SEO for Business – Breaking it Down
You own a small business, and you have invested a significant amount of cash in starting up; including the creation of a business website. The problem is that just having a web presence is not enough. You need to make sure that people actually visit the site. Generating a significant amount of traffic towards your site is the first step in the process of increasing revenue and growing your business.
Getting your SEO right is vital, if you want to feature highly in search engine results, and increase traffic to your website. Many small businesses struggle to work effectively with SEO in house. If this applies to your business, you may want to think about getting some professional help; you can read more here. Whether you decide to take this route or not, it’s still helpful to understand what SEO is, how it works and why it’s so useful.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation. Many people assume that the concept is hugely complicated, but it’s not really. What is more difficult is getting SEO right. SEO is aimed at making sure that your website features highly in organic search results (the ones that are not paid for).
When someone enters a search online, Google looks for the sites that are best suited to the search. It has an index of all sites which are ranked according to Google’s algorithm. Ranking is dependent on lots of different considerations, such as quality of content, ease of navigation and page load speed. SEO is an important aspect of ranking. You need to make sure that Google recognises your site as having content that is relevant to the search.
How does SEO work?
If you want your SEO to be effective, you need to ensure that you use the right keywords in your content. This used to mean simply stuffing keywords across the site. This kind of action is now penalised by Google. You need to use keywords in relevant places, such as in headings and titles and once or twice in page content. The keywords you choose need to be relevant to what people will find on your website.
Do not fall into the trap of using the most obvious keywords, or the ones you have seen be successful for others. Remember that Google has already ranked others highly for these keywords, so it’s hard to compete. Keyword research is important, and long tail search queries are now more common than ever, so you need to be clever with the words that you choose, as well as the way that you use them.
Why should you concentrate on SEO for your business?
The simple fact is that you need good SEO techniques in order to be competitive on the Internet. If you have a new business and have yet to define your main purpose or service, or you are involved with a brand new product, you may want to to think about using a marketing agency first, to look at making warm contacts, before you concentrate on SEO. This is because you have either yet to define what searches you want to attract, or you have a product that people are not currently searching for.
If this is not the case, you need to concentrate on SEO, on an ongoing basis. If you do not feel your business has the time or resources to fully commit to doing this, it may be time to seek some expert help.
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