Why is Search Engine Optimization important for businesses? Well, Did you know that? 167 Billion Searches happen on Google a month. If you are not showing on the first google result for your products and services, you are missing in a vast untapped potential. Search Engines, such as Google, are the new yellow pages. It is where people go to find answers, including people looking for your products and services. 88% of people research before they buy a product or services. And what’s the first place where they research? Google! So, Do you really need SEO for your business website? Yes, you do! Because of this, we decided to create our SEO guide!
What is SEO? S.E.O. stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the work that goes into your website and some other online places to prove search engines, such as Google, that you are the best, more relevant, and most trusted answer. So let’s get started with some basic terms:
Key Terms
Keywords: Your SEO keywords are words and or phrases for which you want to rank in search engine result pages. For example, if you own a spa in El Paso, TX, then one of your keywords might be “spas in El Paso, TX”, or “hot stone massage in El Paso”. A keyword is a phrase someone looking for your product or service might type into Google when looking for a business like yours.
Keyword Competitiveness: It is a term to define how easy or hard it is to rank higher for a specific keyword. Think about it as the “difficulty” level to rank higher for a keyword. Products or services that are in high demand might, such as restaurants, will most likely face higher keyword competitiveness that other business that is not as crowed, such as a Mobile Car Wash.
Looking at the number of results for a specific keyword is an excellent way to get an idea for keyword competitiveness. As a general rule, the fewer results, the lower the competitiveness. We will dive more into this later.
Backlinks: A backlink is a link in someone else’s website pointing to your site. It is also essential that these other pages mention your keywords in their content, where they link to you.
SERP. SERP or “Search Engine Results Page” are the pages Google and or other search engines display the results for a user search.
The job of the Search Engine Optimizer is to convince Google that our website has the most relevant and trusted result for a specific keyword.
First, you need to concentrate on creating great valuable content on your website for your customers and your prospects, but you also need to make sure that search engines can understand your site. Search engines are robots, so you need to make sure your website is well structured using the right HTML syntax, has the right metadata, etc.
Modern website builders might do some of this work, but it is easy to get it wrong. If you know how to do this great! If not, you might need help from an SEO company, such as Phidev, or your marketing agency.
Another thing you need to pay attention to is how fast your website loads, not only from a customer perspective but also from a Google perspective. There is a great tool out there created by Google named PageSpeed Insights. Simple, visit that page and enter your web address. It will then give your website a grade depending on your website performance. PageSpeed Insights looks into many things that might not make sense to the average person. Still, a knowledgable web developer or SEO company will help you figure out the results and the advice on how to improve your website. It is hard to get a score of 90+, but if you are above 50, your site is doing a decent job.
What about Trust?
How does Google know if your website content is trustable? Here is a perfect analogy for that. If you get a call from a 5-year-old saying your neighbor is the next best basketball player in the world? Would you believe it? Now, if you had a call from Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Larry Bird and told you the same thing? Would you believe them? Most likely, you would because they have something we call “authority.” They are known to be someone who has authority in their field. Search engines work the same way; it is not enough for you to say what you are great at what you do; other trustworthy sources need to say it too. That is where backlinks come it.
What can you do right now?
Search Engine Optimization should not be ignored! The biggest thing you can do is to put relevant content on your website. Answer the most common questions to your products/services on your website in a separate page. Create pages giving some tips on how to get the most of your products or services, or how to do it themselves. It might seem counter-intuitive to provide information for free, but your experience is another aspect for people to decide to work with you.
