The Importance of SEO for Small Business Owners

As a small business owner, you need to do everything possible to help your business thrive. That includes implementing a solid SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plan.

We’re here to explain SEO and its importance in keeping your business moving forward, along with some tips on how to best advance your online strategy.

Why is SEO Important?

Organic traffic from Google is the biggest traffic driver for any website, with an extremely high return on investment. The key is developing the proper online content that satisfies Google’s requirements to rank your content higher in search engine results, which then drives more traffic to your website.

When it comes to Google, your product is exactly what your customers are searching for online, so ranking ahead of the competition puts them at your doorstep immediately.

Who Are You Targeting?

When developing your SEO content, you must know its intended audience. This can be broken down into four types of search intents:

1. Informational: Anyone looking for information or answers to questions about a topic, business or product.
2. Transactional: Anyone looking to purchase a product or shop for services.
3. Comparative: People who may have an idea about a certain product, topic, or service but want to compare it to others to gain a clearer understanding.
4. Navigational: Some people want to land on a specific page and will use Google to find it, such as social media pages or shopping sites.

Keyword Research

One of the most important, if not the most important, things you can do when it comes to SEO is to optimize your keywords. Google is highly competitive, and proper keyword research is imperative for discovering what content will be a better producer of traffic.

So, implementing strong keywords which you think your client base will be searching for gives you a much better chance of having their journey lead them to you.

How To Win

So, how do you rank higher than the competition regarding SEO? There are hundreds of factors that play into how you rank. But it comes down to a few significant ones that will help you out-rank the competition:

1. Relevance: Your content must be 100% relevant to what your customers are searching for to rank higher than the rest. The best way to attract customers is to give them what they want.
2. Valuable Quality Content: You must engage your reader with original, non-duplicated content to not only get them to your page but keep them there. Ensure you cover the topic thoroughly, with a strong intro paragraph, detailed headers, appropriate content length, readable and concise sentences, and a user-friendly format.
3. Topical Authority: For your audience to fully trust your content, it must come from a reliable source. You. Establish that you are a trusted authority on the topic you are covering, by including links, quality content, credible sources and by displaying author credentials.
4. Backlinks: If you can establish a sufficient level of backlinks in your content, you’ll be able to demonstrate to Google your content is viable. The more authoritative backlinks, the higher you rank.
5. Internal & Outbound Links: Increase the quality and trustworthiness of your content by supplying outlinks to trusted, authoritative sources outside of your website as well as internal links to your own relevant content.

Flagstaff Crafted Logo

As a member of Flagstaff Crafted, you have received a copy of our logo attached to the welcome email. If you have missed it, you can download it HERE. We encourage our members to include our Flagstaff Crafted logo on their website where appropriate, with a link to our website. This not only encourages more traffic to our content, but it also benefits you, adding more credibility to your website, which can, in turn, build up the quality of your SEO content.