How Can SEO Grow My Business?

I’m sure every business with a website has wondered: How Can SEO Grow My Business?

It’s a question as old as SEO itself, and it largely underestimated and misunderstood, even by profession website builders. A lot of website designers build a website to look nice, but forget that SEO is the biggest deciding factor as to whether Google will show your website or not.

I wanted to cover some of the most important SEO could be used to grow your business. And I meant that in the sense of ranking for more keywords, ranking higher in Googles suggestions, getting more traffic and converting more of that traffic to actual paying customers.

I’ve also written this on Medium in case you prefer reading over there!

Before we start, if you don’t know what SEO is, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. And the entire point of SEO is to provide search engines a greater incentive to display your website higher than other websites.

This is done in a number of ways, some of which we will cover today. But SEO can also be quite abstract, and a lot of businesses instead get comfortable working from ‘work of mouth’ and forget that they’re missing out on 95% of customers.

If you’re business currently operates entirely on word of mouth, then this post is definitely for you. Trust me, Google knows more people than the homeowner you installed a fence for last week.

Growing your business through organic traffic is completely free and can be done by anyone that understands some basic principals. In a nutshell, Google and other search engines are looking for original, helpful and credible results to show to users.

And unless you are running paid ads to get Google to plaster your website to the top of search results, you’ll probably want to read on…

Ranking for keywords and ranking high for keywords are two heads of the same beast. On one hand, you obviously want to rank for as many keywords as possible, but you also want to rank higher than your competition so that potential customers see and click onto your website first.

One of the best ways to improve your rankings, is to research what you can actually compete for.

I use the free Keyword Research tool from Ahrefs.

Trying to rank for keywords like ‘VPN’, is pretty much impossible. Don’t believe me? Look at this!

So whilst there are hundred of thousands of people searching for the keyword ‘VPN’, the chances of you seeing any of that traffic is next to 0. When starting out, you should try to find a balance between traffic volume and the keyword difficulty.

I find competing for easy to medium keywords works best for me. But if someone is reading this from Forbes or the BBC, then yeah you can probably compete for high difficulty keywords.

You can often find as well that adding another keyword, otherwise known as ‘niching down’ can improve your changes. So instead of competing for ‘VPN’, you could compete for ‘VPN Netflix’, which has some easier keywords but gets much less travel:

Hopefully you can see now that it’s a huge balancing act. Do you want to get 0.1% of 100k or 80% of 10k?

This could also be called ‘Trust’ or ‘Authority’. And it encompasses how well Google thinks your website knows the subject of the user’s search and it’s surrounding subjects.

The easiest way I can describe this is with an analogy. If you Googled for ‘best cake recipes’, you’ll find that most of the results come from baking focused websites. There will likely be no results from a sports website that also posted a random baking post.

This is topical authority in action. Google knows what your website is about, so focusing your website down to a specific category or niche is often super effective at getting keyword rankings.

You could also compound this topical authority with social proof. So if your Google Business Profile only has 5 reviews, then asking previous customers to leave a review will help Google see your business as more credible.

The same way you’d likely pick a plasterer that has 500 reviews versus a plasterer with 10 reviews.

If other people like your business, then changes are new customers will like you too.

Forgetting to actually serve the human customers in favour for optimising for internet robots is also a great way to discourage visitors from becoming customers.

This can be boiled down into a few categories: speed; function; mobile optimisation and ease of use.

I personally use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to make sure my website technically functions as good as it can. It’s almost impossible to get full marks for this one, but making sure your website is as good as it can be will definitely help.

You can see how my own website performs above. I’m happy with how it currently stands, whilst it’s not 100%, it still shows as credible to search engines.

You also need to make sure that you website functions, nothing worse than having a checkout procedure that is broken or a button that doesn’t do anything. So double check your website, send it to family or friends and get them to find things wrong with it. Don’t get offended, get busy fixing what they suggest!

Oh and please, please, please make sure your website works great on mobile. So many business will start building a website on Wix thinking it’s easy. They’ll build it all on desktop, test it on desktop and completely forget about mobile devices.

Unfortunately, ~60%m of website visitors are on mobile. So forgetting this is kind of like turning away 6 out of 10 customers before they even come into your store.

I’ll breeze over this section a bit, as I have covered it in previous posts, but you want to make sure that you have a good title, h1,h2 and h3 headers along with alt text for your images.

So instead of writing all your text with the H1 heading, please use other options and format your content correctly.

Your website will lose credibility if this isn’t the case.

The last topic I will cover is content. This is everything that the user will see or read on your website.

Right from the hero title to the footer. Making sure that you website has unique, useful and relevant content is really important.

Google and other search engines also have AI detection technology, so if you’re planning to just churn out posts using this method then you’re out of luck unfortunately.

Using your own images over stock images is also preferred. Search engines knows when you’re using stock images which can cause them to see your content as less authentic. If you are writing about something specific, make sure you have images and diagrams to back it up.

You obviously want your content to be useful! If you’re title it ‘How Can SEO Grow My Business?’ but the post is about baking banana bread, then search engines will see it as confusing and irrelevant, causing your post to not get picked up and rank for results.

Lastly, you want to try and put a unique spin on everything you do. This could be a particular point of view you have, a writing style or any other element that will cause you to stand out from the crowd.

If there are 10 identical lemonade stands, but you have one with bright flashing lights, bigger cups and you’re mixing the lemonade fresh to order then you have the advantage.

What I find most days, is that businesses have a bigger budget for toilet roll than SEO and website maintenance. Causing them to turn an asset into a liability. Your website should be changing as fast as your business does.

Missing this is causing your business to quite literally miss out on new enquiries and customers.

If you’re still struggling to get this signed off by a manager or supervisor, then find out how much your business makes from an average job and how much the SEO changes will cost. Then you can work out how many jobs per month you need to bring in to pay for the SEO improvements.

And the plan therefor, is to bring in those extra customers and more using the SEO improvements alone. Essentially meaning, that SEO pays for itself.

I hope you enjoyed reading this and learnt something new!

Enjoy! 🎉