Do you know SEO can drive the potential customers at your business site who are looking for the same product, service, or solution?
But the question is, what does SEO stand for in business actually?
Every business has one main goal, “generate as much as revenue possible”
And when it comes to generating revenue and a high gross margin, you need to implement proper marketing strategies by taking the cost into consideration.
Although, there are tons of way to market your business all of them are costly and doesn’t guarantee success.
That’s where SEO stand for in business. It helps you market your business and ensure your visibility in front of your potential customer through organic search results.
Why SEO is important for business?
As a business owner, you might undermine the importance of SEO or delay its implementation due to the cost factor.
Search Engine Optimization plays a key role in generating organic traffic for your business.
Without traffic, it is impossible to attract the relevant audience and convert them into customers.
SEO is important because it increases business revenue without increasing the cost of marketing.
SEO help business to drive the potential customers at their site and convert them into leads and sales to grow revenue.
Your online business presence is nothing without SEO, it maximizes your online reach and ensures visibility in front of the right audience.
let's understand the importance of SEO for business in four easy steps.
1. Direct organic traffic from search engine
28% of users click on the first page of Google results, while the other results on the first page and second page get little attention. What does this mean? If your business site is not appearing on the first page for your business-related queries, this is the prime reason why you are already losing potential customers. SEO, boost your ranking in the search results, and get organic traffic visiting your website.
2. Primary Source of Website Traffic
Organic search plays a vital role in the lead generation and later converting them into sales.
for example –
Let’s assume you are a leather jacket seller, and You dominated the search engine with SEO.
Now if your customers will search for them. “Leather jackets” are most likely to click on your site because it’s appearing in the top result.
Apart from this, SEO is the primary source of your site that generates a constant flow of potential customers directly from search results.
The rest of the traffic sources are not as beneficial as organic traffic generated via SEO because they cost you tons of money.
3. SEO Builds Trust
In the era of this digital world, buyers are very smart and they have access to every information sometimes they know about a product more than a seller.
To see more relevant and helpful information, buyers are most likely to click on top results because they know a site can’t pay to google to appear in top results.
The only way to get there is product quality content and serve the relevant material.
If your site is appearing at the top, it will be built a sense of trust between your business and your customers since they know you quality the condition to appear in the top result.
4. SEO is a Long-Term Strategy
SEO is indeed a long process, and it takes time and effort to dominate search results.
Similarly, it is also true that once you are there, you need to be consistent with your SEO Strategies and stay on top all the time.
That’s why SEO is a long-term strategy. Further, it can bring in a noticeable impact on your business for years together.
Brands, who have been investing in SEO, understand that the more time and effort you put in it, the longer your website stands worthy. It pays off in the long run!
Common facts about SEO
Before we dive deep into how SEO is important for your online business and how you can do SEO for a business site to boost its visibility across search engines, let’s understand the common fact of SEO then we will be learning the best SEO techniques for small business.
What is SEO?
SEO is used to optimize your business site for search results and driving organic traffic directly from search engines.
Imagine you are a librarian in a very big university and you have thousands of books in your library around several subjects and student comes to borrow their desired books.
It became very difficult for you to find the right book for each student at the right time.
The process will consume lots of time and hard work and even after you might not be able to find the exact book at the moment.
In that case, you will feel a need for a system that keeps records of each book and finds it within a few fingertips every time a student asks for a specific book.
The concept of a search engine is also the same.
Search engines like google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. have crawlers, bots that analyze every single page over the internet and decide what pages are all about then algorithms decide in which order the pages will be organized appear in the search result.
Search engines use these algorithms and crawlers to find pages and index the webpages into their database and keep a record of it.
When a user searches for a particular query, the search engine finds the related pages on its database and quickly show the relevant search result.
The most relevant result appears on the top and as the relevancy decrease, the ranking of pages also decreases in the search result.
Higher search ranking will enable the pages to drive most of the traffic that comes for the particular query which results in getting more visitors, more leads, and more customers.
As a small business, it’s very important for you to rank higher on search engines for your business-related quarries, services, and products.
In order to get a high search result, optimizing your site and content over it and increase the relevancy according to user search intent will ensure you a higher ranking in the search result.
The process of optimizing your site and content to indicate to the search engine what your content and site are about, called SEO.
How does SEO WORK?
There are thousands of businesses similar to yours, are producing the content and improving their sites to get a higher search ranking for the same terms.
