Why SEO Matters To Your Business (and How to Get Started)

Google and Apple’s recent changes to online privacy rules are leading to dramatic changes in the online advertising world. Until now, paid online ads have been relatively cheap, though large budgets are usually required to generate enough views to lead to sales. But that may all be changing, particularly for small business owners. The timeline extends through 2023, but that's not very far away, and mitigation and planning must begin now if you want to stay ahead of the coming changes in digital advertising.

What are SEO and SEM

SEO and SEM are the two most powerful tools you can use to increase traffic to your website. You can use them to convert the traffic you get into leads, subscribers, and sales.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, a digital marketing strategy that focuses on the presence of your website in the search results of search engines like Google. If you understand how SEO works, you can use a variety of tactics to increase your visibility (or how high you rank) in search results

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy used to increase a website's visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engine marketing is also variously referred to as paid search or pay-per-click (PPC).

As online advertising costs continue to increase, and your audience faces a growing onslaught of promotional messages, it's more important than ever to pay attention to growing your website profile and prospecting potential through SEO.

SEO has two main goals. The first is to help you understand what users are searching for online so you can create high-quality content to fulfill their purpose. The second is to help you create a website that search engines can find, index and understand. Also, following good SEO practices is a great way to improve the quality of a website by making it more user-friendly, faster and easier to navigate

As a small business owner, your SEO Toolkit must be as complete and current as possible for you to be successful in your online marketing. As you improve your SEO Ranking, you not only improve your website traffic, you also increase your website sales.

Why SEO Matters to Small Businesses

SEO is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your website, so it’s important to know how it can benefit you and also to ensure that your business has the right services to be the best it can be. Even a small amount of SEO knowledge will help you benefit from search engine rankings and increased traffic and gain an insight into what your customers are looking for.

Use SEO to Qualify Your Customers

SEO is the best way to ensure that your business is seen by the right users. By creating an SEO friendly website and making sure that you have plenty of content about the products and services you offer, you can ensure that people who are looking for precisely what you have to sell will find you, and that once they arrive on your site they will stick around and learn more about you.

The heart of good SEO content is keyword research. Keywords in SEO are no longer used as they used to be, but they are still a very important part of the equation. Without keywords, potential customers may never find you when they search, so keywords are the cornerstone of your SEO strategy.

Let's say a company sells handmade fly fishing baits. An obvious keyword phrase to rank for is handmade fly fishing. However, there are other keywords and phrases that customers are sure to use to find fly-fishing products, and many of those words and phrases will have less competition. It’s up to you to find keywords and key phrases that apply directly (and hopefully, uniquely) to your business, and then apply them to content pages, URLs, headlines, image descriptions, metadata page titles, emails, and more. Also, don't forget about long-tail keywords, because half of all searches are four-plus words long. These phrases experience less competition and higher conversion rates.

How Content Creation Improves Your SEO

Content Gets You Noticed

It can be hard for a small business to get noticed in today's market. With so many different brands vying for customers' attention and countless new online retailers coming on the market every day, it can be hard for a small business to compete. One way to get the attention of potential customers is through the content you produce. Whether you use blogs, live videos, podcasts, or digital magazines to create the content, your audience will learn about your business's unique offerings and you'll be able to communicate to them in a personalized way through content. Content can help attract new customers and give you an edge against larger competitors. Content also helps reduce the number of inquiries you get over the phone.

If you're looking to get noticed, create great content.

Your Content Improves Your SEO Rankings

Paid links have historically been very valuable, but they can be expensive to maintain, and once the money stops flowing, so do the links. The best way to increase site traffic is to create quality content that people want to read. If you have something of interest – maybe even something that could go viral, the internet will find it, and your site traffic will grow as a result.

Research has demonstrated that Google’s search engine is primarily focused on the quality of content, and how useful it is to those looking for information.

Create Great Content that Increases Your SEO While Wowing Your Customers

How to create great content for SEO

When creating anything for your website, focus on addressing the needs of your target audience. Before you pick up a pencil or touch your keyboard, think about the people who you want to reach with the content, and what they want and need to know.

How to Create Linkable and Relevant Content

The Internet is full of interesting and engaging content. It seems every day someone creates something insightful, funny, informative, or just plain entertaining. And while all of these things are worth reading, some content serves a greater purpose than others. Your goal when you create content should be to give something of value to your reader.

A few ways to do this include:

•         Provide solutions to problems
•         Teach something
•         Be helpful
•         Entertain
•         Be original
•         Offer something other people can't
•         Be honest and authentic
•         Provide follow up information or propositions

Even if advertising rates don’t shoot as high as the advertising world is expecting, privacy rules and consumer preferences are changing the nature of online advertising. The thing a potential customer likes most is when you show up and answer their questions and respond to their concerns. That is the most receptive your prospect will ever be. Use content strategies to make sure you are the one who shows up, builds trust, and gets their business.

Postscript: Here's How Important this Is

Google has made it clear that 3rd party cookies used in advertising will not longer be allowed, and the original deadline for shifting its advertising strategy was the beginning of 2022. But major advertiseres, as they realize how much work is involved shifting gears and following new marketing guidelines - many of which were detailed in this article - have asked Google for more time. These are companies that started preparing for the shift from 3rd party cookeis in 2020, and they are still not ready. As of June 26, Google has agreed to extend the deadline to 2023, but they have not put this change on ice. They will continue making the necessary changes to 3rd party cookies, albeit at a slightly slower pace. Let this be a lesson to the rest of us. If the big companies with their big marketing departments and advertising agency relationships are having a hard time ramping up their alternate advertising strategies, the rest of us need to start working right away, before too much more time goes buy.