What is SEO and why is it important for my online business?
How can you outsmart your competition?
You started your own business so you’d have more chances to do the things you love, right? You wanted to be your own boss so you’d have more time on your hands to spend with the family/in the water/travelling/knitting/[replace with favourite pastime here].
So if you can focus your efforts on making your business more efficient, you’ll be doing less work with greater results. Doesn’t that sound dreamy?
SEO can have a transformational impact on your business. It can catapult you from hiding in the shadows to being at the top of your industry.
When it comes to creating your home page, rewriting your copy, blog posts and media on your website, are you considering how it will have an impact on your online presence?
Will your website content really be useful to your perfect customer? Have you seen an increase in new businesses popping up that are still wet behind the ears, but who have suddenly risen to the top search result pages in a worryingly short space of time?
Having a website SEO strategy can help clarify all of this and ensure that every ounce of energy you are putting into your business is all for the greater good.
Everyone knows that SEO is important. But why?
Before we get into the HOWs of getting our website noticed on the internet, we’ve got to understand what effect it can have on your business.
What does SEO stand for?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation.
So optimising your content for search engines means making it clear and informative, and you’ve ensured that your business can be found easily online. By carrying out SEO, you are boosting traffic to your website (the equivalent of feet through the door of a brick-and-mortar shop on the high street, but in the online world). And you are ensuring that the traffic that you get is qualitative (- it’s as hard to type the word as it is to say it!) as well. We’ll unpick this all a little later on...
What is Google looking for?
Google wants to provide the user with the most relevant, useful, thorough answer to the query that they’re typing into the search bar. The thing you type into the search bar is called a keyword.
To find you the answer or response to your keyword, Google searches through the wealth of information on the internet.
On every website that has ever existed, Google gives various ‘indicators’ on the website a score, quantifying its value.
The score of the indicator depends on whether they think the content will be a good answer for keyword searched.
These indicators include (but are not limited to) web pages, entire websites, blogs, the number of similar keywords on a page, videos and images.
The number of indicators is tallied up. If you’ve optimised these indicators, making it clear what your content is, giving as much value as possible, the better score you have.
The better your score for that particular keyword, particularly if you’re doing it better than your competition, the more visible your company will be on search engine results pages.
Ok, so these SEO tips do count for something still if your potential customer is searching the internet using another search engine, but what I’m trying to get across is Google’s intentions and goals for their users, doing their best to keep internet users on Google. And they’re doing well from what I can see.
How does SEO work? And how will SEO affect my business?
So say you jumped on your laptop this afternoon and typed in the keyword “ski schools in Whistler”, ahead of your trip to Canada next winter.
Jim has a ski school right next to the main ski lift in Whistler, it’s a good one and has been around for years.
Rosy also owns a ski school based in the village, and is the new kid on the block. They are serious rivals on the mountain. But when it comes to their online presence, there are some stark contrasts.
In the results you’ve found on your Google search, both Jim’s and Rosy’s ski schools appear when the keyword “ski schools in Whistler” is searched.
But even though Rosy’s company is newer and her website is only a year old, it comes up on the results page first; Jim’s website has been online for nearly 10 years, but it is only showing as the 4th result on the page.
THIS IS BECUASE ROSY HAS IMPLEMENTED SEO ON HER WEBSITE AND JIM HAS NOT.
Rosy had set up an SEO strategy, and considered a ton of the indicators that Google is looking for.
By optimising these indicators on her website she has gained more ‘SEO points’ from Google. The more ‘points’ Google gives you, the more likely you are to rank well.
Rosy has so many SEO points, she has seemed to beat all the competition on Google for the coveted first spot.
ROSY HAS SO MANY SEO POINTS, SHE HAS SEEMED TO BEAT ALL THE COMPETIION ON GOOGLE FOR THE COVETED 1ST SPOT.
Rosy did her research on what keywords to use and where to include them. It is clear that her research has paid off, because Google has decided that her content is more valuable to you, and will answer your query better than Jim’s, when looking for somewhere to book your kids into for lessons on your imminent holiday.
By being the first website on the results page, more people are likely to click on Rosy’s website than on Jim’s. But the content of the website, once you’ve clicked through, that also makes a difference...
So what actually is ‘qualitative traffic’?
