Organic SEO or Organic search engine optimisation considers the natural efforts a company or an individual must make to improve their search engine rankings.
It can be pretty daunting, confusing and challenging for small businesses to get their heads around the subject of SEO and how it can benefit their business.
But a robust online presence enables small businesses to reach potential clients or customers using the internet.
If you are unsure where to start or what to focus on, here are some fundamental principles for maximising organic SEO for your small business:
Understand the Potential of Organic SEO
Not knowing the potential of organic SEO is where most small businesses get into trouble with their SEO programs. These small businesses don’t know what they’re trying to accomplish.
Organic SEO isn’t just about ranking high in search engines. It’s also about getting more traffic to your small business website and increasing conversion rates. The more users and potential clients visit your small business site, the more opportunities you have to convert them into customers. If you don’t have enough traffic from search engines, it will be challenging to achieve these goals.
Develop and Implement a Results-Driven Strategic Plan
The strategic plan will help you understand how much time, effort and money you should allocate towards achieving your organic SEO goals.
To start with, make definite and clear goals and objectives that are measurable and actionable.
After goal setting, spend some time answering the following questions:
What do we want people to do? For example, buy our products or services or sign up for our newsletter.
Who are our target customers? What terms or language do they use when searching for products/services like ours?
Once you have answered the questions, you must start writing the plan.
Review the plan and start implementing it step by step.
Focus on Targeted Keywords That Deliver More Than Traffic
One of the essential principles to maximise organic SEO for small businesses is to focus on targeted keywords that deliver more than traffic.
This means that you should be using keywords specific to your business and its industry but also words that are broad enough to be searched by consumers looking for what you do.
For example, if you sell pancakes, you might want to use the keyword “pancakes” in your SEO strategy—but this will only attract traffic from people who already know what pancakes are. If you want to bring in more customers who aren’t as familiar with pancakes and don’t have their expectations set yet, try using a longer-tail keyword like “What are some good pancake recipes?” This will bring in more customers who are just starting their pancake journey and need guidance before buying from you.
Start paying attention to the competition.
As a business owner, it’s easy to focus on your product or service and forget about the competition.
But to maximise your organic search engine optimisation efforts, you have to do more than focus on what makes your brand unique. Please pay attention to what other similar brands do and how they do it.
When you’re just starting, focusing on yourself and how amazing your business is can be tempting. But if you don’t look at the competition—who they are, what they’re doing, how they’re marketing themselves—you could miss out on some great opportunities.
You can use tools like Google AdWords or Bing Ads to track your competitors’ keywords and see which ones they rank for. These SEO tools will give you an idea of which keywords are working best for them and which ones might be worth trying.
You can start by looking at what keywords they’re ranking for and checking out their content to see why they’re getting those results. Are they publishing blog posts? Does your competition have a solid social media presence? What kind of images are they using?
If you do this research and find out what works for them, then you can apply those strategies to your content strategy and see if it works for you too!
Keep SEO in Mind Throughout the Web Development and Design Process.
SEO is a component of any website.
It’s not just about keywords and meta descriptions; it’s about how your site is structured, how it loads, and the user experience it provides. Google has penalised sites that load slowly or have a poor user experience.
No matter how beautiful or quirky your website looks or how many great features you have on your site, if users can’t find what they’re looking for or have difficulty using it, they won’t stick around. That’s why it’s important to keep SEO in mind throughout the web development and web design process.
Conclusion
Organic SEO allows small businesses to compete with larger companies in ways that were not previously possible.