So how the search engine will decide which business should appear on the top?
And how will you make sure you get a higher rank among your competitors and get more traffic more leads and more customers?
There is no way you can tell search engines what your business is about and how best you serve the customers, unlike advertising, you can’t even pay a search engine to stay on top.
Although you can run the paid ad campaign which appears on the top of search results it’s clearly labeled with ad and people looking for great information are less likely to click on ad in comparison to the organic search results.
That’s where SEO comes into existence.
Search engines like google made a series of more than 200 ranking factors that decide the rank of any site or page in search engines.
Imagine if there are 10 businesses willing to rank for the same terms, so Google’s algorithm will analyze all pages based on ranking factors and decide their rank based on which pages are following more factors.
Search engine’s ability to see and analyze the web pages depends on how they practice ranking factors.
Because AI can’t understand the content on your pages until you call it out by practicing the best SEO techniques.
This is how does SEO work?
Now you have an understanding of what SEO is and how it works.
Yet you are not ready to practice SEO for small businesses.
There is a lot more to learn.
Types of SEO
Google’s 200 SEO ranking factors that I have discussed above, are categorized into 3 following parts.
I am going to describe each one of them and let you know how each part is important for your small business and how you can practice them in order to get the most out of it.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is about following the best practices to create the content that itself tells the search engine what it’s about.
In simple words, it’s about optimizing the content on your site to make it easy for search engines to identify and index it in their database that will enable the right users to find it.
Finding the right keywords and produce the content around is the main part of on-page SEO.
We are going to talk more about keyword research later in the section below.
Apart from keyword research, there are several factors that come under the on-pages SEO such as including the keywords at a certain location of your blogs, post URL, and Meta descriptions.
But you as a business owner or manager you don’t have time to read the in-depth guide and become SEO pros so I have created the complete free on-page SEO checklist for you.
Make sure to follow the checklist while creating content for your business site.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is performing outside of your site and creating quality backlinks on authority sites is the heart of off-page SEO.
Quality backlinks are one of the most important powerful SEO factor among all 200 SEO ranking factors.
Google crawlers travel on the pages on the internet through the backlinks to analyze and find the information.
If your business niche is related to critical topics like health and serious condition etc. Google hesitate to trust new sites no matter how good your content or SEO is, but if your site is linked to a high authority site then it’s easy for Google to trust and rank your site.
And regardless of niche, you still need backlinks to increase the authority of your business site.
If a site has greater high-quality backlinks then it will get a high search engine ranking in comparison to the same site that has a low backlink profile.
There are basically three types of links…
- Natural backlinks – This type of backlinks can be achieved only if you have high-quality resources and the people will automatically link back to your business site.
For example –
A blogger writing a blog on photography-related topics can link to your business photography site.
This kind of backlinks is most beneficial for your business as it can drive direct and highly relevant traffic from the other sources to your business site.
If you have great content, people will automatically link back to your site, this is how big brands and companies win tons of high-quality backlinks.
- Manual backlinks
Manually backlinks are created by asking others to link to your sites, such as guest blogging, sponsor post, and broken link building.
This kind of backlinks will take effort and time but the result will be worth it.
- Self-created backlinks
These types of backlinks are created by linking the sites on article submission directories like medium, Quora, enzyme article, forums, and thought the comment on other’s blog.
Most of the Self-created backlinks known as black hat SEO.
Although some of them really help in driving traffic especially from Quora and the public’s forms I would not recommend you to create these backlinks for a business site, it might be useful for affiliate sites or small niche sites.
Apart from backlinks, any action performed outside of your site in order to boost search visibility is also counted as off-page SEO such as
- Influencer marketing
- Social media promotion
- Guest blogging
If you want to go ahead and create the backlinks for your business site, I have written these articles especially for you.
6 ways to create high-quality backlinks for a new site in 2022
The ultimate guide of guest blogging for high-quality link building
Technical SEO
Technical SEO has nothing to do with the content on your business site but it plays an important role in how a search engine finds your site and updates its database.
It’s the process of optimizing your site for crawling and indexing. By doing proper technical SEO you can help search engines to identify, crawls, and index your business site properly.
There are several factors involved in technical SEO but the best part is, it’s only a one-time process – once you performed the proper SEO at the time of your website set up, you don’t need to repeat this process again.
If you have not practiced the technical SEO on your business site before, you might find it hard to index the content into a search engine database.
