A Simple Guide to SEO for Businesses

This guide as you will see, started life as a long email to someone I had agreed to offer some free advice to because they were having some issues with their business because of the Coronavirus pandemic. It turned out to be a fairly decent guide to the easily actionable things that a small business owner can do immediately to improve their SEO visibility on Google.

Apologies for the personal style, but I thought it would be good to share these tips more widely. It is just the basics and of course there are many other things you can do and some things which might not be appropriate for everyone, although it is mainly solid advice to get you started and not too technical.

I’ll try to distil a bit of quick actionable SEO advice for you, so that you can get started with some of the things that will improve your position on Google for organic searches.

A few things to know at the basic level: Pages / posts not whole Websites rank on Google, so it is all about making particular pages on your Website as optimised as possible for certain keywords or keyword phrases.

I have included a link below to the Moz beginners guide to SEO. If you have some time on your hands because of cancelled events, then you could very easily spend it well by going through this guide. If you follow this as your learning resource, you can teach yourself the major parts of SEO and you can use your site as the test case. It is well written and fairly non-technical. It tells you what to do simply and in a step by step manner. You can learn a lot from it and more than I can tell you in an email.

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

I’ll summarise some key points though for you, that you will find in detail in the guide.

Fix your onsite SEO – is your site in WordPress? If WordPress, then you need to install a plugin called Yoast. Use Yoast to fill in focus keywords for each page and post on your site. It is straightforward to use and gives you a traffic light-style system to make sure you have done everything you need to do to make a certain page well-optimised for SEO.

Things you will want to do. Choose a keyword theme for a page. Make sure that keyword phrase or word is in the URL of the page, so bluebelldigital.co.uk/seoadvice and then in the title of the page – eg “SEO Advice – Bluebell Digital” and then in the body of the content. “Today we are going to go through some SEO advice.” You can mention it more than once, but don’t feel you have to say it multiple times – it doesn’t work that way any more for SEO. Your content should be at least 300 words long. I would go for something like 500 – 750 words for an average page or blog post. You can go longer, but try to keep everything on one theme only, so it is well optimised for one unique (preferably) keyword or keyword phrase. Maybe write an executive summary-style introduction for any really long content.

If you have a bigger topic, then hyperlink the subtopics that you feature in the page to separate sub-pages that go into fuller detail on those sub-topics. So my SEO advice page might have a series of links to “Onsite SEO”, “Link Building” and “SEO Content Strategy”. Each of these subjects then would have its own page, so I can write a fully-optimised page / post just about that topic. Also, that creates a nice structure that Google can recognise and see that your site has a whole area of content that is well-organised around a particular topic. UX and usability are also important to SEO, so you want people to be able to easily find information on your site and to be able to navigate easily around. You can have a deep structure, but you don’t want to bury stuff under too many layers – perhaps have everything only up to three clicks away for example.

In Yoast for WordPress, fill out the meta title and the meta description, so including your focus keyword in both places (plus your URL stub). Fill out an alt tag for any photos which features the same keyword and try to include photos and video (tag videos appropriately too) for your page. Use categories and tags too in WP. If your site is on a platform other than WordPress, it should have some similar functionality that you can use to fill out meta information that Google will display in the snippets / summaries you see, when people find you on search. This is how you control what people see there and it doesn’t have to be precisely what is in the actual page, although of course it should be closely related. Don’t add random words to this. Keep it relevant. Also good to put your key phrases / keywords as upfront as possible, so at the beginning of a title for example.
Go through every page and post with this process – this is fixing your onsite SEO.

Go to Google’s search console https://search.google.com/search-console/about. You should sign your site up to this, as it can give you information on the performance of your Website for SEO and in general how it looks / performs on Google – errors can be found and fixed etc. Again in WordPress, there are ways to use plug-ins to link your site up to Google’s search console to pull information into the WP dashboard. I won’t go into too much detail, as I don’t know you have WordPress.

Google Analytics – use this. Set it up, if you don’t have it already. It is free and tells you what is happening on your site. You can see user journeys and understand where your traffic comes from – so organic and any paid channels such as Google Ads and social media plus referrals or PR campaigns for example. Also demo, device and geo info plus you can create goals for ecommerce and qualitative things like time on site or pages read. Bounce rate means the percentage of people that hit a page and then left the Website immediately without going elsewhere on your Website. A high bounce rate is generally a bad thing and you want people to spend a good amount of time on your content. This will all vary by business and industry. Remember some pages will have a high bounce rate by design, so Google for example doesn’t really want people to stick around – it wants them to arrive, search and then click through to another website quickly, as that is the service it provides.

Once you have done the above, then start to think about where the gaps might be for your SEO strategy. Look at the keyword list you supplied me – do you actually have a good page or post on each of those topics? If you don’t, then you won’t rank for that term – there is no or very little chance of Google showing your Website for keyword terms you don’t have on your Website. This seems obvious to me, but a lot of people don’t realise it somehow. This should give you a list of places where you need to improve your current content (as above) or create whole new pages or posts to fill that gap. That can be your content plan / strategy for the next weeks or months. Write carefully curated SEO optimised posts / pages for these topics. You can also research what comes up on Google to see what the competition is for these terms – try to write something more complete or generally better than these articles / posts as they are your competition for this search term.