Website SEO is not just about getting as many people to go to your website as possible.
You’ve got to prove that what is on your website is providing value to the person that ends up there.
This might be through the problems you can solve for people if they buy your product, how you can make people’s lives easier through blog articles, the new experiences and perspective that will be opened up to them by using your service, or the educational video tutorials you upload to inspire (or a combination of all of these).
We’ve got to do more than just get people on your site — we’ve got to get people to stay on the page and delve deeper on your website.
… Back to our Canadian friends, to show what this looks like IRL:
There is little difference in the standard of lessons that Rosy’s instructor’s and Jim’s instructors provide, they offer almost identical lesson packages, the style of teaching is the same, but Rosy’s prominent position on the results page means people are more likely to click onto her website (i.e. more traffic) instead of Jim’s.
If Rosy’s website is interesting, people will spend longer scrolling through the different lesson options she has, get to know the instructors on the ‘about us’ page, maybe even head to the blog section to read about the epic trip the team did to Patagonia last year.
You’re interested in the company, Rosy’s coaches are portrayed as reliable, fun and all have great experience.
The longer you spend on Rosy’s website, Google thinks “oh, this website must be good because the user is exploring what they have to say, and didn’t get bored quickly and click back to Google”, so Rosy gets even MORE points.
For Rosy, you are quality traffic. The points gap between Rosy’s website and Jim’s is just getting bigger and bigger.
The more people Rosy gets on her website, as long as it’s qualitative traffic, the more sales she is likely to make, if she’s spending more time considering the importance of SEO.
Just by implementing a strategy on her website, the newer company can quite easily dominate the ski school scene in Whistler, over the more well-established businesses.
On the other side of this, you might be shopping around for lessons, and click on Jim’s website (sitting in that 4th position).
You’re finding it hard to find the info on lessons and prices, the content isn’t very interesting, it’s badly written and sounds a bit cheesy.
It’s frustrating, so you quickly click the backwards button to go back to the other options of ski schools in Whistler. You are deemed by Google as are low quality traffic.
You’ve shown Google the content isn’t very valuable to you, which equals negative or ‘bad’ points for Jim’s site. He’s falling behind now.
Can Jim scrape it back?
Now Jim might realise he is dropping lower and lower on the results page for the keyword search “ski lessons in Whistler”, so he goes and pays an ads agency to help him get better rankings.
He hasn’t changed the content of his website, but he’s lazy and wants a quick fix to out-do Rosy on Google.
If you are willing to put up the cash, you can be a bit sneaky and get someone to give you a hand.
But it can get expensive very quickly. In my eyes, that’s cheating. But I can assure you, if you can spend a little time prepping for your SEO, you can do A LOT and make an impact without paying a penny.
A business could have spent houurrsss on keyword research, pay a monthly subscription to some fancy online software that gets you mega accurate and insightful data, have done all your research on what your competitors are ranking for, BUT if you don’t have the actual content of your website dialled, it’s kind of all wasted.
It’s the language, design, tone of voice, imagery and easy navigation that makes people stick around.
You could jump to the number #1 spot for your preferred keyword, but if people get bored of or infuriated by your website very quickly, the backwards button is going to get clicked again and again and again, which means negative ‘points’ in SEO terms.
Does your website need a bit of a spring clean?
Are your competitors consistently showing up above you on Google searches?
I hope these main take-aways can help you along the road to making a bigger impact with your website, by understanding the importance of SEO. The bigger the impact, the bigger the rewards (think more email subscribers, bigger social media following, healthier cash-flow).
Just remember:
Google isn’t just looking for loads of keywords chucked onto the page in order to rank your website highly
Try as best you can to answer the problems and queries that will arise from the keywords you want to rank for (if people click on your website expecting info on snowsports lessons in a Canadian ski resort, but click on your site to find content about summer activities in the region, they aren’t going to stick around long)
Search engines also want to make sure they are providing their users with quality info
SEO can be boosted by the value that your website offers the people who view it: only by attracting the right people, and keeping them scrolling on your website, your ranking will improve
Consider how easy your website is to use, how easy it is to find the info they’re looking for, whether the copy reads well and sounds authentic, to make sure people enjoy being on your website, and don’t click the dreaded backwards button returning to Google, too soon
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