Home-grown SEO for small business owners
Making waves online can be a tall order for any business, but for the small business owner, a combination of shortage of funds and shortage of time can make the online world seem pretty inaccessible.
This article will give you the advice you need to get noticed on the web without forking out for a professional SEO consultant (note, find someone reputable and you’ll definitely see a decent return.)
Don’t be put off by the shroud of secrecy that many in the SEO world like to propagate. There is no secret. SEO is like anything else, accessible to all once you learn how. Master these basic principles, and you’ll see your business quickly become visible and searchable online. The only constraints are how far you want to take it.
Learn the ropes
Before you let yourself loose on the internet, you need to know what you’re dealing with, and have a basic understanding of how SEO works. Finding trusted resources can be difficult, and no-one wants to jeopardise their efforts with black-hat (underhand) techniques, especially if done so innocently.
If you’re completely new to the internet, this article from UK Business Forums is a great primer but if you want to skip straight to the SEO, check out SEOMoz’s beginners’ guide.
Understand how your customers search
This is actually so close to common-sense, that it’s amazing how many business owners don’t figure it out. Even if you’ve never had a website, you’ve certainly used the web for research, shopping, or just browsing. How do you find the content that interests you? How did you find this article? Take some time to stop and really think about the search terms your customers use to find products and services they need. These search terms – or keywords – will become central to your SEO effort. Sign up for a google account so that you can make use of the excellent suite of SEO tools on offer, including the useful keyword tool. Don’t rely on it exclusively, but be aware that it’s an excellent prompt.
A website is only half the deal
You’ll be forgiven for thinking that your website is your web presence. It’s not. It’s the central pillar of your web presence, the city to which all other roads lead, but on its own it’s not enough. Building your web presence can be time consuming, but it’s actually really easy. Things like registering and getting verified with search sites and respectable directories can make a huge difference to your visibility on the net. But if you remember only one thing when building your web presence, remember this: keep your business details absolutely consistent across all sites and platforms. That means your company name, telephone number, address, etc etc should always appear in the same format. If your business is AcmeCart LLP, then choose whether you’re going to list as AcmeCart LLP or just AcmeCart. Decide on a single format and stick to it. Always.
Your website is your salesman
Your website plays a central role in your SEO effort, so you’ll need to make yourself aware of basic HTML (the language used to create web pages – don’t worry, it’s easy.) Ensuring your site makes full use of its title, description, heading and anchor tags can make or break an SEO campaign. If your keywords are used appropriately, the job of getting customers to your site just got a lot easier.
A word of caution – don’t forget that people – not robots- buy from you. It’s easy to lose sight of the simple fact that creating content for robots (search engines use ‘bots to index your site) can lead to an unreadable mess when the humans arrive. Always create content for human consumption, then modify it for SEO afterwards.
Is the social web taking over SEO?
This question can’t really be answered, because both are changing all the time. What’s important is that the social web (twitter, facebook, google plus) provides an invaluable platform to connect with your prospects on a personal level. Particularly well-suited to customer service conversations, you’ll find that a positive social experience will quickly build trust among your customers, leading to better response to your offers when you roll them out.
A word of caution here – the social web is not a direct sales platform in the traditional sense. Too much hard sell will quickly lead to prospects ‘unfollowing’ you (that’s social speak for ignoring you.) However you frame it, it’s bad. Don’t do it.
Measure your results
If you’re new to the web, you probably don’t know that there’s a whole array of brilliant tools out there to help you track your prospects’ interactions with your website, some of which are even free to use! The most popular, and probably one of the best is Google Analytics. This free tool has a comprehensive reporting interface allowing you to monitor where visitors to your site came from, what search terms they used, how long they stayed, what pages they visited, and much more besides. Of course, this information is useless if you do nothing with it, so if you notice a disturbing trend (e.g. a bounce rate over 50%) you need to rethink the page, or pages in question.
That’s enough to get you started on your SEO journey. Be sure to keep this maxim in mind: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. In other words, driving traffic to your site is only half of the battle. Once your prospect finds you, your mission is to make him convert – or buy from you.
About seoblogger:
Our SEO blogger is an expert in Web Marketing, Usability and Interface Design. He has been a vital part of The Blue Cube Communications since 2003. As the West Midlands fastest growing web marketing agency, we always strive to maximise return on investment for our customers.