You can easily audit the technical SEO error of your site by using SEO tools like Ubbersuggest and SEMrush.
Read step by step guide to perform the technical SEO of your business site to get the most out of it.
Local SEO
Do you know 46% of Google searches are local and even after that at least 56% of businesses didn’t sign up for google business listing?
If you are one of them then you are losing tons of potential customers right away.
Local SEO is for a business that has physical stores that allow customers to visit their office or stores at a physical location.
It’s also important for online location-based businesses.
Local SEO is performed to optimize a business site for local search in a particular area.
An example of a local search is, “best hardware stores in New York”
“Coffee shops near me”
What does SEO stand for in business?
You have read and understood what SEO is and how many types of SEO are there? Now the question is, “what does SEO stand for in business?”
And the answer is, SEO helps your business to show the products and services to potential customers by keeping them on the top of the search result.
As I cleared in the sections above, the higher you rank the more traffic you get.
The more traffic you get, the more leads and sales you generate which directly increases the revenue of your business.
Now you have understood why SEO is important for business growth.
Let’s have a look at 8 steps you can follow to get the most out of SEO for your small business.
Practicing this step will ensure your search engine ranking among your business competitor’s
8 steps to increase SEO ranking for small business
Either you can do the SEO of your business site by yourself or you can hire an SEO agency.
Either way, you go, make sure you understand the basic SEO concepts that I have told you in the section above and you should also know the SEO optimization techniques to make sure you have the right knowledge of SEO optimization.
If you are outsourcing SEO experts, still you should have common knowledge about it, in order to get the most out of it.
So that you can practice these techniques in your marketing campaigns and content creation process.
- Hire an SEO agency
If you don’t have time and technical skills to do SEO for your business or you want to hire someone professional then an SEO agency is the best option.
But not all SEO agencies are as good as they claim to be.
I often come across SEO agencies who don’t have proper knowledge of SEO and they hire someone to do the SEO of their site (:
Most of the agencies create the private blog network on expired domains and create the client’s backlink on those sites.
But this is considered a black hat SEO technique and it’s outdated.
If the links are spammy, it can do more harm to your site than benefit.
If you are planning to hire an SEO agency then make sure you go for a reputed SEO agency in order to get results. It’s always better than falling for cheap SEO agencies that can hurt your SEO ranking more than good.
- Do SEO by yourself
Doing SEO for business is not as tough as you think, you can practice it by yourself along with your marketing team and content creation team to get the most out of your online business marketing.
If you practice these SEO techniques at every piece of content you create on your site, you will defiantly dominate the search result and get a higher rank among your competitors and generate more leads and sales.
1. Produce high-quality content
Producing quality content is the key to success in your online business.
High-quality content attracts, engage, and retains your audience while entertaining and educating them.
When people love your content they share it across social media and it opens new ways for your business site to getting backlinks which helps in boosting the SEO ranking.
Apart from a blog post, everything a visitor sees on your site is content such as social media pages, email, YouTube channel, and landing pages, and so on…
Tip – since producing quality content take time, you don’t need to create separate content for social media and other channels, you can refine and repurpose your blog post in social media and optimize it for other platforms.
Before producing content, you must know your business goal and it should reflect in every piece of content you create.
Simultaneously you should not forget who your audience is? Instead of just talking about your business, put your audience into the stories.
Answering these questions will enable you to create the content that your audience will love to read and share…
- Who I am writing for?
- How this will help my audience and add value to their life?
- What value they will get from this piece of content?
2. Excellence keyword research
Keyword research is the main part of on-page SEO, you have to find the words and key phrases that people use in search engines and include those words in your content.
There was a time before 2005 or even till the end of 2010 when this process used to be as simple as I said.
Now search engines like google focus on the user’s search intent and relevancy of your content to decide the ranking and it became less necessary including the exact keyword.
The search engines are smart enough to identify and serve your business site in front of your ideal customers based on their search intent.
Instead of focusing on the exact same keywords in your content, practice to provide as much as relevant information on the topic, if you properly match the user search intent, including the keywords is not necessary.
However, it’s still important to know the search potential and other important Metrix of the topic.
To become a master in keyword research and dominate the search result, read this ultimate guide to keyword research step-by-step.
3. Optimize for mobile
In 2020, 81% of users over the internet use their smartphones to browse the internet.
Users like to search, read, and shop online during traveling and free time anywhere and smartphones are a more convenient way to do so.