Another way to look at it, is by doing some keyword research, so try to find relevant keywords that are high traffic – use Google keyword tools if you have a Google Ads account or use services such as SEMRush or the Moz tool itself. If you are really serious about SEO, then I would buy a subscription to Moz – it costs about 100 dollars a month for the basic plan – loads of education material and you can then use it to track your keyword positions. This will tell you whether your SEO efforts are bearing any fruit. Get your keyword list plus the new keywords you have found and add them to a new campaign within Moz. You can then see as they go up or down the rankings on Google. Hopefully, as you do more SEO optimisation, you will see improvements in your keyword visibility – you can see this down to the keyword level via Moz or similar tools (also SEMRush which is a similar cost)

Another way to look at things is to find good relevant high traffic keywords, but to apply a competitive filter to that list, so Moz or similar tools will show you which keywords are high or low competition. A high traffic keyword which is relevant to your business, but is also low competition is the ideal “low hanging fruit” as you can then get your content optimised for that keyword or create something new and you will have less difficulty in getting your page to rank on Google, because there is less competitive information out there on a similar topic / theme. SEMRush in particular (and Moz) can also tell you a lot about what your competitors might be doing for paid search and how they are ranking for various keywords organically too. You can take inspiration from what they are using for their content / SEO. You can also just go and look at the Websites of competitors or any written resources that have been created for your industry sector (magazines, news sites, institutions or member organisations)

Google is only trying to show the best content to users at the right time. That is the most important thing to remember about SEO. You aren’t trying to game the system or use any black hat techniques, that might have worked in the distant past. If you stick to writing good, solid, content that isn’t too lengthy or too short around a particular topic that is highly relevant to your product or service, then you can’t go too far wrong. Use customer service or information that you can glean about what questions people are asking about your area of expertise online to inform your content strategy. If you are answering the needs and questions of people that are searching on Google, then you are doing what Google needs from you and you will be rewarded with decent rankings. Don’t get hung up about being number 1 – be more than happy if you get into the top 10 / first page for any of your important / high traffic keywords. This is fine for your first efforts at SEO and it can take some time, so keep at it over a period of months not weeks and you will see results. Keep on top of search trends in your industry sector. Use tools such as Google Trends to explore this. https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=UK

Halo marketing – this is another technique to build your content and reach around your services or products. Try to take a very customer-centric view of what you do. What are the problems that your customers are trying to solve in a broader sense? What are the types of content that will help them most? Take my business “digital marketing” for example. Some big companies like Hootsuite have very good content and social media that is aimed at an agency or digital marketer like myself. They do of course write occasionally about their latest commercial offer for the software / tool and they talk about new features etc. That is fine and expected, but what they do, that is cool for me, is that they mainly write really useful blogs about key aspects of digital marketing, that I find interesting and or useful. Interesting, useful or entertaining are the three “needs” that you should try to make your content address for its audience. Hit two of these and then you are on to a winner and will be making engaging content. Hootsuite might write something like – “What are the 10 best free SEO tools for digital marketers?” Now they don’t offer SEO tools or services themselves, but this is an article that I want to read and will subtly create a positive association in my mind for Hootsuite and perhaps give me a little push towards their product suite, if and when I decide I need social media management tools for myself or for clients. It also keeps them top of mind, if I follow them on social media to get access to all this useful blog content they are sharing regularly – see Social Media another very long email / article from Bluebell Digital 🙂

Final aspect of SEO is link building (in my simple guide to SEO – there are lots of advanced things I am not going to cover right now). This is the principle that Google has made it’s billions of dollars from, in that the search engine is at least partially built on the idea that links to a Website create a profile, which it can use to assess the relative importance or influence of that Website. So for example, if you write an article about SEO and then Moz, the BBC business pages, the Guardian Tech blog and a well-known SEO specialist agency all link to that article, then you can be pretty sure that it is a good article on the topic of SEO. Each Website will have something called Domain Authority (DA) – ie what does Google think is the relative importance / credibility of this Website? DA is a kind of mark or score that companies like Moz have developed to measure this Google “link juice” that credible Websites have. Big organisations like newspapers, TV channels, academic organisations, museums or institutions are likely to have high domain authority, if they have decent Websites and content, as you can only imagine how many links there are going to (and from) content for a big broadcaster like the BBC. https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

Obviously it is much harder for small / medium-sized companies to get this domain authority, because they are less famous. However, you can follow a link building process (sometimes also called SEO outreach) to try to get relevant websites and blogs to point links at your good content. You can also take the route of writing guest posts, articles or blogs for other relevant industry publications and then get that content to link back to a relevant page on your site. This process is largely manual and is a bit like the digital version of getting good PR in the past. It involves researching high Domain Authority (DA) websites in your industry and then literally reaching out to them to get the links described above. It is well worth doing this, although fixing onsite SEO and having a good content strategy might be your initial priorities. Moz again has a whole step by step process for doing this well and efficiently. https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building

So that is a lot of work in itself. There are lots of more advanced techniques, you can get into when you have expended all of the above. The only other last advice I would give you is to check your site speed, as this is something that Google will penalise, if your site is too slow. 

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/feature/testmysite/

Try this for your site and if you are in the red or amber, then see if you can implement any of the suggestions that Google gives you to improve your Website speed. These will be things like compress your images or use different site loading techniques. Often quite technical, so a Web developer / designer might be needed, although some can be fixed with a WordPress plugin for example, although always be careful here if you aren’t confident with what might change on your site, if you try installing something new.
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo is your beginner’s guide. Enjoy!

I hope that is all useful. SEO is an ongoing process and if you do any of the actions described above well, then you will start to see improvements in your organic rankings. Use the suggestions above to try to generate a keyword list of say 50 – 100 keywords that you can track (in Moz) and use as a baseline to measure success and growth over time. You can also see organic traffic information in your Google analytics account.

Bluebell Digital is a digital marketing consultancy offering help to small and medium-sized businesses and start-ups in London, Brighton, Sussex, Surrey and Kent.