Everyone needs to know that how SEO Works for Small Businesses? HawksCode has made a simple SEO guide for you.
One of the most common questions that we get from our clients here at HawksCode is – How SEO works or small businesses? For organizations that are simply beginning to build their site or experiencing a site upgrade, Search Engine Optimization or SEO can feel somewhat terrifying.
But it is nothing to worry about.
You can start making some positive changes that will help you improve your SEO without an experienced SEO associate.
In this blog, we will provide an answer to the million-dollar question – How SEO works for small businesses? For your better understanding that how it impacts your business and what you need to do we will also discuss some basics of SEO.
What is SEO and How It Works for Small Businesses
Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting unpaid, organic, traffic to your website. In easy terms, SEO involves making some changes to your content and website design that makes your website more attractive to a search engine. A search engine will display your website as a top result on the search engine results page is you do this work correctly.
You are making your website more visible to people who are entering keywords related to your product or service by optimizing your web pages – including your blog posts.
Search engines scan the website to determine how easy is it to use, user-friendly sites use to get higher rankings on the search engine results page.
The benefits of SEO for your business are countless. You can get more organic traffic and more traffic means more customers.
Factors that Affect SEO
So now you know what is SEO and how it works. Take a look at both on-page and off-page factors that impact search engine results page rankings.
1. Content Marketing
Content marketing is the most effective way of attracting search engines and helping you to make connections with your website visitors.
Writing quality content will help your website in many ways. The more relevant and quality content it is, the more likely search engines will be to rank your pages higher on SERP.
Similarly, the more effective and engaging your content is, the more visitors will spend some quality time on your website which may convert into a purchase.
You should write content including your keywords. Try to focus on long-tail keywords at first as they are good at the beginning. Content should not be copied from other websites and completely describing your business or product. Incomplete information leads to misconceptions.
Types of content you can publish and improve your search engine rankings:
- Articles and blog posts.Videos and audio
- Social media content
- Infographics
- How-to Guides and Tutorials
- Other visual content
Creating fresh content is key. Fresh content does not mean that you have to write daily but it means that you can repost your previous blogs. Edit them or update them and make it fresh for your audience.
3. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to all the practices done on the web pages in order to rank them higher on search engines. In simple words, all the elements which happen on your website come under on-page SEO. Content marketing is not the only factor but it also consists of your website’s HTML.
You have complete control over your website’s on-page SEO.
Have a look at some important on-page SEO factors that can help you improve your search engine ranking:
Title Tag – The title of your page tells what your page is about. Your title should be of 50-70 characters with space. The primary keyword should be present in the title before the separator. An eye-catchy title will help you in getting traffic.
Meta Description – It is basically a summary of your page. It tells search engines and human visitors about your page. The meta description should not be more than 160 characters and its optimum length is 125 characters. The focus keyword is very important in the Meta description.
Sub-headings – Your page should contain several headings. Headings not only make your content easy to read but it also helps your website’s SEO. You can use many heading tags like H1, H2, H3 and so on. Under one heading don’t write more than 300 words.
Image Name and ALT tags – People do not consider it important but it is as much important as other things are. If you are using images in your blog post then adding keywords in the image name and alt attribute helps search engines to index your image for a particular keyword.
Internal Links – Internal links help search engines to know more about your site. Internal linking means linking within the website. Link your other products or services within your blog.
3. Off-Page SEO
You will have complete control on on-page SEO but here on off-page SEO, you don’t have any direct control. Still, you can improve it in some ways. Work done for your website on other websites is known as off-page SEO in easy terms.
Some off-page SEO factors for your website:
Social – One important factor is social signals, such as likes and shares. It’s easy for you if you get some quality shares on your content. It will make you reach much wider.
Links – The most popular way in off-page SEO is crating backlinks of your website. It will boost your SEO very easily. You should be very careful while creating backlinks as your website can get spammed very easily because of this method. Build links on good websites having a good SEO score.
Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO
There are two different approaches that companies have to take for optimizing their sites for the search engines.
Black hat SEO focusses on optimizing content only for search engines and not for human visitors. It may help in ranking on search engines very quickly but they often get banned by search engines.
White hat SEO is the opposite and it involves optimizing for the human audience that will be reading and clicking the site’s content. It’s a more effective tactic in the long run.
How SEO works for small Businesses: Final Outcome
Now you know how SEO works, you can easily optimize your website and boost your rankings on search engines.
Always remember that there are a lot of factors that impact the SEO of your site but providing the right content to the relevant audience is most important. SEO is not magic as it does not shows its results overnight. It may take months to show results.
Want to boost your search engine rankings? It is time to call HawksCode Company. The talented team at HawksCode is always ready to provide quality SEO services that will bring in more relevant traffic to your website.