SEO helps small business owners create user-friendly websites that rank higher in search engines and helps build brand awareness for your business. The more optimized a business website is, the more likely the site will rank on the first page of search engine results (SERPS).
Getting on the first page means significantly higher click-through rates, and search engine users are more likely to trust a site that is on the first page than brands who are not.
If you’re a small business owner, you should utilize SEO to build a strong web presence and bypass your competition to gain new customers for your business and take it to the next level.
“Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves”
It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Knowing the answers to these questions will allow you to connect to the people who are searching online for the solutions you offer.
Search engine basics
Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing,” and then ordering it by how well it matches the query in a process we refer to as “ranking.”
Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.
While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.
SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.
Things we avoid at Sikes Media to ensure businesses maximize their SEO.
Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.
Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.
We ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up URLs and cause duplicate content issues.
We ensure your URLs are descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.
We bury links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight and keep content out of these as well.
Duplicate content
Keyword stuffing
Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
Conclusion
Implementing strong, quality SEO on a brand’s website and digital properties is always going to be beneficial to that brand and its marketing efforts.
It’s considered a “new age” marketing technique, but it’s critical to a brand’s web presence in this day and age, especially as available data and rivaling competition continue to increase and grow.
Interested in SEO strategy and management for your business?
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