Tips for small business SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of optimising a website so that it ranks highly in the natural results of the search engines. For many small internet businesses, SEO is essential to generate revenues.

In fact, studies from comScore reveals that 50% of internet purchases are immediately preceded by a search on a search engine, and that 85% of all internet purchases start with a search. Furthermore, it is common knowledge that people searching for services or goods on internet don’t go further than the 2^nd or 3^rd page of the search results, often no further than the first one. Therefore, it does make sense to make your website rank high, and for many small businesses good rankings are the difference between commercial success and commercial failure.

The first thing you should do when building your SEO strategy is to set your targets. To do that, you need to have an understanding of what internet users are searching for in your field of activity, and how strong the competition is on these searches. Some tools can help you: Google Keyword Tool, Google Insights, Yahoo! Site Explorer (these are not exclusives, just examples). Depending on how many results and how strong the competition is, you’ll know how difficult it will be to rank above them, and therefore how much time and effort you should put in.

• Beware that SEO is not an easy thing, and often many companies are competing for few places at the top. Hence why it’s important to target not only the most searched keywords but also long tail keywords, for there is less competition.
• Also remember that achieving good rankings cannot be done overnight, it will often take a few weeks to see an impact, and a few months to achieve your targets.

Once you’ve set up your targets, you need to start your SEO activity. This splits in two: on-site (optimisation of your website’s content and structure) and off-site (link building).  Given the high volume of work required by SEO, it’s sometimes difficult to do it all. You then need to know what the most important ranking factors are, and focus on these ones for a maximum impact. Here is a list of what is commonly accepted by the SEO community as the most important ranking factors:

Page Titles: include your target keywords in your page titles but remember that searchers will view a page title before selecting which website to visit so make it appealing to the user as well as the search engine.
Use of headings and sub headings: use H1 and H2 tags for headings and sub headings within a page to help tell the search engines what your content is about.
Internal linking and navigation: in order to ensure the search engine crawlers can find the pages of your website and index them accordingly it is important to ensure you website navigation is usable and that where useful you link from one page to another. Navigations built in flash or using images are less accessible for the search engines so you should aim to use a menu system which uses a text link based system for maximum accessibility.
File names and URL structure: Many people starting out in SEO pay little attention to the URLs where their website pages sit but the search engines use the URL content as an indicator of page relevancy. A page on a plumber’s website about boiler repair for example should be placed at www.website.com/boiler-repair rather than www.website.com/services. This is just another opportunity to indicate to the search engines the topic of a page’s content.
Content: too often websites don’t have enough content on their website, or don’t make the most of their existing content. Make sure your content includes the keywords you’re targeting, but don’t get keyword crazy – make sure your content makes sense both for the search engines and for the users reading it
• Relevant links: a large part of the current algorithm of search engines is based on links. You can see links to a website as a testimonial of its “popularity” and relevance to web users, and so does search engines. Generating relevant links is one of the most impactful SEO activities and thus shouldn’t be overlooked.

Making changes such as these should help you build a platform for your websites SEO to grow from.

Don’t forget what your main objective is: to generate more revenues for your business. Therefore you need to measure the impact of your SEO activity as your search ranking evolves – and to make the most of your SEO, there is nothing better than a website that delivers.
So rankings are not the only thing to monitor, but how do you measure the impact of your SEO – and more generally of your online marketing and website success? You do it through web analytics. Have a look at my previous post on this subject, Web analytics: improve your website’s revenues. For SEO the main things to watch are the quantity and quality of visits generated through organic search, and if you have a transactional website the sales generated.

SEO is a great way to generate traffic and revenues, but is not the only one in the online marketing toolbox. Pay Per Click (PPC), display, affiliate marketing, social media are worth the consideration, and web analytics are a must do for anyone serious about building an online business. So make sure you don’t become a “ranking junkie”.
Finally, if you don’t have time to do it all yourself, you might consider outsourcing your SEO activity. Whether you just need to be led or you need a full service, the experience and knowledge of a SEO consultant or an agency having worked on many websites will definitely help your success, and will save you a lot of time. However, selecting a consultant or an agency is not an easy thing to do. Beware of false claims such as guaranteed positions on Google, or promises of surprisingly fast results. Make sure the agency / consultants you hire have a proven track record, adhere to your objectives and are totally transparent in regards to what they are going to do to improve your rankings.

Robert Weatherhead is Operations Director for BT SearchSmart. BT SearchSmart provides affordable Pay Per Click, small business SEO and analytics services.