If you are just starting to run your own business, SEO can be quite a daunting subject. I was definitely baffled by it in 2011 when I set up my first business Cocoa & Heart.
I initially thought: ‘What’s the point of even attempting to understand small business SEO, when I can never compete with large companies that have been around for ages?’
But then things changed – Google algorism has been updated several times in the last few years, sometimes with drastic results of websites falling into the the darkness of never ever land. Google started to weed out spam websites with loads of advertisements, websites without content, unpopular websites and websites that were using ‘black hat’ SEO to get to the top of the search rankings. Google become more and more concerned with websites trying to compete for keywords that were actually nothing to do with their content. It started to push to the top of the results websites that people actually wanted to read, liked to share and were genuine businesses. And suddenly search engine optimatisation become more of a level playing field.
It is still hard work and it requires a lot of tweaking as things change and it is most definitely a continuous job. You can never be really finished with your SEO!
[bctt tweet=”‘Slow & steady wins the SEO race’ ancient proverb” username=”magdamarsden”]
But the good news is that it’s now more than do-able!
Small businesses have the potential to reach first page of Google as much as any big company.
Of course there is a snag to it – it’s still very competitive to reach first page with certain keywords, but if you are more specific and focus on your local area, you are on to a winner!
So, for example, if you are a small producer of handmade chocolates based in Devon, it would still be difficult to compete with large established companies for keywords such as ‘chocolate’ but if you use something like ‘handmade chocolate’ or ‘handmade chocolate Devon’ you can certainly get in front of the right people in your area.
And my own example?
Once I started to apply what I learned through various courses, books and even directly from established SEO companies, my website traffic and ranking improved reasonably quickly. I say, reasonably, because SEO is not like a switch that you just change at the back of your website and it rockets you to the top of the Google. It takes time, but within a month, my website visitor numbers doubled and during the second month I started to get actual orders and inquiries as a result of my efforts.
There is much more to small business SEO than just the right keywords, meta tags and heading descriptions – it’s as much about how you bring the right traffic to your website and how you use off site marketing tools and social media.
In SEO world everything is connected.
For example, by having share buttons on your website, your friend is able to share your blog post with their friends, who then visit the website and post a comment. This creates traffic, which is picked up by Google, who then thinks ‘Hmm, this site is becoming popular, lets push it up a bit…’. Next time somebody searches for the keywords used in your blog, they actually find you (which they couldn’t previously). And then the next person…
You see, it’s all connected and possibly not as scary as you might think. After helping other business owners with their small business SEO and website strategy for a couple of years, I’ve decided to put all my knowledge together and create an on-line course that will help others to achieve what I thought I couldn’t when I first started my own on-line business back in 2011.
The practical SEO course always runs live and this summer I’m welcoming students from all over the world for the third time. If you are interested, you can find out more about the course here.
As always, I love to read your comments and look forward to answering your questions.
Magdalena
P.S. And my Cocoa & Heart website? My main source of course bookings and inquiries now comes directly from organic search. I don’t run any Google Adds or pay for advertising on Facebook or other media. I don’t do magazines adverts or advertise locally (those don’t really work anyway…), because I don’t need to. There is always more to be done, but so far all the hard work has paid off!
