All The SEO Basics You NEED To Know

I imagine you’re here because you’re a small business owner that has recently been made aware of SEO and has vaguely been told how it can bring you more business, or, you’re currently looking into a new way to improve your business's online presence?

Great, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s go into more detail about what SEO is, what improvements you can make to your website and how it can help your businesses grow. This guide goes into detail about the basics of SEO and is an amazing starting point if you are just learning about SEO.

How can SEO help my business?

Between updating your website’s content, building your backlinks (the most important act of SEO) and providing your visitors with a functional and speedy user experience you’ll begin to notice an increase in traffic. More traffic towards your website could mean more sales for your business.

You must remember that your website is like a shop window with unlimited potential and SEO helps unlock that potential by building your Google ranking and pushing traffic to your website and products. For example; if the shop across the road from you has a sales sign, SEO is making your own sales sign but bigger and brighter.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Which consists of, but is not limited to:

• Updating your website to run smoother.
• Posting on social media, forums, directories and other websites to build backlinks.
• Updating your website’s content to use keywords within your niche
• Improve your Metadata so Google can crawl your website more easily.
• Looking deeply into Google analytics and your website's user experience
• Using best practices for SEO to increase web traffic

What is a Google Crawler?

Imagine a spider that is searching the world wide web for information. It’ll look through your website and find out information within your

Alt tags - Text attached to images within your website

Title tags - This is a type of metadata that shows on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)

Meta description - This description also shows on SERPs

HTML (HyperText Markup Language)

Keywords - These keywords or phrases help Google know which searches to put your website into

Sitemaps - These can be easily generated and allow Google to know what pages to crawl or not crawl

Bounce rate - This measures how long users stayed on your page. 26-40% bounce rate is where to aim

Rich snippets - are structured data markup that help give crawlers and search engines a better understanding of your website's informationWith these and many other factors, the crawler will then use this information to decide what your website is about and how helpful your information is while reporting back to Google. We want to optimise the metadata so the crawler has an easy time navigating your website’s information. The goal is to always be better than the website above you so constant competitor analysis is key.

Why is SEO important?

Making sure your website is optimised so Google or other search engines such as Bing can find your information easily is a method of marketing that a lot of smaller business owners seem to overlook. Your website can bring you in a lot of business providing you put the time and effort into doing so. If this is done correctly, Google will start pushing your Google ranking higher and higher, which will ultimately grant your website more traffic (traffic = the number of people who visit your website). The more users you have visit your website the more likely one of them will contact or buy from you.

Why do I need a high Google ranking?

Your Google ranking is defined by at which place you appear in the list of search results when searching for keywords or phrases related to your products, website or business niche. The higher your ranking the more likely a user will be willing to visit your website.

Example: You sell candle’s to relieve stress. You’d want your website to be the first link on Google when someone Googles ‘’Candles to relieve stress”. This is because 90% of search engine users don’t go past the first page of Google or Bing.

This is why it’s so important to be optimised and making sure you’re able to stay on that first page as often as possible because “Candles to relieve stress” is a selling search term which means the user is usually willing to purchase from this need.

How long does it take?

Optimising your website is a lengthy process and requires patience and practice. Your aim is to rank higher and higher within Google or Bing over time and not overnight. Google will sometimes take weeks to crawl your website but you can always priorities this by requesting your website to be reindexed within the Google console.

If SEO was an Olympic runner it’d be more Mo Farah than Usain Bolt (it’s a marathon, not a sprint).

How do I start Optimising my website?

We can begin with some of the basic changes you can make to your website to help towards improving your Google ranking/ SEO score.

This can be made easier by breaking it down into two categories “on-page SEO” and “off-page SEO”.

What is on-page SEO?

This is the optimisation of everything on your website itself, including your website content, how the website looks, the amount of images on your site, etc.

Why is on-page SEO important?

If your page is not correctly optimised it will not show up on search engines and you may not gain any traffic from different searches other than your brand name and sometimes your brand name may get pushed down if it isn’t unique enough.

What on-page improvements can I make to optimise?

There are many different types of on-page changes to be made to your website:

Keywords: these are certain words that can be used across your website that are related to your niche (Candle shop: Relaxing, fragrant, slow-burning and scented). You can use tools such as Google Keyword planner to find the best keywords for your website to help Google understand your niche.

User engagement: The longer you can get someone to stay on your site the better. But visitors don’t want to stick around if your website is slow, unresponsive or has broken links. (The average person will go back to the search engine they came from if your website doesn’t load within 3 seconds.)

Mobile-friendliness: Nearly 60% of search engine users use a mobile device to search. That’s roughly 2 billion people. Imagine a 10th of them visiting your website but not sticking around because it’s hard to navigate.

Alt tags: Adding a description to your website’s images is not only great for SEO but helps the visually impaired navigate your website too.

Title tags: This shows on your websites search engine results pages and is the first thing the user will see. Make sure it’s catchy with the keywords you need. (Betty’s Candles Relaxing scented candle)

Meta description: This shows up under your title tag and is a description of what your website/business provides (Betty’s Candles is a candle shop based in London that sells candles that aid in stress relief, build confidence and help ease the mind, body and soul.)

Sitemap: Adding a sitemap to your website will allow web crawlers to find it’s way around your website more easily. This way it can gather all the details it needs to report back to Google about what your website is.

Content is only half the battle when optimising your web page. There is no point in having content on your website if the user visiting it can’t access it.

Let’s say you’ve finished your website, it’s running fast and you’re ready to launch it out for everyone to enjoy. Just because your website is optimised doesn’t mean you’ll begin to gain traffic right away.

This is where off-page SEO comes in.

What is off-page SEO?

If on-page SEO is the optimisation of your website and its content, off-page SEO is the process of optimising who will be able to see the website outside of a search engine. Adding yourself to a local directory, creating a Google business page or simply posting on social media are all examples of off-page SEO. This is where backlinks come into play.

What is a backlink?

Backlinks are links from another site like a friend’s blog, a directory or even Facebook that links back to your website.

How can I build backlinks?

This is the easy and fun part, post, post, post!Posting on all of your social media accounts to advertise to your friends, family or customers is the first step in building solid backlinks. Make sure your link is attached to your posts so your fan base doesn’t have to try to find you in Google themselves. You want to make the backlink easy to use.You can trace where your website traffic is coming from using Google Analytics to find out who is coming from where and how long they are staying for.

Key to success

Making sure you’re consistent with your practice.

The more you keep updating your website, posting backlinks on social media and providing your visitors with great content and an optimised website, the more Google will trust that you are the right website to show their users when searching for related keywords.Additionally, updating your website will provide a reason to bring old visitors back and new visitors in.

Remember it’s a marathon

The longer you’re in the race the further you’ll get and your ranking will show it. But don’t get disheartened when you make changes and your website isn’t suddenly changing ranks. The secret is to keep on persisting, you’ll be sure to notice your changes taking effect over time.

Post, post, post!

The more you share the better. Make sure you’re building those backlinks towards your website. The more links out there the easier you’re to find, the easier you’re to find the more business you’ll drive to your website.

Start now!

If you really want to take your online presence seriously you have to start working on your SEO immediately, like seriously, right now! We can’t iterate enough that SEO is a marathon and not a sprint. The sooner you pick up those shoes and start your journey, the quicker it’ll be for you to see some results and for your customers to find you online.

We understand that this isn’t possible for everyone because running a business is a full-time job itself, but fortunately for you, the team and I already have our running shoes on and are available to help you and your business excel online. For more information or simply a chat, feel free to drop us a message through our website or email us at [email protected].