I have always been intrigued and interested in working for small businesses post grad. This week, I wanted to focus on the benefits of Search Engine Optimization for smaller companies. I read an article that talks about how having good SEO strategy establishes authority and attracts potential customers to drive more traffic to your site. SEO works by capitalizing a search engine’s ability to find and display information posted on the internet. The user wants to find helpful content and if you provide the most relevant and helpful information, you will be featured at the top of the results page. The article goes on to talk about EEAT. EEAT stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. This is important when you are assessing how your website will rank on search engines. In EEAT, expertise is crucial. You can prove your expertise through backlinks and transparent sourcing. The article gave examples of good SEO which I found really helpful. They gave examples of businesses like “Cosmetics company” and then identified a popular question like “Which lipstick colour is best for dark skin?”. Then they listed what the business created to rank high on that question. For this example they could create a “FAQ section that includes a question on the best shades of lipstick for various skin tones”. Another interesting thing I found in this article was an emphasis on tracking and measuring your SEO results. They said that you must take a long-term approach and be patient to see the results that you want. You can start by using google search and see if your pages pop up under different keywords. Then you can start using digital analytics to get hard data on how many visitors came to your sight and how many stayed. Overall, I found this article very helpful and interesting and can see very clearly how SEO is helpful and vital to the growth of small businesses.
3 Responses
I think you emphasized some very important points. For whatever reason, when I think of SEO, I naturally don’t associate it with small or local businesses. However, to say that SEO has no connection with small or local businesses would be dead wrong. As you mentioned, SEO is crucial for small businesses and can go far in increasing conversions.
Jenna, this is awesome and I really want to touch on the long-term approach! Long-term focus is so important especially for a small businesses because it will allow for them to mature into the green and prosperous business that they desire to be. If they wanted short-term success, I’m sure black hat tactics would come up but sticking to a proper plan that may not produce results in the beginning will pay off in the long-term.
Great summary! I love the focus on EEAT and how SEO helps small businesses build authority. The example with the lipstick shades was a great way to show how specific content can drive traffic.