Written by Huntington Chamber Member, Sean McAuliffe, President at Ecommerce Maven, LLC a Long Island SEO Company
Many small business owners either don’t see the value in investing in SEO campaigns or simply don’t have the time to invest in working on SEO. Other business owners want to rank higher in Google search results but don’t know how. In this article, we’ll explain the basics of Search Engine Optimization services and why we think it’s worth the investment for all businesses.
What is SEO?
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your web presence so that your business ranks higher up the page in search engines such as Google search results.
Generally speaking, there are three pillars of search engine optimization SEO.
Technical SEO
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of making sure that your website’s structure is optimized for Google and other search engines to crawl, index, and serve your website in their search engine results pages (SERP).
If Google or other search engines can’t properly crawl, read and understand what your website is about then they won’t want to serve your website to searchers on their platform. Thereby decreasing your website’s visibility.
Some of the things that we look at in regard to technical SEO would be your website’s meta titles and meta descriptions. We’d make sure that each page has a clear indication of what it’s about by making sure that all of the headings are filled out and make sense. We want to make sure your robots.txt is formatted correctly and that your website loads quickly, which is especially important for customers on mobile devices.
On Page SEO
What is On Page SEO?
On Page SEO is the process of making sure that your existing website has high quality content that is geared towards what target audience might be searching Google for. Doing keyword research using tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner can help you figure out what keywords you should be focusing on in your content marketing plans. A good SEO company can also do this for you and use more advanced tools to make even better suggestions.
Another aspect of on page SEO is link building for internal links. If you can link your pages together in a meaningful way for search engines, they will ranking your site higher in their search results thereby driving traffic to your site which can help with lead generation for your business.
Off Page SEO
Off page SEO is mostly comprised of link-building and content marketing.
Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to your website. This is one of the main determining factors of how search engines decide where to rank you in their search engine results pages. If many important websites are linking to your website with the text “pool company long island” then search engines will know that they should rank you high in their search results for the term “pool company long island”. If no other websites are linking to your site with that term then the search engines are likely to present a competing website that does have those links.
3 Reasons why SEO is important for Small Businesses
#1. More inbound calls without buying advertising
#2. Evergreen strategy that will continue to drive sales for long periods of time
#3. Provides insurance against slow months
#1. More inbound calls without buying advertising
Many small business owners rely on referrals, print & digital advertising, or plain luck to get customers. What happens if referrals dry up or you need to turn off your print & digital advertising for budgetary reasons? How will new customers find you?
According to a recent study, the top result in Google gets 28.5% of the total clicks. The percentage of clicks drops sharply the further down the search results page you go with minimal people making it to the second page.
Image Source – Search Engine Journal
If you can invest some time and money into search engine optimization, you can rank towards the top of the search results page which will be very difficult for competitors to beat you on, winning you more inbound traffic.
#2. Evergreen strategy that will continue to drive sales for long periods of time
Unlike traditional advertising which loses its effectiveness rapidly after ending a campaign, a good Long Island SEO Company, can get your business to rank toward the top of the results page. Just as ranking toward the top of the search results page can take months to make happen, it will take even longer for a competitor to knock you down the results. If you decide to end your SEO campaign, you can still rank at the top if your competitors are not actively running their own campaigns.
#3. Provides insurance against slow months
Getting referrals from past customers is fantastic, however, you can’t exactly plan your business goals around that strategy. In order to have an effective strategy for business growth, you should have a reliable source of leads. If your business has high organic rankings, you can be pretty sure that you will get more traffic to your site which means more potential customers.
I’ve heard many business owners say that they can’t handle the business they currently have so it’s not important to them to rank on the first page. I disagree with this sentiment because again, you never know when your current source of leads might dry up. Furthermore, it stands to reason that if you have higher demand then you can charge higher prices, increasing profit for the business.
Conclusion
SEO is important for small businesses because it can help them increase website traffic, leads, and sales. If you’re not sure how to get started with SEO or want to make sure you’re doing everything correctly, contact Ecommerce Maven LLC for a free SEO audit. Ecommerce Maven is a long island SEO company who knows this local market and wants to help other businesses succeed. We’ll help you identify what changes you need to make to your website so that you can start seeing the results you desire. Thanks for reading!