Let’s assume that you are a complete beginner: you run a business and that business has a website and maybe some social media presence. So far you have been getting clients for your business through a variety of channels, but your website isn’t a major source of leads or clients. You’d like to change that.
Before you put in any more resources into developing your online presence, you must understand SEO. What exactly is SEO? What are the benefits of SEO? How do I get started with SEO?
What exactly is SEO?
To understand what SEO is, we need to first understand how Google search functions. In any given search, there are at least three parties involved: the person doing the search, Google and the business/services that could be a match for this search.
Firstly, the person doing the search. Let us say that I am looking for ‘ice cream parlour near me’ on Google search. Secondly, the business, whether it is a product or a service, that could be a match for this search. This is how it works for businesses: Google’s search engine ‘reads’ and evaluates all the websites that businesses and organizations create. This is done periodically. When I look for ‘ice cream parlour near me’, Google goes back to the evaluation that it has done of all websites in the universe and ranks them for my convenience. The first website listed is more relevant than the second website and so on. Note that the website ranking by Google is so refined that most searchers find what they are looking for in the first sheet of website rankings. In case you haven’t noticed this yourself so far, please pause reading here and go try out a search or two on Google and test this for yourself. If you are satisfied that is indeed the case, we can proceed further.
Once you know how search functions, you can optimise for it. In other words, SEO is a set of steps that help a website rank higher on Google. You have to make sure that you present your business, and its products and services, in as clear and complete a manner as possible. This is because only if Google is able to understand your offering it will recommend your website to searchers. This brings us to the second question: what are the benefits of SEO, in business terms?
What are the benefits of SEO, in business terms?
Done well, SEO leads to more traffic. As explained earlier, most people click one of the first few search results. So, if you can get your site to rank higher, your website gets more search traffic. The other major benefit of SEO is that SEO leads to ‘free’ traffic. In other words, your cost of customer acquisition can be quite low if you or your digital marketing agency can execute your SEO strategy well.Note that when we say ‘free traffic’ what we mean is that, as compared to paid ads on Google, search traffic fueled by SEO is ‘free’ and given than ads on Google can be expensive, you should make the most of SEO. Note that even with SEO you need to follow a set of steps to get the desired results. All this requires resources, whether you decide to do SEO by yourself or you decide to hire an agency such as our’s. However, in most cases, this is considerably cheaper that ads on Google.
How do I get started with SEO?
Suppose you wish to focus on running your core business and want digital marketing, and hence SEO, to be taken care of by an agency, that would be a great choice. Even if that is the case, it would be good for you to understand the subject. Broadly speaking, SEO is broken down into
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO and
- Technical SEO
On-page SEO refers to all the things that you can do on your website to optimise for search engines. Off-page SEO refers to what you can do with other websites. Off-page SEO is a form of social proof. The more other trustworthy and relevant websites ‘recommend’ you by giving a link to your website on their websites, the better your off-page SEO becomes. Technical SEO refers to all the things that you can do to the structure of the website so that the search engine can easily ‘read’ and ‘evaluate’ your website.
Even if you are a complete beginner and have no technical skills, there are few things that you can do to get started with SEO immediately.
On-page SEO
Review all content on your website. Put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers and see if they will derive value from the content on your website. If you identify any gaps, fix them asap. If possible, post fresh content regularly: content that is unique and is not a copy paste of content from another website. Note that Google penalises when website engage in plagiarism.
Off-page SEO
Get other trustworthy websites to give a link to your website. A great place to start would be to reach out to all your existing clients and, if they each have a website, request them to give a link to your website under a suitable section such as ‘partners’ or ‘vendors’. If one or more of these websites have a blogs section, you could write a guest blog for them with appropriate links to your website.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO, especially for a novice to SEO, can be a bit overwhelming. We will reserve technical SEO for another post (or a series of posts). For the moment, if you want to know more about Technical SEO and how we could help you with your SEO (or digital marketing) efforts, we’d be happy to take you through our services.