SEO: A quick guide for small business owners part 2
So, the first part of our quick guide – which is quickly turning out to be less quick than I expected – dealt with the mechanics of search engines and how users interact with them. As the most trusted providers of information on the web, it’s vital that businesses seek to maximise their exposure to search. The process of ensuring maximum visibility to search engine queries is Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO.
There are a few central pillars to any SEO strategy that don’t change, regardless of the minutiae of a campaign. The first, and arguably the most important, is perhaps the most often overlooked or underdeveloped SEO.
Research
Search engine optimisation centres on keywords – words, phrases and questions that you hope your business will be the antidote to. What we find when the research phases is neglected, though, is that there is often a significant gulf in how a business expects prospects to them and the reality of how prospects actually do.
My favourite example is that of a high-end car dealership selling second-hand luxury automobiles. Their branding is such that they would never use the term ‘used cars’ in their advertising, but does this branding strategy effective when it comes to SEO? If research illuminates us to the fact that one hundred people a day are searching for ‘second hand luxury cars’ as opposed to one thousand people a day searching for ‘luxury used cars’, the answer is obviously no.
The above example seems straightforward enough – keyword research certainly involves looking at the popularity of certain words and phrases, usually with the goal to find the most-used terms that relate to your product or service. But there’s a catch. Perhaps ‘used cars’ is getting ten times the search traffic compared to ‘second hand cars’, but let’s say that the number of results returned for the former are one hundred times greater than the latter. What does this mean for our SEO campaign?
Another vital aspect of the research phase, beyond keyword popularity, is looking at keyword competition. As we noted in the first part of the guide, search ranking is vitally important, as the first page of most search engines (and the first results on that first page) grabs most of the user attention. Many more people may be search for used cars, but also many more businesses are ranking against that keyword – it’s obviously really, the more common the term the more competition there will be.
Any SEO provider or business owner then needs to consider what is going to be more profitable – obviously it will be significantly more difficult to rank highly for the more competitive term, but it has significantly more searches. Perhaps, though, a very high rank (or even number one ranking) is within reach for the less popular term, returning to the business a larger percentage of that search traffic. Which is the way to go? Do you have the resources to pursue both? What about keywords and phrases people are using to find businesses like yours that you haven’t even thought of yet?
That is the beauty of the research phase – often you find out information on yourself and your competition that has usefulness beyond the SEO process.
This guide will continue throughout the next few weeks, so keep an eye out!
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