Getting started with SEO for small businesses and entrepreneurs

Knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO) and how to implement it is a must for any small business or entrepreneur doing business online. Whether you’ve heard of it before or it’s a new term for you, it can be hard to know where to start. This beginner’s guide should put you in the right direction. Read on to learn what SEO is, how it works, and how to implement it on your site. 

What is SEO?

As the name basically reveals, SEO is a way of optimizing your site for search engines. Why is that necessary? Well, search engines, such as Google, use particular factors to measure how high web pages are ranked in search engine result pages (SERPs). Implementing SEO based on these factors could mean the difference between your page turning up on page 1 of the SERPs or page 1001.

There are myriad ways you can optimize your sites for search engines, both simple and complex. This article will lay out some starting points for your small business website.

Key terms you should know

• E-E-A-T: One of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines key factors for measuring a page’s authority and relevance. It stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust.

• On-page SEO: Changes you make directly on your website for SEO purposes, from adding keywords to content to implementing better site structure. 

• Off-page SEO: Actions you take outside your website to improve SEO, such as link building.

• Link building: Having high-quality websites link back to your site.

• Keywords: The words and phrases people enter in search engines to find a specific result. 

• Long-tail keywords: Less competitive keywords. Often a phrase made up of three to five words.

• Keyword research: A process to determine which keywords are most relevant to your site.

Now that you know the basics, here are the first steps you need to take to get set up for SEO success.

1. Do keyword research

We’ve already explained what keyword research is, but how do you actually do it? The first thing is to consider topics relevant to your business that you’d like to rank for. Being specific and relevant to your audience is key here. Think about your niche and the kinds of questions your audience would be likely to want answered. After you think of some topics, you can use an SEO tool like Moz or SEMRush to refine your research further. 

With these tools, you can find out the search volume (how often they’re searched for) of these specific topics and high-ranking keywords related to them. Once done, you should have a list of keywords you can use as part of optimizing your website’s content. 

2. Optimize content

Now it’s time to use those keywords in the on-page SEO portion of proceedings. Not in the sense of trying to shoehorn each one on each page of your site hundreds of times, but in a natural way. The first place to start is header tags. 

You can use these tags to separate headings and subheadings on a webpage. Not only do they help break up content and make it easier to read, but they’re also good for SEO and indicate the hierarchical structure of a piece. The headers range from H1, which is the title of the page and the most important heading, to H6, which is the least important. To help search engines understand a page more easily, you should put the most critical keywords in the header tags and throughout the piece wherever relevant. 

You should also add keywords to the web page’s URL and meta description.

Beyond keywords, you should ensure that everything on your site is of the highest quality and adheres to E-E-A-T, mentioned above. Beyond being relevant to your audience’s interests, you want to ensure it is well-written, offers value, and meets a certain level of expertise.

3. Ensure your site has a logical structure

In other words, make your website easy to navigate. In this age of low attention spans, users will quickly use patience with sites that are, well, unusable. This means creating a website where users can easily find what they’re looking for, no matter what page they’re on. This means organizing topically related pages together in categories featured on a menu accessible on each page. 

Logical structure is also essential for proper website indexing. If users can’t easily navigate your site, search engine crawlers (bots that scour the internet for web pages to add to search engines) probably won’t be able to either. Creating a sitemap is the most surefire way to ensure your whole website is indexed. Find out more information from this Google guide.

4. Do link building

Once you’ve completed on-page SEO considerations, it’s time to tackle off-page. A vital element of this is link building. Having high-quality sites in your niche link back to content on your site is crucial to being seen as authoritative (remember the A in E-E-A-T?) This might be difficult at first, especially if you don’t have any prior relationships with relevant website owners. A good place to start is writing quality content that people would naturally want to link back to. After that, you can do link outreach, which can include cold emailing site owners and asking them to add your content link to one of their pages or creating a guest post for their site, which will link back to your one.

Linking to other sites in your niche within your own content will also help convey relevance. 

5. Track SEO performance

If you put all this effort into optimizing your site for search engines, you’ll want to make sure it’s paying off in the end. Several tools are available for monitoring how various pages on your site rank. Some free ones include Google Search Console and Check PageRank. By keeping a close eye, you can tailor your SEO strategy accordingly. 

Conclusion

This beginner’s guide to SEO is an excellent way to prime small business websites for ranking in SERPs. Once you implement everything in this article, you can decide whether you want to go even further with optimizing your site for search engine success.