Search engine optimisation for small business
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation which is the process of ensuring that your website is as visible as possible in all the major search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo for the search keywords that potential customers are using in their searches.
Why is SEO important?
Statistics suggest that web users rarely venture out of the top 10 search results, especially if they find what they need in the top listings. In terms of traffic; there is a large difference between even position #2 and #1 in terms of click throughs and hence conversions (sales). If you are not in the top 5 positions, you are missing up to 80% of search engine traffic, and if you are not in the top 10 positions you can expect 1 in 100 hits by comparison to the #1 position. This underlines the importance of SEO to your small business.
Difference between SEO and SEM
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) have a number of key differences. SEO is the science of increasing traffic to your web site by improving the internal and external factors influencing ranking in search results.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion - this is most often called PPC for Pay Per Click.
Generally SEO requires more up-front but less ongoing investment compared to SEM and the results last for longer. SEM is easier to set-up and is more flexible as it can be turned on and off with ease. One of the key differences, in our experience, is that generally, SEO traffic converts significantly higher than SEM traffic as web users tend to trust organic search results more than paid search results and thus convert at a higher rate.
Four cornerstones of SEO
These four elements form the foundations of any well thought out and logical SEO strategy for small businesses. Getting each of these four essentials right is crucial to the success or failure of your SEO project. What follows is a brief explanation of what makes up these SEO fundamentals.
1. Content
This refers to all content on a website and includes most types of digital content including text, videos, images and audio. It is important to ensure that a website contains multiple pages of unique and relevant content and uses multiple types of digital content throughout the website and on important landing pages.
2. Website Structure
This refers to how the website is set-up from an SEO perspective. It includes landing pages, urls, internal inking, hosting location, server set-up and domain strategy.
3. On-page optimisation factors
On-Page SEO refers to SEO techniques that are done to the website page. This includes pagecontent, keyword density, keyword frequency, layout, meta tags, heading tags, image alt tags, the page template, code structure and quality.
4. Off-site optimisation factors
Off-site SEO refers to SEO techniques that are performed externally to a website or page. This includes inbound external linking, web signals and social media participation.
This is just the start of the SEO for small businesses series of articles. In the following articles the points outlined here will be expanded and more details and examples provided.
