What is SEO – Search Engine Optimisation?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all about optimising your business websites and its content to improve its visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. By improving your website SEO, the goal is to increase the organic traffic to your website by increasing your website visibility on search engine results (SERPS). Organic traffic is non-paid traffic. SEO involves multiple strategies, including keyword optimization, technical improvements, and building authority through backlinks.
So, SEO should help your business rank higher on these search engines, increasing your visibility and attracting more visitors to your website.
Key Aspects of SEO:
- On-Page SEO – This is on your actual website and is about optimising individual web pages, including content, keywords, meta tags, internal linking, and URL structure.
- Off-Page SEO – This is off your website and about building backlinks, social signals, and external factors that influence a website’s authority and ranking.
- Technical SEO – This is the real basis of good SEO and is about improving website performance, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, and indexing.
- Local SEO – This is fab for local businesses and involves optimizing for local search queries, Google My Business, and local citations.
Why is SEO important for my business?
SEO is crucial for businesses because it increases your business visibility on search engines, therefore driving organic traffic to their website.
Higher search rankings mean more potential customers can find and engage with your business.
Good SEO also helps build credibility and trust, as users often trust websites that appear nearer the top of search results.
With effective SEO, businesses can reach a wider audience, reduce reliance on paid advertising, and achieve long-term growth. Which ultimately can lead to higher conversion rates, more leads, and increased sales, making SEO a cost-effective strategy for your business success.
SEO Strategies for Small Businesses
Let’s look at those key aspects of SEO and expand on what they are and why they are relevant for your business.
1. On-Page SEO – Optimize Your Website
This is all done on your own website and is completely within your own control.
- Use relevant keywords in your website content, meta titles, and descriptions. Write your content for humans but make it friendly and useful to search engines. Meta titles, descriptions, and ALT text are important to search engines and screen readers, so can make your website more accessible too.
- Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, as many users browse on their phones and Google takes mobile-friendliness to be an important factor in ranking. I have a whole blog on Why your website needs to be mobile friendly, so why not have a read through.
- Improve page speed because slow websites can lead to lower rankings. There are some very simple things that you can do to improve your website speed and I have a blog that takes you through 3 top ways to improve your website speed. There are plenty of free tools that can assess your website and give you pointers to where those improvements can be made.
- Use internal linking to guide visitors to important pages. This helps with the usability of your website and can allow you to help visitors find important information, via blogs, FAQs, how to information, or detailed product or service information.
2. Off-Page SEO – build authority with backlinks
This is done outside of your website and on other websites outside of your control, or areas like social media.
- Get listed in online directories such as Yelp or Thomson Local, 118 etc. Look at online small business directory listings because many of them are free and a simple Google search will bring up plenty of choices. Look at local directory listing too, because these are generally free and a really good option for local businesses.
- Encourage customers to leave positive reviews because these can improve your rankings too. If you have Google My Business set up, then that’s an idea place for customer to leave reviews. Other review websites can be key depending on the business niche, such as Trustpilot, Amazon or TripAdvisor. If you are using WordPress for your website, these can also be automatically pulled through to your website.
- Get quality backlinks by collaborate with other businesses or bloggers. You can offer to do guest blogs, partner with complementary business and swap backlinks, sponsor events or charities etc.
- Create good content that other people will want to share either on their social media or websites.
- Use social media to share your content, tips, advice and direct traffic to your website.
3. Improve Technical SEO
- Ensure your website is secure because Google prioritises safe sites in rankings. Make sure you are using HTTPS instead of HTTP as Google ranks HTTPS websites higher and warns users about insecure sites.
- Make sure your website loads quickly. Website speed is another factor in search engine ranking. Slow sites increase bounce rates, causing visitors to leave which can affect well time, which is another ranking factor. Faster pages boost engagement, mobile performance, and credibility. Optimizing images for both desktop and mobile can be an easy fix on many websites.
- Use an XML sitemap to help search engines crawl your pages. If you are using a plugin like Yoast, this will be created for you.
- Fix broken links on your website. I mean, apart from being annoying to visitors, it makes your website seem really out of date. Broken links will increase bounce rate and signal poor website maintenance to Google.
4. Leverage Local SEO
- Set up Googe my Business can help customers find you on Google search and Google maps and can help with local SEO. A well-optimized GMB profile builds credibility with customer reviews, accurate business details, and photos. It also provides a direct way for customers to contact you, get directions, or visit your website all for free.
- Include location-based keywords in your content, title and descriptions, e.g. “best coffee shop in Cardiff” or “SEO services in Nottingham” etc.
- Ensure your NAP is consistent across all your online listings. NAP stands forName, Address, and Phone numberand it’s a term used in local SEO. Consistent and accurate NAP information across the web is important for businesses because it helps search engines like Google verify the legitimacy of a business and improve its visibility in local search results.
Where do I start with SEO?
Well, there are various free tools out there that will crawl your website and let you know where improvements can be made, such as missing meta data, such as titles, descriptions or ALT text. Free tools can check the speed of your website, both on desktop and mobile so you can see where you can optimise. You can also see where you may have images that are affecting loads times.
It can be useful to just do a few Google searches on keywords or phrases that potential customers will use when searching for products or services. Does your website come up? What are competitors doing? Use this to think about the keywords and phrases you can focus on – instead of trying to compete with “best coffee shop” what about 2best coffee shop in cardiff2?
How can Plumb Digital help with SEO?
Small businesses often compete with larger companies that have bigger marketing budgets. SEO helps level the playing field by making your website more discoverable without requiring massive advertising spend. With the right SEO strategy, you can reach local customers, improve brand credibility, and drive long-term growth.
I find the best way to start with getting you competing with other businesses, including those big ones, is to start with an SEO Audit. This is a comprehensive audit of your website and will highlight where improvements can be made. Almost like an SEO shopping list. This will allow you to DIY those changes or I can develop an SEO strategy for you and implement those improvements.
If you would like a chat about your business and SEO, then Contact me via my online form.