As cleared by the report above, if your site is not optimized for mobile search then you are losing tons of potential customers.
In order to capture the most of customers, make sure your site design is responsive and optimize for the smartphone screen.
If the content on your site is not fitting into the smartphone screen then a user who is browsing your site, will immediately drop away and never look at it a second time.
Whatever theme, layout, design, content, image, info-graphics, videos, tables and charts and so on… make sure everything is responsive and fits perfectly into the mobile screen.
And the second thing is, google prefers to show the search result in a smartphone with AMP enables. It’s Google’s technology which reduces the size of the page and shows the lite version of the page to make it load faster on a smartphone screen.
If your site is hosted on a CMS system like WordPress, you can use the AMP plugin to accelerate your site’s page speed.
4. Be active on social media
You might know more than me how important is it for businesses to have active social media profiles to interact with the audience.
Additionally, social media increase the shares and engagements of business blogs. It increases brand awareness and spread the word of mouth which leads to more traffic and customers to your business.
However, Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s webspam team stated on google official webmaster channel on YouTube “Google doesn’t consider social shares as a direct ranking signal”
Still social media help in boosting the SEO of your site, it drives direct traffic to your business site which converts into leads and sales.
Social media engagement also opens new ways for your site to attract tons of quality backlinks.
5. Organize your site structure
Organizing your site structure will decide how the main pages of your site are connected and lead to the deeper pages of your site.
Structuring your site in the right way improves the overall user experience around your site and it increases the time user spends on your site which is considered a major SEO ranking signal.
If your business site is not organized, visitors will find it hard to navigate. They might not be able to find the right information they need or the things you want to show them.
Unorganized site structure, make google crawlers confused about what your site is about.
Organizing site structure is not only about creating easy navigation, planning the internal linking and other content placement on your site does matter as well.
6. Optimize the site loading speed
If a site is taking 5 seconds to load on pc then it will take at least 8-9 seconds on a smartphone screen. And slow loading irritates the users, they are likely to hit back before the site loads.
Search engines like Google also considered the page loading speed the major ranking signal.
In order to make sure your site loads faster check your site’s loading speed at tools like google page insights.
Make sure to keep the score for both mobile and pc above 75% and the higher the better.
The big catch data and high definition images like media increase the page loading time which negatively impacts your site SEO ranking and drives users away from the site.
Fortunately, the CMS system WordPress made it easy for you to automatically fix this problem at a single click with the help of catch and media optimization plugins like WP Rocket.
If your site has video content then make sure you don’t directly upload the videos on your site instead of it you can upload the videos on platforms like YouTube and embed the links of your videos.
7. Focus on blogging for business
If you are running a business site and you have not started your blog then you are not getting the benefits of online marketing, not even a half.
Businesses with blogs generate 67% more leads in comparison to the simple business site.
Business blogging is used to drive more traffic to a business site and boost its search engine visibility in front of potential customers.
Who doesn’t want to get more traffic on their business site?
But how will you drive the traffic to your business site?
Imagine how customers find about a business website?
- They type the name of your business into a search engine and they land on your site. But the thing is, they are your regular customers who already know you. How new potential customers will find you?
- You can run social media and SEM ads campaigns but soon you going to run out of money.
That’s where business blogging comes into the existence.
When you write blogs on topics related to your business, you open the way for new customers to find your business site and get to know about you.
When a new blog is published on your site, you get new opportunities to be found by potential customers.
8. Write good blog description
When your site appears in search result with other similar sites, it’s only your Meta description which decides whether the user will click on it or not.
However, it’s not an important SEO factor that directly impacts your site’s ranking but writing a good Meta description will attract the audience's attention and make them click on it.
Meta description plays an important role in increasing the CTR of your site. (How many people click on your site regardless of how times it has been shown in the search result, is known as CTR).
A higher CTR rate is a major SEO ranking signal for your business site.
If you want to get more visitors to your business site, more leads, and increase revenue, read this blog on different ways to generate traffic on your site.
Final thoughts
If you are running a small business, SEO is more important for your site than anything.
As a small business, it will be more beneficial for you to boost your SEO rank and drive organic traffic instead of running paid ads and marketing campaigns.
Seo directly impacts your sales and leads which increases your business revenue and helps you accomplish your business goals.
I hope this informative guide makes it clear for you, “What does SEO stand for in business?”
What is your take away from this guide? Are going to practice SEO by yourself or hire an SEO agency?
Tell me in the comment section.
