You may not think you need SEO for small local business websites and blogs, but you do.
In my lifetime, I’ve only ever seen three Green Woodpeckers. I think it’s a fair bet that most people, if asked, would say they’ve never seen a single one. And yet, surprisingly, the Green Woodpecker population is fairly stable. Why surprisingly? Well, if I’ve only ever seen three, how do they find each other, in order to breed?
The answer is, of course, that they take all the right steps to make sure that other Green Woodpeckers notice them.
For one thing, they have a particularly loud, distinctive song that only others of their kind would be drawn to. These others, don’t forget, will be listening out for this song, to the exclusion of all the other birds’ songs.
Also, they eat, almost exclusively, ants. So, by hanging around the local ant-bars, they’re highly likely to bump into other ant-eating birds, i.e. Green Woodpeckers. In other words, they’re optimizing their chances of meeting a mating partner.
Which brings us to SEO for small local business. Search Engine Optimization. You may think, as a small business owner, that there will be little in the way of competition for the top spot in your category, locally, in the search engines. Wrong. Unless you happen to run a highly specialized small business, then there will be plenty of competition on Google, Bing, Yahoo and so on.
Chances are, though, the top search engine results pages (SERPs) will be from big national directories and organizations. Your first real competitor will probably be some way down the list. They’re the ones you want to beat, because they hold more credibilitywith local people than the bulk directory listings and the Pay Per Click (PPC) results at the top and right hand side of the page.
If you’ve done no SEO on your website, you’re likely to be way down the list of SERPs, in which case, you may as well have no website at all, since nobody normally looks beyond the first or second page of their search engine results.
But all is not lost. It’s surprisingly easy to push your website or blog higher up the rankings, with just a small amount of time and effort spent on search engine optimization.
By inspecting your competitors’ web page source, you can discover the amount of optimization you’re up against. If the website or blog is implemented using WordPress, then you can see from the source if they’ve installed an SEO plugin, such as All In One SEO, one of the most popular at the moment. If you look at the source for this page, you’ll see the following line:
<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v1.0.3 - http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/ -->
The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin is one I’m testing right now, and so far, it seems to be giving good results. The first time I used it was to boost a local building company from nowhere in the natural search results to high page one ranking. This worked in a very short space of time, so I’m pleased with the plugin so far. It’s very easy to use, if you follow this guide at wpbeginner.com.
You can find plenty of information about SEO via the search engines, but a good place to start is with Google’s own Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.
The table of contents is shown here, to give you an idea of what SEO involves:
- SEO Basics
- Create unique, accurate page titles
- Make use of the “description” meta tag
- Improving Site Structure
- Improve the structure of your URLs
- Make your site easier to navigate
- Optimizing Content
- Offer quality content and services
- Write better anchor text
- Optimize your use of images
- Use heading tags appropriately
- Dealing with Crawlers
- Make effective use of robots.txt
- Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links
- SEO for Mobile Phones
- Notify Google of mobile sites
- Guide mobile users accurately
- Promotions and Analysis
- Promote your website in the right ways
- Make use of free webmaster tools
If you’re happy delving into HTML, or configuring your own WordPress settings, it’s well worth implementing some basic SEO techniques. A little SEO goes a long way!
So, you can see why you need SEO for small local business websites and blogs. If you don’t use it, you’re like a Green Woodpecker sitting quietly in a parking lot, hoping for a mate to come along. It won’t happen.
Terry
Photo: By User:Hans-Jörg Hellwig (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons