There are a lot of moving pieces in the SEO world and literally, hundreds of different things are shown to have correlations with your rankings in Google.  Often, for small business owners who just step into this world because they see how important it is, it leads to immediate confusion. They meet with a few companies offering SEO and they all seem to tell them different things they are failing at or high priority action items that need to be taken to move them forward. Some of these may be true, while others may unfortunately be outdated or misguided. I have seen many a proposal that was either ignorantly or intentionally asking a business owner to spend a lot of money on things that wouldn’t help them at all, or at least very marginally.

So if you have a website and want to get started on improving your SEO performance and rankings, where should you start?  In actuality, every industry, and even every search, has a different competitive landscape, which means different things have different weights depending on the search.  For some searches, speed may be more important, while with others it may be review scores or counts. Still, others should have video or images to boost their content, while others need far more inbound links coming in to your page to move it up the rankings.

So Where Do You Start With SEO?

I have been helping businesses with SEO for nearly 15 years, and though every search is different, there is one constant. Since my day one in the world of SEO, it has been known that “Content is King”. It makes sense.  You won’t rank for a particular search unless you have content that answers the question right?  Google’s job is to provide the best answer to searcher’s questions. It would make sense they would look for good content to provide that answer. Think about what Google is “searching” for, which generally is what users are searching for.

Content is King

Content is King SEOWhat does that mean in 2020 SEO? You should have a page of content for any concept you want to rank highly for. For small businesses, this means you should have a page for every product or service you offer, and in many cases multiple pages addressing different user needs and questions about those products and services. To get started though and make it feel manageable, start with a page for every product or service you offer.  Write a nice and comprehensive piece of content for what your users may be looking for. What is the process for hiring you? Why should they hire you over someone else? What issue will your product or service solve? You don’t need to aim for a word count, but understand the more important questions you answer, the better you content is, so usually a few sentences will not suffice.

If you are looking for ideas, go to Google. See what the highest-ranking pages are writing about your topic.  Their content may give you ideas about other topics to mention, which may give you an extra paragraph or two. Chances are if a majority of the sites ranking on the first page of Google mention a topic or subject on their page, then Google finds it important. Add your own version or spin on that piece of information.

Break Up Your Content

While being thorough with your content, also make it user friendly. Break up your paragraphs and give them headers. Users want all of the information to be there, but they want to be able to easily pick out the two or three sentences most important to them. Whether it is pricing, process, reputation, or some other important information, break up your paragraphs and use headers to make it easy to find that info.

Link Your Content

When you write your content, link between pages on your site. As you grow your content and write more supporting pages about your core services, always remember to link back to the main service page when discussing it elsewhere. This helps spread the love around and shows page importance.

Don’t Forget Google My Business (GMB)

Google My Business is also a representation of your business online, so another place to add your content. Remember to add content here as well. You can list your products and services and be specific here as well. Take all of those services that you created website pages for, and make sure they are also represented on your GMB page. This gives Google more and more information about what you offer. If you haven’t set up your GMB page yet for your business, get that started. They will lead you through the process.

 

If you need help getting your SEO going, give us a call and get started with an SEO plan to help you get found.