SEO for Small Business Owners
SEO or search engine optimization can help small business owners increase their website’s traffic and place. However, using SEO is a complicated task. It needs to have a working and effective structure in order to make your website visible and rank well in search results. The process therefore requires a lot of patience but once you get the gears running, SEO will give you sweet rewards for your labor.
Google Will Be Your Best Friend
Studies have shown that Google holds 65%-85% of the search market. Google then is the market leader. According to Google, it looks at around 200 ranking factors when it decides on who to put at the top of the search results. The three main factors that Google looks at are: relevance, reputation, and architecture. You can expound the three factors into three questions such as:
1. Is my site relevant to the search?
2. Has my site earned a good reputation and its right to rank well in search results?
3. Is my site architecture efficient so that search engines can easily find its contents and index them?
Your Site Has To Be Relevant
Relevance is the first key. Of course, if your website is not relevant to the topic or keyword searched, then it will nowhere be in the top ranks of the search result page. Therefore, build a small business website as relevant to broad topics as possible. This method also works well for personal blogs too.
Make sure you put things that do not skew heavily in favor of a particular topic. It’s nice to mix things up and add diversity to also widen your reach. Next is the reputation of your site. Google has to have evidence that your website has previously served well search results and gave them the information that they were looking for.
How Does Google Know That A Website Is Reputable?
Google looks at the page’s popularity and authority. It looks at:
1) the number of visits and page views
2) the number of repeat visits and page views
3) the length of time spent on the page and the site, and
4) the number of incoming links and social mentions of the site.
Obviously, the higher the number on all four aspects, the more likely Google will perceive your website as reputable. Lastly, your site has to adhere to technical protocols, rules, and guidelines in order to make it “visible” to search engines like Google.
Satisfy The Searchers Query
Searchers care most about the answers to the questions that they search on the web. Therefore, like Google, they place importance on relevance. They want to find quality and useful information in a few seconds. Post things on your website about topics that your target audience cares about.
This will increase the probability of your website showing up in Google’s search result page. You have great control on this since you are in the best position to know what your audience want. Write content and post media that you know will best satisfy their needs. These contents should also be consistent with high quality and accuracy.
