3 Ways To Get Started With SEO For Your Small Business
Building a website? You’ve likely heard the term “SEO” tossed around and, if you happened to do some research on what it meant, you’ve likely started sweating from fear. Alternative text, backlinks, and keyword rankings?!
Don’t fret though.
Your SEO is simply a part of the website’s foundation.
Although I could dive all in on the techy research, here are 3 easy things you can do to get started, whether you have a website or are building it out right now.
On-Site VS Off-Site SEO
First thing though, there’s a difference between on-site SEO and off-site. The former consists of things you want to do on your website. It could be the tech changes, speed, and user experience on your site. Compared to off-site which is getting featured (or guest blogging) for backlinks, etc. Both are great but if you’ve been featured in a ton of places and your website’s user experience sucks, well, you’re missing out.
1. User Experience Is Key For SEO
User experience is what happens when a person lands on your website and does something. Do they leave immediately, do they feel lost, is it easy for them to check out?
How is this part of SEO?
Let’s say you’re ranking #1 for your desired keyword. Great! I then search that keyword and click on your site. I’m then immediately bombarded with a pop-up when I haven’t even gotten to the content of the site. When I figure out how to get rid of it, I realize your site is hard to read because the text is gray on white. Worse yet, your site isn’t even mobile friendly so I have to keep zooming in and out to make out the information I was looking for.
Will I buy from you or contact you about your services? Probably not. I’ll likely only spend a few seconds trying to get around before hitting the back button and going to the next site in the search results.
Google notices this.
Oh, yeah, Google sees all.
Google starts to wonder if you should be ranked #1 for that keyword at all since people keep bouncing off your site immediately after entering.
You not only lost a potential client, but you also lost a bit of confidence from Google and it’ll likely hurt your ranking.
Things to consider when looking at the user experience on your website:
Your site is easy to read font that is big enough (but not crazy big) and has enough contrast between it and the background.
There’s no text embedded into images.
As a user, I can easily get to where I need to go. I.E if I searched for “personal trainer in columbus ohio” then got to your site, you better make it easy for me to find your personal training page and program information.
There are no annoying pop-ups that fly in my face immediately. Pop-ups do convert but you need to use them with rules, like timing or the percentage of the page scroll.
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. It’s not the late 90’s anymore. Any site that was built in the early 2000s should have had a mobile-friendly version. If your website was built last year without even a fluid design, ask for your money back or stop hiring your cousin’s best friend’s uncle’s half-brother who is trying to “get back into tech” after 20 years. #sorrynotsorry
2. Choose the correct platform to build your website on.
There are 3 platforms I mainly work with because they’ve come to almost the same level of SEO capabilities: WordPress.com, Squarespace, and Shopify.
I used to hate the latter 2. They sucked when it came to SEO but the good thing, they realized it and these companies have made moves to improve.
Although I still think WordPress is one of the better ones, here’s why I might recommend the others and what you should consider:
Ease of Use
I’ve had clients that had the best WordPress site with all the bells and whistles but they never updated it or blogged or even logged in. Why? They were worried they’d break something and felt overwhelmed each time they went in.
I’ve had clients who start with a Squarespace site and find it so easy to blog that they’re doing it daily. They follow their keyword plan and have grown their traffic.
Both desired to blog and increase traffic but some platforms can feel intimidating when you have no idea what the alerts are. It’s like when I, an iPhone user, tries to check voicemail on an Android. It takes me so long that I give up. The same thing has happened between WordPress and other platforms.
Your Own Tech Skills
Are you the kind of person that loves to check under the hood of your car? You might not be able to change out the motor but can tell when it’s just a spark plug that needs changing?
When it comes to your website’s platform, you need to ask yourself: How techy am I, and am I willing to learn?
Your Time
Along the lines of tech skills, do you have the time to learn a platform that already overwhelms you? Will you just keep procrastinating because you’ve got better things to do than learn how to use a particular plugin?
Your Budget
Do you have the money to have someone deal with the tech stuff? If you can’t do it yourself, because you either don’t have the tech know-how or time, then certain platforms might require you to get a specialist versus a VA which could be more costly.
Ultimately, I don’t believe that one of the 3 platforms I work with is bad. It comes down to how they’re serving my web design clients and their business and SEO goals.
3. Do your research and track your progress.
First, spy on your competition to get an idea of what they’re ranking for. Yup, spy on them. I use SpyFu’s free reports to see what others are up to. If your main competition is ranking high for “yoga studio columbus ohio” then maybe that’s a keyword you could consider.
Brainstorm a list of keywords and whittle them down to 1 or 2 per page on your website. Make sure you know the average searches per month and the competitive level - which can be found via the Google Adwords tool for keywords. Note: you might need to start and quickly stop an ad in order to get to the Adwords tools.
After you’ve recreated your copy, been blogging, and gotten some links to your site from reputable sources, check in with your Google Analytics account and Google Search Console. The latter tells you the keywords you’re coming up for and the former will show traffic.
Knowing your numbers will help you pivot your SEO and marketing strategy.
Although there’s a lot more that goes into SEO (and that’s just on-site SEO), starting off on this foundation will make tackling other tasks, such as an image’s alternative text a bit easier to handle.
What’s the #1 most confusing thing about your website and SEO? Let me know in the comments!
