02 Oct The 4-1-1 on SEO for Business Websites

Every business sector these days is full of competition. How can a potential client discover your company, and why should they choose your services over those of one of your many competitors?

Your potential clients will probably be of the Millennial generation, and Millennials are much more likely to search for potential businesses via the internet. (They’re also more likely to do their searching via the tiny computer known as a smartphone rather than on a laptop or desktop computer, but that’s an article for a different day!)

According to Matt Walker, CEO, and founder of Main Path Inc., in an article for Entrepreneur magazine, “How do Millennials find your business?”  Millennials “spend about 18 hours a day consuming online media…”  In addition, Millennials have a great deal of spending power – about $200 billion dollars a year, according to Forbes magazine.

If Your Business Doesn’t Show up on page 1 of SERPs, it’s costing you business

When someone, Millennial or otherwise, searches online for “best electrician in Sand Rock, Arizona,” or “best Greek restaurant in Fort Collins, Colorado,” the search engine they use will return a list of hundreds or even thousands of results.

But searchers typically only look at page one of the search engine result pages (called SERPs). If your business is not on page one, or at the very least page two, it will very likely not be found by web searchers. This “habit” was first studied as early as 2015 and has not changed to this day. (See How far down the search engine results page will most people go.”)

Millennials Will Find You With SEO

How can you get your business to show up on the first page of SERPs?

SEO.

Search engine optimization.

SEO is divided into two parts – on-page SEO and off-page, or off-site, SEO.

Each of these parts is integral to the other. If both of them are used to work as a team, the result is a website that will be found on page 1 of SERPs for the appropriate keywords.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO refers to everything on your website, from the URL to the meta tags to the text to the number of pages the site has. 

When a search engine such as Google “crawls” the web indexing and re-indexing websites, its algorithm tells it what to look for and where to place a site based on its algorithm.

Content is key. Every page of a site should be at least 500 words in length, for example, with a keyword density of 1% – meaning that if a page is “optimized” for the keyword “best electrician in Sand Rock, Arizona,” that phrase should be used 5 times within those 500 words.

On-page conversion

Many years ago, website owners would engage in “keyword stuffing.” A page would have its 500 words and the keyword would be used over and over and over again. That may have put the site up on page 1 of SERPs, but when someone visited the site and saw nothing but gibberish in the text, they would abandon the site immediately. 

Therefore – while keywords used appropriately help your site reach that coveted first-page ranking – it will do you no good to have a first-page ranking if your site does not engage the consumer in such a way that they are encouraged to engage your services.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is essential in getting your site to the number 1 through 10 spots on the first page of SERPs. 

Off-page SEO consists of link building, which can be done by placing links and keywords in the descriptions of YouTube videos, in Facebook and Twitter posts, and as tags for such sites as Instagram. 

Guest articles written for other websites, by “influencers,” will also include keywords which are linked to your website. Links can be placed in comments on blog posts (but they must be appropriate comments and not spam).

The more inward-bound links a site has, the more likely that it will reach a page rank of 1 through 10 on page 1 of SERPs. (Page rank, by the way, does not refer to a results page, but rather to a man actually named Page. Larry Page.)

White hat versus black hat

Unscrupulous SEO optimizers continue to use “keyword stuffing,” which is considered to be black hat SEO and which is really cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. “Black hat” SEO may work in the short term to get a site into the top ten ranking on page 1 of the SERPs, but the site never converts any business.

White hat SEO, on the other hand, is ethical SEO that builds page rank slowly, methodically – and successfully.

The bottom line

Create a website that engages your visitors, and become an “influencer” out on the internet, and your site will be on page 1 of SERPs and your visitors will convert into customers or clients.