Understanding SEO for your small business website
You can watch the video presentation version of this post below, or if you prefer to read, scroll to below the video!
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation and it really just describes how your website is set up to be found by a search engine, typically Google.
What we need to remember is that search engines are serving their audience. They want to deliver the best, most accurate and useful answers to whatever the user has searched because that is what will keep people coming back and using Google over and over again.
When it comes to SEO for our websites the first step for us is to make sure we are providing useful content to our ideal client and then from there we can work to optimise it and make the most from it.
High quality content is the baseline, the most important thing we need for a well performing website, which will come from your market research and identifying your ideal client and their needs.
Once you’ve nailed all of that down, there are things we can do to make sure this information is presented in the most Google friendly way possible.
How a search engine reads your site
Search engines find your website by using robots to trawl through all your content and then serve up the information it decides is most relevant to the searcher. These Google bots can only read text, so your website copy is the most important aspect of your SEO.
The great thing is, setting your web pages up to be easily read by Google, follows the same principles as setting up your pages for your website visitors to most easily digest – two birds one stone!
What are keywords for your website?
All the text on your website should include keywords wherever possible.
So what are keywords? They are the words that people will be typing in to Google when they are looking for the service or product you offer, for example, ‘wedding hairdresser glasgow southside’. So you want to make sure you include these words and that exact phrase throughout the text on your site. Don’t go crazy, it should still sound natural, but do your best to include them where it makes sense.
Finding keywords to use doesn’t need to be complicated. Think about the words you would associate with your business around these headings:
your business name
your location
your service or product
event or special offer
It’s also important to think about the less obvious phrases people might be searching when looking for what you offer. If you’re based in the southside of Glasgow you will also do wedding hair throughout the wider area, so think about the related places people will be searching too.
If you use Chrome, there is a free extension you can install called Keywords Everywhere, which gives you a list of related keywords and search terms when you use Google.'
Applying keywords throughout your website
The idea with the text on your website is to remove any vagueness, particularly in headings, and replace those terms with your keywords.
For example:
My Services becomes My Web Design Services
Our Products becomes [Business Name] Products
Hi, I’m Kirsty becomes Meet the Squarespace Website Designer
What We Offer becomes Handcrafted Floral Bouquets for Weddings
Structuring your content for SEO & your users
Now you know what keywords are, you need to know how to use them.
As we all know, humans browsing the internet have an incredibly short attention span. So we need to make sure the content on our site is visually engaging and broken down into manageable, digestible chunks.
When writing the copy for your website it’s helpful to create a hierarchy for the different types of text that your website needs. This not only helps the reader to take in all of the information on the page but it also tells those Google robots which pieces of text are more important than others.
In web building terms there are 6 types of headings, then standard paragraph text. These range from h1, the most important, to h6 the least important (although typically I just work with h1-h4).
Looking at a list like this doesn’t really help you very much, so I’ve got a template ‘best practice’ web page for us to look at.
Your opening statement/h1
This should be an opening statement for your business and will clearly convey to the website visitor, what you do and who you do it for. This should be just one sentence or statement that conveys one key message. If it’s your homepage it will be your mission statement, if it’s a secondary page it will be the goal of that page. Be brief and to the point.
From a web building point of view, this should be a ‘Heading 1’ or ‘h1’. That is what will tell Google that this is the post important piece of text on the page.
The sub-heading/h2
The sub-heading can expand upon that key message but shouldn’t get too bogged down with details. A sentence or two at most. This gives additional key information but should also be brief. Think of it as a bullet point type statement and this should be a ‘h2’. If you are a location-based business, you should include where you are based.
Your services/product categories
This is a good place to use a h3 text type. Give each of your services or product categories a heading, it’s helpful to use descriptive names here rather than stylised names. You can use these on your services page, within the description, but until someone gets to know you, ‘fancy’ names for your products and services won’t mean anything to them, so be plain and simple, even if you think it’s a bit boring!
Connecting with your audience/using keywords
This is where you can start to expand more, but don’t get too wordy in the text used throughout your site. It’s important to always keep your goal in mind when writing for your website. People are short on time and have a limited attention span, especially online, so you want to get your point across as quickly and effectively as possible. Short paragraphs of text dropped in throughout your site are best. Explain what you need to and remember to talk in the language of your audience, but don’t start writing War and Peace, that is reserved for blog posts and articles only.
Again, if you are a location-based business, remember to mention your place name often throughout the text on your page. You can dedicate a paragraph to this, using the place name and your service in the heading and in the copy.
Call to action
Don’t forget to include buttons throughout your pages – this will direct the user through your content and take them on the journey to get to know you and finally make that next step.
From an SEO point of view, linking your pages to each other helps to build your sites credibility, proving it’s a useful and engaging site that people spend time on.
SEO for your images
Another factor that plays into your sites optimisation is page speed. Google prefers websites that load quickly and the number one thing that slows down the load time of a standard website is images. This is usually because the file sizes are huge, particularly if it’s been taken directly from the camera or phone storage with no editing, these files are often a minimum 1 megabyte. When you have multiple images on a page, this can really add up to create a large page size, that loads slowly.
Once again this is Google thinking about their end user, people online are impatient and won’t wait around for slow loading sites.
Your images should be as compressed as possible and no more than 500kb, although ideally, they should be under 250kb. As small as possible without effecting the quality. The ideal pixel size for your images is between 1500px and 2500px, depending on where you are using the image.
To resize images you can use software such as Photoshop, or your computers default image editor. There are also free online services that can compress large JPG and PNG files, such as https://tinyjpg.com/
I said earlier that Google can only read text, which is true but it includes the text associated with your images, so the file name. This means should name your images descriptively, including keywords and your business name.
So instead of IMG083618.jpg your images should be named rustic-peach-wedding-bouquet-longlevens-flowers.jpg
The most important takeaway about your website SEO
Make your headings unique and use words that describe your business, your products and your services. If someone was to only read the headings on their page, would they understand what you were talking about?
Further reading:
5 Simple ways to increase traffic to your website
Simple website terms explained
Interested in working together on a website for your small business? Get in touch below!
