Marketing is amongst one of the most important considerations that you should have a small business owner. While your product or service could be amazing, without the right marketing, no one will know about it, and no one will buy. There are several aspects to the marketing mix, but one of the most important is SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is the act of optimising your website in order for the search engines to rank it higher and higher in the search engine results pages (the SERPs).
When you search for something online, for example “cake makers in Essex”, a series of different results appear. For our example, we have The Sugar & Spice Cake Company, a Yell listing and a Facebook page, among others. If you’re using Google, you’ll often have a map of businesses in the area; ads down the side; and URLs in the middle.
SEO aims to help your business come up in these results when someone searches for something relevant.
Why Utilise It?
A lot of people use search engines. In 2013, there were on average 5,922,000,000 searches per day on Google, and while Google is by far the most popular, there are others like Bing, Yahoo, AOL, which means that there are even more searches. Search comes in to a person’s repertoire wherever they are on the customer journey, whether someone is searching for information, for reviews to read or to write themselves. So if you want to drive traffic to your website, then you need to be appearing in the results pages when users search.
Using our example, the number of average monthly searches for “cake makers in Essex” is approximately 1 million (you can check out your keywords using Google Adwords). If you’re a cake maker in Essex, you really want to be top of those results, so 1 million people will see your name, and even click on it.
While there are lots of ways to get your business seen by customers on digital channels, ranking high on the search engines is one of the most important parts of the puzzle.
How Do I Do It?
There are lots of resources on the internet that can help you do it yourself, but it will take a lot of time. There are several tools on the net to help you, like this free auditing tool from WMG. If you have more of a budget to play with, hire a professional to do it for you. From hiring a digital marketing executive with specialist knowledge in SEO to employing an agency so you can have a whole team of experts working on it, this is often the preferable option to trying to figure it out yourself.
