
- What is SEO?
- As a small business, should you do SEO yourself, or hire an agency?
- What are the best SEO agencies for small businesses?
- DIY SEO guide
- Top SEO tips from the experts
- What can an SEO agency do that I can’t?
- What are the costs involved with SEO?
- How SEO helped my small business
- Next steps: Compare SEO agencies
What is SEO?
- Well, firstly, it’s a very low-cost way of getting more traffic to your website. Aside from taking up lots of time, SEO is a resource-light strategy that simply takes care and attention to succeed, rather than a big budget.Although, if like most business owners you’re running a time-poor operation, then you might want to think about bringing in an agency to take on the task. See our quote finder above to compare agencies now.
- SEO will also get your website into new areas of the web, allowing you to reach new markets and expand your client base. By matching your content to the things people are searching for, you’ll be able to reach customers who were once considered to be way out of your market range.With SEO, even the smallest business based in a remote pocket of rural England has the potential to go global. Online marketing means that customers from all over the world can become aware of your product/service, but SEO is essential for harnessing the full potential of the world wide web.
- You’ll boost the user ‘friendliness’ of your website. The average online user is pretty impatient – in fact, studies have shown that when the load time of a site is 7+ seconds, 32.3% visitors will bounce* away from the page. However, a load time of 2 seconds is shown to reduce this bounce rate to just 9.6%.SEO has a massive part to play in the load time of your site. It’ll help optimise your imagery and get your site’s loading time looking healthy, which will reduce the rate at which customers click off your site, frustrated by how slowly your website is loading.
*click off
- New consumer insight can be gleaned from an efficient SEO campaign. This is super useful as the data SEO delivers can be used to make big business decisions, such as the creation of a new product line or a change in your overall marketing strategy.SEO gets you the inside scoop on what your customers really want, all by analysing their search terms, and the ways in which they interact with your website. This data is gold dust, and will allow you to make key business decisions with a much higher degree of certainty.
- Google monopolises the world of online search habits. The people trust Google – that’s why they use it. So, if your website is appearing at the top of a search, people will trust your site – and, by extension, your business too.Making your website as trustworthy as possible is essential to attracting new customers and keeping them coming back for more.Your page will be ranked on the trustworthiness of the content itself. To create the trustworthy content, keep the following four things in mind:Originality (find something new and unexplored to talk about)Relevance (make sure your audience will be interested in your content)Creativity (keep it unique)Regularity (your website needs to look fresh, update your content regularly) – Read more
