Most everyone has a vague idea of what SEO is. But if you’re going to try to use it to succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to genuinely understand what the term means, how the concept works, and how you can leverage it in order to help your business prosper.
Defining SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it refers to practices designed to improve a site’s position in search engine results pages (SERPs). The goal of SEO is to improve the visibility and traffic of a site. In essence, this optimization is much like holding a search engine’s hand in order to help it understand a website.
Black and White Hat SEO
Now, as you might suspect, this can lead to both good and bad SEO. Your SEO practices must be centered around improving your audience’s experience. If you focus solely on short-term gains in the SERPs, you’ll inevitably find yourself engaging in ethically questionable practices.
Bad or “black hat” SEO involves the owner of a website deliberately misleading search engines by stuffing their site’s content with SEO tactics, even if it doesn’t accurately reflect the content of the site itself. This satisfies the needs of the search engine but doesn’t actually provide quality content for the audience — in essence, “lying” in order to get traffic.
Good or “white hat” SEO, on the other hand, utilizes sustainable, honest techniques in order to optimize a site’s content while simultaneously making the content itself focused on the audience, not merely on gaming search engines.
Types of SEO
In addition to white and black hat techniques, there are two kinds of SEO that you want to use in order to fully optimize your site.
The first is on-page SEO. This involves the content actually housed on your site. On-page SEO involves optimizing everything, from keywords and links within the content itself to meta tags and titles, image alt text, URLs, and even the code on the back end.
Off-page is the other kind of SEO you’ll want to consider. As the name suggests, this consists of any and all online SEO activities that you do off of your website. This can include things like guest posts, sharing infographics, working with influencers, and utilizing social media.
How to Use SEO to Build Your New Business
Now, if you’re starting to feel like a deer in the headlights, that’s understandable. SEO can feel very overwhelming at first. However, there’s no need to panic nor to throw in the towel. When broken down into manageable steps, optimizing your business’s online presence can actually be quite an achievable task, and it can yield tremendous benefits. Here are a few ways to go about using SEO in order to make your business shine and bring in traffic from across the web:
Create Genuine, Authoritative Content
First and foremost, always remember to put the customer first. One of the best on-page ways to increase your new business’s SEO is to create authoritative content that is aimed at the customer. In other words, if you start a company blog, make sure that you use it to write articles that provide real information and answer key questions for customers within your niche.
As you create content, start looking into keywords, including long-tail keyword phrases that are specific to your industry, expertise, and location. There are many different free keyword tools out there, like Google AdWords, Keyword Planner, or Keyword In. Look for one that you feel comfortable using, then search for keywords and phrases to include in your content. As you come up with a list of terms that people are searching for, add them to your content in natural places where they don’t disrupt the flow of information.
In addition, make sure to include links within your text that both point to other parts of your sites (known as internal linking) and outside quality sources (known as external linking). Governmental and educational sites are excellent quality external links. When you add a link to your text, also make sure that the words you hyperlink are applicable to the information being linked to!
Heading Off-Page
In addition to the on-site content, make sure to look for opportunities to share your business in other places. As previously mentioned, this can be done by using social media to personally connect with customers. It can also provide an avenue to promote your materials as well. Simply take the time to interact with customers as well as those interested in your niche and join in the conversation.
In addition, you can look for opportunities to connect with other authorities within your niche (known as influencers) who you can collaborate with. Providing quality guest posts for other blogs that include a link or two pointing back to your site can also help drive traffic.
Hiring a Professional
If want to use SEO but you can’t find the time to do so, you can always hire a professional to help. If you do that, though, make sure to set up a system of analytics in order to track their effectiveness. Remember, you’re not running a charity. If your business is new, chances are you don’t have a lot of capital to throw around. If that’s the case, you want to make sure that you’re investing your SEO dollars wisely. Make sure that you have a tool like Google Analytics tracking your data behind the scenes in order to see where your customers are coming from, how long they’re spending on your site, who is making purchases, and so on.
Using SEO to Succeed
In many ways, SEO is the lifeblood of the internet these days. While you always want your content to genuinely meet the needs of your customers, it’s good SEO that will ensure that the content reaches those customers in the first place.
The beauty of good SEO, though, is it doesn’t require a massive budget or an extremely specialized skill set. While SEO experts can take the concept of optimization to very detailed levels, it’s certainly possible for startups and fledgling companies to also throw their “white hats” into the ring as well. If you focus on creating quality, on-page SEO content and leveraging your off-page SEO endeavors to the best of your ability, chances are you’ll notice your online momentum beginning to build in no time.