The basics of SEO that every business should do
Large or small, most businesses can benefit from some sort of SEO. Whether you need a full campaign or not depends on the results you want to get, the more you put in the more you get out.
In this article, I’m going to talk about what SEO basics every business should do, whether you’re a large corporation or a small one-person business. And I’m going to quickly show you how to do each of them.
It’s 2020, most businesses have some sort of online presence, whether this was a website that you had built years ago and just left it there to do nothing, or you have invested a lot into it.
Doing some SEO basics, not only will it help you drive more business through your website, but it will also make your website look far more professional when people research your company. Because believe me, they do research before buying from you.
Recent research by PRO SEO Galway states that only 20% of businesses actually know how to optimise their meta titles and descriptions properly. That’s why it is vital for businesses to outsource SEO to highly skilled search engine optimization experts.
If your website displays like crap in the search results, it’s going to put people off working with you, whether it’s a deal-breaker or not depends on many things.
Below I’m going to cover the 5 SEO basics we at Arken Marketing believe every business should be doing on their website.
1. Keyword research
So you have a website, great now what? We have to look if people are searching for your business, service or product. What are they searching for?
This is the most important part of any SEO campaign, without doing this correctly you’ll end up just wasting your time with the next steps.
Do some research, look for keywords that people are searching for, you can do this by using Google’s auto-complete. Go to Google and type your service or product, what does it come back with?
You can also look at tools such as Ahrefs.com, whilst it isn’t free it will give you all the information you need when looking at keywords. From the search volume to the number of links you’re going to need to rank the keyword.
Below I’m going to show you how to get a general idea of how to do keyword research using Ahrefs.com:
Using their Keywords Explorer, we’re able to see not only the competitiveness of the keyword we’re researching. But also the amount of searches this keyword, in particular, gets every month.
Keyword research is the most important part of any campaign, if we go after irrelevant keywords, we’re going to be wasting our time. If we go after keywords that are too competitive for us, we’re going to be wasting our time. The example above is a very competitive keyword, and it doesn’t really get searched that much.
Let’s try another:
Whilst neither of these terms are searched that much when you compare it to consumer searches, both will hold significant value to whoever is ranking for them. The first one has a keyword difficulty rating of 46, whilst the second is 15.
You have to weigh up what you’re willing and able to put into your campaign whilst weighing up what keywords you think are viable to rank.
2. Title tags
The title tag is the text in the browser tab. Now that you’ve gone ahead and researched what keywords you want to target, how should you optimise for them?
Like this?
Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Keyword 3 | Company Name
Or like this?
Find Keyword 1 Experts In LOCATION – Company Name
The old way of optimising title tags was the first version, nowadays you will likely get an over optimisation penalty for doing that. We still see plenty of websites doing it this way, but they risk having all their hard work undone by an algorithm update (oh, by the way, there’s 200 of these a year!).
So now we’ve got our keywords, and title tags. What else?
3. Supporting headers
So most websites have headers on every page, how do we add keyword-rich supporting headers?
When we look at the keywords we wanted to rank for, there will always be some variation to our keywords. For example, if I’m looking for a London based accountant, you could search for any number of different terms to get the same result.
For example; ‘London accountant’, ‘accountant in London’.
So we have a keyword in our title tag, and then we can use a variation of that within our headers.
For this, you will need to use some basic HTML, depending on how your website was built your CMS may make it easier for you.
4. Supporting content
When we find the keywords we want to target, take a look at the search results. What sort of content is being displayed? Google is very good at matching searcher intent, so if the keyword you want to rank for has long-form articles ranking, most likely that would be the best type of content to rank.
Is it videos? Then perhaps that might be the best for that keyword.
Can you answer the searcher’s question better than the piece of content currently ranking number 1? Great then go ahead and do that.
5. Backlinks
This is where most SEO campaigns fall down, how do you go about creating backlinks to your website? There are 100’s of different ways in which you can do this, but for this let’s focus on some quick wins.
Depending on your business this will vary, but if you’re a supplier or stockist of somebody’s products. Reach out to them, can they provide you a link? It’s in their best interest for your site to perform as well as it can so most won’t have a problem with it.
Are you an expert in your field? Reach out to bloggers that write on your industry and offer them some content, not only will you get a link to your website but you’re also getting in front of your target audience with your content.
Depending on how much you want to invest in SEO, every business owner can at least do these basics to not only help their website get found more but also look more professional to potential customers.
