What is SEO and how does search engine work?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing a website to improve its visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!. The ultimate goal of SEO is to increase organic (unpaid) traffic to a website and help business grow online by earning more leads, sales and revenue.
Before going further with SEO tactics for small businesses, it is important to have a basic understanding how search engines work. Typically search engines operate following below process:
- Crawling: Search engines use crawlers (also known as spiders or bots) to discover publicly available webpages. Crawlers begin from a known web page and then follow links from that page to others.
- Indexing: Once a page is crawled, search engines analyze content of the page (text, image, video, etc.) and store it in a massive database which can later be retrieved.
- Processing queries, ranking and returning results: when a user performs a search, search engines retrieve results from its index using various algorithms. This involves understanding user intent, ranking the results based on its relevance and quality then displaying them in an ordered list the user.
Why is SEO challenging to small businesses?
While SEO brings lots of benefit to businesses (increased brand awareness, reputation and credibility, cost effectiveness and long term value, competitive advantage), microenterprises often face challenges with SEO due to below main factors:
- Limited resources: Small businesses typically have tight budget and resources to invest in SEO.
- Lower brand recognition: Establishing brand visibility and authority in a competitive market is challenging for small businesses. Larger companies usually have more brand recognition which can result in higher user trust and click-through which directly affects search engine rankings.
- Content volume: Larger companies often have the capacity to produce a larger volume of high-quality content. Search engines favor websites with regularly updated and relevant content, making it harder for smaller businesses to keep up.
- Time and patience: SEO is a long-term investment, and it can take time to see significant results. Smaller businesses may become discouraged or lack the patience to continue investing in SEO when they don’t see immediate returns.
SEO tactics for small businesses
With all above challenges, small businesses can consider blow SEO tactics for their websites.
Keyword research
Keyword research is the process of identifying keywords and phrases that are relevant to business of each company. With the development of AI, keyword research tools have become quite helpful:
Whichever tool is leveraged, it is recommended that small businesses focus on niche, long-tail, specific and less competitive keywords.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO (also known as “on-site SEO”) is the practice of optimizing web page content for search engines and users.
- Page titles (also known as “meta title”, “title tags”): This is the most crucial on-page SEO factors as it appears in the top of browser window and in SERPs. This tells visitors what the webpage is about so it should be descriptive, relevant and optimal in length (best practice: 60 characters).
- Content: One of the most important steps any businesses should take is to create unique, high quality content and frequently keep it updated. Images, videos, and other media content also play a vital role as they make a website more appealing to the users.
- Page URLs: It is recommended to use a logical URL structure, make it simple, easy to read, contain relevant keywords and use hyphens (-) to separate words.
- Headers: Also called body tags, these help organize and structure a page’s content and make it easier for readers and search engines to understand the webpage. Headers should be relevant to the content and include keywords when possible.
- Alt tags: Adding descriptive descriptions for images on a webpage helps search engines and those using screen reader software understand what these images are about.
- Meta descriptions: Even though meta descriptions have no impact on search engine results ranking, these appear underneath a title in SERPs so they should accurately describe the page with target keywords and encourage clicks.
- Internal linking: This is to encourage website visitors to dwell time on the website by linking content under the same website together via hyperlinks or anchor texts. This also helps search engines find, index and understand better all the pages on the site. It is best practice to use descriptive anchor text and link to relevant content that provides additional value to the readers.
- Mobile optimization: Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking. This is called mobile-first indexing. Businesses should ensure their websites are responsive and mobile friendly.
Backlink
Backlink is a link from one website to another which is also known as inbound, incoming or external links. Search engines algorithms always favor inbound links to a website as it is linked with credibility and authority. This is challenging even for big companies but small businesses can consider following practices to boot their ranking via link building:
- Collaboration, sponsorships or partnerships: Build relationship with other businesses is a good way to earn backlink. Consider sponsoring a webinar or meet-up, hosting a community event, collaborating with influencers, content creators, journalists and bloggers.
- Guest blog posts: Guest blogging is a content marketing tactic that involves writing and publishing one or more articles for other websites. Offer to be a guest blogger to become an active participant in the community conversations can result in social media growth.
- Optimize social media: Actively engaging on social media and encouraging other people to share your content is a great way to spread the word about your business and potentially pick up a few backlinks in the process.
Local SEO
Local SEO is a powerful tool for any small businesses that want to draw attention of potential customers in nearby areas. Some useful techniques for local SEO include:
- Optimize Google My Business
- Add location pages: Location pages provide readers with your name, address, phone number, store hours, unique store descriptions, parking/transit information, promotions, and testimonials from happy customers.
- Encourage and engage on online reviews
- Keep business information consistent and up-to-date
- Create locally focused content
- Monitor and analyze performance by Google Analytics, Google My Business Insights.
Conclusion
Small businesses often face challenges with SEO due to limited resources, lower brand recognition, content volume, and the time and patience required for results. Despite these challenges, small businesses can implement various SEO tactics to overcome obstacles and improve their online visibility such as keyword research, on-page optimization, backlink building and leveraging local SEO. These small investments can have a huge payoff for a small business in long term through increased visibility and traffic, better online experience, new customers, and increased sales.