I recently asked on my Instagram page, what blog content you’d like to see more of, there was a clear winner: more SEO. So that’s what we are doing, this will be a series of blogs on how to tackle SEO for your small business. But firstly I wanted to start with a glossary of terms. I know as a marketer I can be guilty of throwing around these words, and maybe you’re feeling confused but you’re embarrassed to ask. I don’t want you to feel this way so let’s demystify SEO, this is part one, stay tuned for our SEO journey to pro!

Let’s start at the beginning, what is SEO and why does it matter?

Search Engine Optimisation  is the practice of using specific words or phrases on your website to improve its visibility in search engines like Google. So let’s imagine a customer goes to Google and wants to know:

“Yoga classes near me.”

“Sound baths in Hogsmead.”

“Yin Yoga in Hogsmead.”

How does Google know what pages to show?

The more relevant keywords you have on your site, the more likely you will show up for customer search queries. Google is very clever, it reviews many, many sites, and it makes a decision on which sites are best for that search query. So when I say to you, you need more text on your site, you need more location based keywords, you need to be more specific about what you do, this is why. I want to improve the chances that Google sees you as a reliable site. Now there are lots of techniques to achieve this, it’s sadly not just a case of throwing a few words around, but I want you to understand how important it is that your website shows up on the search terms that matter when you provide a local service.

The main techniques involve keyword research, on-page optimisation, creating high-quality content, and earning backlinks from other websites. We will talk more about these don’t worry. But hopefully now you understand what SEO actually is and why it’s an important part of building and maintaining a website.

Let’s do a glossary of other terms you might hear

Keyword

A specific word or phrase that your customers could enter into search engines to find relevant content. So this is where you get into the minds of your customers… what would they search for when they want a service that you offer? It will likely be the service followed by “near me” or a location, people will typically look at their town and those adjacent. I wrote a blog recently on how to do keyword research for your business, so for more on this topic head there.

Meta Title

You will hear me talk about an H1 title, so let’s explain that. When you or an agency create your website pages, each unique page has a large banner header, this is your H1 title. When customers search on Google it appears as the clickable headline in search results. 

It’s really important that this H1 title contains your keyword phrases in a natural way. Ie you can’t write like a weird robot and jam them all together, as I said Google is clever (this would also be a crap customer experience), but you do need to make clear choices, eg if I offered Sound baths in Hogsmead, I would make sure my H1 title for that page was Sound Baths in Hogsmead. 

And yes, it’s really important to have a unique page for each service as that’s more likely to be offered in Google search results.

Meta Description

Your website gives you the option to create the meta description for each page, in a nutshell it’s a brief summary of a web page’s content. It appears below the meta title in search results. So it’s no surprise that you should have your keywords in here too!

Backlinks

This is very simple, it’s helpful for your SEO to have trustworthy websites linking to your site, it increases the authority of your website. I have more about this topic on my local marketing page, read more here.

Crawling

I never like this expression! But essentially it’s the process by which search engine bots (crawlers or spiders) scan and index web pages. Clearly this is important if you want your site to show up!

Indexing

After crawling, search engines store and organise web pages in their databases for retrieval in response to search queries. This is why Google Search Console is important, we will have more on this topic in the next blog… so I’ll leave it on a cliffhanger!!

Algorithm

You started a small business and had no idea you’d ended up feeling like you’re back in a maths class! This is a set of rules and calculations that search engines use to determine which web pages to display for a given search query. This is why there is no “single” magic tip for SEO, it’s a combination of good practices that help you to be more visible. 

Long-Tail Keywords

Longer and more specific keyword phrases that are less competitive but often more targeted. This is really important for local service businesses, I’d prefer to target these than something super generic like “Vinyasa Yoga.”

Page Speed

The time it takes for a web page to load. Fast-loading pages are favored by search engines. The resolution of your images, how you embed video > these can impact page speed.

Alt Text

This is important. It’s descriptive text added to images to help search engines and screen readers understand the content. Basically you need to explain what the image is, not leave it as “image 54.”

Ranking Factor

Elements that search engines consider when determining the position of a web page in search results, such as relevance, backlinks, and mobile-friendliness.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of visitors who leave a webpage without taking any action or navigating to other pages. We don’t want a high bounce rate. So we want to ensure you have a clear customer journey and calls to action for visitors.

There are more we could include here but I wanted to capture the main concept in SEO. I hope this was helpful and stay tuned for the next part in the series where we will look at putting this into action!