Do You Want to Grow Your Business? Try Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There has never been a time in history when the opportunity to excel in any kind of business has been as available as it is now.

Large or small, every business has an equal chance of success if they know what to do. The playing field has been largely leveled such that small firms can compete with much larger firms with larger and deeper war chests.

What exactly leveled this playing field? The internet and much later, search engines. We certainly live in very interesting times.

What is SEO and Why is it Important?

Ideally, there will be no one in business today who do not know what SEO is and stands for.

Sadly, some folks may still be operating in the stone ages, running their businesses the way business was run decades ago.

Such folks are likely not to be recording too much success. For this special class of people, we will look at what SEO is.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process through which a website or webpage is positioned to show up on search engines whenever certain keywords are searched.

Okay! So how does that help grow my business?

Let’s track back and look at search engines, top among which is Google. There are a few important statistics you must never forget. The first is that about 93% of all internet usage begins with a search.

That is, 93% of the people who go online do not go straight to a website but to a search engine to search for something.

The search engine then offers them the results from which they visit websites that offer the information they seek.

So exactly how many people actually go online daily? This brings us to the second important statistics.

As at today, there are a little over 4.1 billion internet users. 93% percent of this will be about 3.81 billion. This is the approximate number of people that carry out a search on a search engine every day.

Google alone clocks over 3.5 billion searches on a daily basis. You can look at a live stat here. SEO helps you compete for the business of these 3.81 billion searches and this figure is constantly increasing.

Let’s try to be more practical. Let’s say you own a flower shop in Miami. Go to Google and carry out a search for the phrase “flower shops in Miami”. The image below shows About 16,20,00000 results came up.

Someone owns the number one website (which is not shown in the image above) while another owns the 28 millionth one. It’s been proven that about 75% of folks who use search engines never go beyond the first page.

Even on that first page, the first website on the search result gets about 33% of the traffic while the second gets about 17%, the third gets 11%.

It keeps reducing until number 10 which gets about 2% of the traffic. You, therefore, do not just want to be on the first page but in the top 3.

SEO helps you achieve this, positioning you to get more traffic to your site and by implication, more business.

Different Aspects of SEO

Search engine optimization is a combination of different processes that all work together to yield a specific result. These processes are divided into two major groups – on-page and off-page SEO.

On-Page SEO

These include steps taken on the website to make the website better optimized for search engine crawlers. Some of these steps include:

Website Design – The design of the website is an important factor in SEO. First, your website must be responsive.

This means it should be able to adjust to any type of device that it is viewed on be it mobile or a regular pc. Actually, since 2015, Google has been penalizing websites that are not mobile friendly.

With the continued increase in the number of people who access the internet through mobile devices, this crackdown is sure to continue to increase.

Ease of use is also a major factor to consider. Your visitors should be able to easily navigate your site as should search engine crawlers too.

You can use a site map to make this easier for crawlers, but your design, layout and navigation system should be clear and easy.

One of the ways Google rates a website is how long a visitor remains on it. If a visitor stays for an appreciable length of time, it is a plus for the website.

There are other issues to look at including how quickly your website loads, your meta description and others. Starting from your website’s homepage to every other page, deliberate steps need to be taken to position them in the best way possible for search engine listing and ranking.

Content – Content is king so the content on your site has to be top notch. You also need to optimize this content with the right number of keywords, LSIs, media content, links (inbound and outbound), H1, 2 3 3tc tags and more.

Off-Page SEO

This covers such activities as link building, social media sharing and more. All these different activities have to work together to achieve the end goal.

Here is an Infographic to understand how SEO can help you ranking on #1 in SERP.

How to Optimize Your Business for Search Engines

What we have discussed above does not even begin to cover all the different things that you will need to take care of to fully optimize your website. There are other issues like keyword research that are very important to the entire process.

It is therefore not something that just anyone can handle. For most business owners, the best bet is to find a suitable SEO company to handle the many different aspects of SEO, so they can focus on the real task of running their business.

This certainly will be a much faster way of achieving an impressive search engine ranking and thereby increasing traffic to your website.

Choosing an SEO Company

To choose an SEO company to work with, note the following:

• Look for a company with experience.
• Take a look at how well the company’s website is doing on search engines. This will tell you if they really know their stuff.
• Ask for past jobs and clients so you can rate the quality of work they do.
• Look at a couple of SEO companies and compare their prices and what they offer.

Conclusion

Regardless of the type of business, you are involved in, SEO can benefit you greatly. Take this important step and expose your business to billions of potential customers.