Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last ten years, you’ll know or at least have heard about SEO.
It might be that your SEO-tactics are in full swing with a plan that is absolutely first class and gets your business all the attention it needs on search engines such as Google.
For the rest of us who own small businesses or work as solopreneurs, the world of SEO is a scary and confusing place.
We know we need to get to grips with it but with so much to learn and so many bloggers screaming at you to do it their way, where would you even begin?
If you’ve never heard of a pillar strategy for SEO or aren’t even too sure what SEO is, then this blog is for you.
SEO – The Basics
First off, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it’s quite simply the art of getting your business website picked up by Google in searches. When you Google Chinese restaurants in your town, how many results pages on Google do you search through? We would suggest you barely make it past the first page, two at most before you make your selection.
This is why ranking high up the results pages is so crucial to your business. If there are three hundred plumbing businesses to rival yours, you want to be among the top five that appear in a Google search for your city.
There are plenty of ways of doing this including, of course, advertising, but while this will certainly get your name up there on the first page it can be expensive to sustain that activity and as soon as you stop, your name will sink down the rankings out of sight.
In the past, it was all about keywords, for example, if you typed “plumber, Leeds” into the search box, Google’s algorithms would take you to a results page based entirely on those two keywords. But things have changed and Google now recognizes that the majority of searches are more text-based. Instead of just typing in the word “plumber” a searcher might instead type in “how do I fix a leaking bath tap” and the results would be generated from there.
It’s a subtle but significant change and has changed the way that SEO experts do business, but how can you get to grips with it?
What Are You Looking For?
It’s a big question but will form the basis of your strategy. What is it that you want your website to do? Will it be a passive tool or help to funnel customers through to a sales point? Creating content through blogs and your various pages is going to help to get your site picked up.
If you want that content to get you seen then you’re either going to need to learn how to write content in an SEO-friendly way or you’re going to have to get someone in to make that transformation for you.
Are you using SEO with your business?
