Beginner’s Guide to Basic SEO

In this article you will learn:

• What SEO is and how it can help you grow your business

• SEO basics you need to know

If you want your business to be successful in 2023, it has to have an online presence. Gone are the days when potential customers would open the Yellow Pages to find, say, a plumber. These days, they search for goods and services online. And if your business isn’t there to be found, they’re going to hire your digital-savvy competition. That’s where SEO comes in – it helps you get found amidst a sea of competitors on the internet. The best part about it? The better your SEO, the less you have to spend on digital marketing to attract new customers.

What Is SEO?

Let’s start at the beginning. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimisation”. A search engine is something like Google or Microsoft’s Bing – it’s what you use to look something up online. When you type something into google, it gives you pages and pages of results (because the internet is vast). Search engine optimisation is making adjustments to your content so that it shows up as high on that list of results as possible. Often referred to as Organic traffic, SEO can help customers find your business online without paying for the Google Ad.

If you were a plumber or baker, and prospective customers searched terms like “Plumbers near me” or “Robot birthday cake”, you want to ensure your business website and free Google Business Profile ranks as high as possible in the search results. The goal is to be on the first search engine result page (SERP). Did you know that 75% of internet users rarely scroll past the first page of search results?

Where Do I Begin?

As with any other aspect of your business, a good SEO strategy starts with identifying your audience and your objectives. If you only operate in South Africa, there’s no reason for you to try and show up on international searches. Similarly, if you’re a small, local business only looking to operate in your neighbourhood, you’ll want to target your efforts at making sure that people in your area will find you easily.

SEO basics you need to know

Once you have your strategy down, here are some SEO basics that every business owner should know. We cover this topic in more detail in our SEO masterclass with Peter Jooste, an industry expert with more than 10 years’ experience in this field.

Keywords: When a search engine crawls your website (their term, not ours) to see if it matches a search that’s been typed in by someone, they’re using advanced technology to scan all content on the internet, at lightning speed, looking for certain key words or phrases that are relevant to the topic being searched for. Sticking with the “plumbers near me” example, search engines are likely to return websites and Business listings containing phrases such as “plumber”, “blocked drains” or “geyser burst”.

Try this: When you choose your SEO key words, don’t just go with the most popular key words that the internet says are trending right now. Choose key words that align with your business, your objectives and your audience. Learn about tools like Google Keyword Planner and SEMRush in our masterclass.

Content: Create content around your SEO keywords. Search engines look for relevant, trustworthy content that’s going to help a user find what they’re looking for and answer their questions. So, think of your website as more than just a directory listing – there should be some substance to it.

Try this: Blogs, how-tos, Q&As and even About Us pages are opportunities to create content. Make sure your spelling and grammar are good, as this makes you look more trustworthy. And make sure your content is original – don’t steal content from other websites. Search engines can pick up plagiarism and they will punish you by ensuring your website or Business listing isn’t displayed on result pages. Answer the Public is a useful tool to help you plan relevant content by giving you insight into the type of questions people are asking Google around a particular topic.

Make sure stuff works. One of the biggest SEO mistakes you can make is having a website that doesn’t work properly. The search engine will send its crawlers (again, their term not ours) to crawl the site and if they find something broken, they’ll drop you to the bottom of the pile. It’s the same as if you call a shop and ask them if they have something in stock and they say yes, but when you go there, it turns out they don’t have the item after all. You’re unlikely to go back there in a hurry.

Try this: Make sure your website loads fast – a slow website means a frustrated user and search engines don’t send their users to sites that are going to frustrate them. Test all the links on your site – make sure they work and that they take you to the right places. Once again, broken links frustrate people, so search engines penalise them. Match everything up – your page titles and descriptions should accurately reflect what’s on the pages.

Now that you’ve covered the basics, read our 5 Tips to create a winning SEO strategy for your business including free tools you can use to get started.

A final thought

Although SEO can appear to be complex and technical, the benefits of getting it right is worth the effort of upskilling internally, or hiring a digital marketing specialist with SEO experience, to do it for you.

Thinking about your business's online strategy but not sure where to start? Take our free digital maturity assessment and get an action plan to get you started.

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