Simplifying

SEOA Quick-Start Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Your product or service is undeniably the best around —

and hopefully you’re not the only one who thinks so! Yet

a small business can have a really tough time standing

out from the competition, including the big guys with big-

*ss marketing budgets, especially online. (Needle, meet

haystack.) Since success often rests on customers finding

you online and discovering the true greatness of your

business on their own, it’s important to capitalize on the

essential elements of search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is an ever-evolving area of online marketing for

small businesses, and it can seem overwhelming. That’s

why we break it down for you. This guide offers several

straightforward strategies to help lift your business

ranking with search engines such as GoogleTM Search,

Yahoo!® and BingTM and make your website more visible

to consumers.

Table of Contents

1. Why SEO Matters

2. What are those sneaky search engines looking for?

3. How to Optimize Your Site

a. Know Your Stuff – Do Your Keyword Research

b. Incorporate Quality Links

c. Leverage Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

d. Turbo-charge Your Site

e. Optimize for Local Intent

f. Anticipate the Impact of Voice Search

4. Key Takeaways

01

Why SEO Matters

An often-cited statistic from Forrester research tells us 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine. Many other more recent findings further support the need for SEO.

• 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.

• 80% of people ignore Google-sponsored ads.

• Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average — that’s 1.2 trillion searches per year.

With search said to be outperforming social in driving traffic to sites (by more than 300%), small business owners can only benefit from embracing search engine optimization.

02

What are those sneaky search engines looking for?

You might feel the mighty machine-learning algorithms behind search engines only aim is to make your life more difficult. The algorithms change often and aren’t usually easy to interpret, even for those of us who are more tech-savvy. Nevertheless, their real goal is to help users find what they want on the web more efficiently. We promise, they’re friends, not foes.

So what are they looking for? Plenty of things, things like:

Relevance. This considers how well your web page relates to the user’s search query and its context such as their location, their search history and time of search.

Quality. Evaluates whether or not the page provides useful content — articles, videos, or other type of media — focused on user experience.

User experience. Beyond the content quality, search engines consider the navigability of the site, relevance of links, and user satisfaction with the site. This also includes device compatibility and site speed. Slow and steady will not win the web race (sorry, Aesop’s tortoise).

Site authority. With good internal linking, users will be drawn further into the site, which supports relevancy and reduces bounce rates (when users quickly return to the search results after viewing your site, that hurts your search engine ranking for that query). The search engines also like to see a thriving community of regular commenters engaging with your site and visitors sharing the information via social channels.

Plus, these are only the main factors impacting search engine results. With the pace of change in SEO, we can’t always know all of them. Still, we can try to address the main ones with the following six strategies.

03

How to Optimize Your Site

With millions of pages of information on the web (and several thousand videos of cats playing the piano), small business owners can use SEO to get their sites to show up in a user’s search engine results page (SERP).

Competition is fierce for top billing on the first page of the SERPs, especially as the premium real estate on this page typically contains both organic and paid search results. Organic results rely on the search engine’s algorithm (and you can optimize accordingly) while paid results reflect advertisers having paid for their ads to be displayed above or to the right of organic results.

Organic often dominates, though. For instance, in a 2016 SimilarWeb study of the shopping category, organic drove 94.95% of traffic to sites compared to the 5.05% from paid search.

So, what can you do to optimize for SEO?

1. Know your stuff – do your keyword research.

2. Incorporate quality links.

3. Leverage title tags and meta descriptions.

4. Turbo-charge your site.

5. Optimize for local intent.

6. Anticipate the impact of voice search.

These optimization suggestions reflect both on-page and off-page techniques to help your business gain more visibility. This is an extensive topic, but we’ll make it simpler by focusing on the work you can do to increase your organic search rankings.

04

Know Your Stuff – Do Your Keyword Research

Your audience finds a company online using keywords. Whatever industry you’re in, it’s best to identify the language your customers speak and adjust your keyword strategy accordingly. After all, the machine learning powering search engine algorithms now has enough data to gauge user intent to provide better-focused, more useful search results.

How to do keyword research:

• Examine conversations, feedback, and emails with prospects, leads and current clients. What do they need? How do they communicate their pain points? What words do they respond to?

• Avoid industry terms and acronyms. Simple works best. Think like a human, not a robot.

• Evaluate your competition’s keywords. It always helps to know and understand what your competitors are doing. With SEO, it’s smart to identify what keywords your competition is using and where they are using the keywords (e.g. Headers? Image tags? URLs?). Also look at keyword density. Density is determined by comparing the total number of words on the page to the number of times the keyword phrase appears. This can help you determine what relevant phrase or keyword they are targeting.

05

• Combine short- and long-tail keywords in your strategy. For instance, a restaurant might target a large, non-specific audience with the short-tail keywords “Italian food” and “pizza delivery.” A more targeted long-tail approach would be more specific to a niche interested in “northern Italian comfort food in Charlotte” or “guaranteed fast pizza delivery in Charlotte.”

• For local SEO, brainstorm keywords or phrases that work with a geo-modifier that your customers might use (e.g. adding location to the previous topic keywords).

• Test your keywords. Don’t simply trust your instincts with keywords. Enter your list of ideas into a keyword planner such as Keyword.io to see monthly search traffic statistics. While you’re in there, look for related keywords the tool suggests which might not yet be on your list.

Overall, when choosing the keywords to build a strategy around, it can help to be unique. Don’t follow the herd. Instead, by matching your quality content to user intent for specifically relevant keywords your business can become distinct in SEO.

06

Pro Tip:

New content helps boost

your search ranking and

increase brand exposure.

Write long-form content

that is specifically focused

on customer core interests

and needs in order to see

better results.

keywords short-tail long-tail test

geo-modifier search traffic statistics

Incorporate Quality Links

You can easily riddle a page with outbound links. For instance, using the phrase “purple people eater” in a blog (as you are likely to do), you could link “purple” to Wikipedia, “people” to Up with the People and “eater” to a dining blog you like. And that’s what we’d call going overboard.

After all, we suggested incorporating quality links rather than relying on a large quantity of links. A site’s overall link quality and its backlinks both factor heavily in SERP rankings.

Outbound links to other, related pages can help the search engine to determine what your page’s content is about. Adding internal links (2-3 to your own site content) can also help with your page authority.

According to SEO guru Neil Patel, a high-quality link is:

• On a page that has a lot of links to itself • Relatively high up on the page • Found naturally in the page’s text (surrounded by appropriate

context) • On a relevant page • On a page without too many links (link power is divided by number

of links)

07

Backlinks are another backbone of SEO. Basically, a backlink happens when someone else likes you enough to link back to your site. Good for you, Mr. Popular! These inbound links boost your site’s credibility in the eyes of the search engine algorithms (if they have eyes, that is). The more sites out in the web that point back to your site, the better your page ranking will be. Basically, the algorithms will assume people are linking to your page because of its value and relevance.

Link location, anchor text (the text you highlight and hyperlink from) and the links on the domain will factor into the SEO evaluations as well.

08

Pro Tip:

New content helps boost

your search ranking and

increase brand exposure.

Write long-form content

that is specifically focused

on customer core interests

and needs in order to see

better results.

https://www.yoursite.com/backlinkexample

Leverage Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

How does a search engine even know what’s on your website? Title tags and meta descriptions are a few of the on-page details you can use to tell Yahoo! or Bing about your site’s content.

Your title is the blue highlighted text that will appear at the top of the SERP. The meta description (which should be a maximum of 160 characters) appears below that to summarize the content of your page.

To be effective, both of these should include the keyword you are trying to rank for. For instance, on the SERP excerpt below, it’s clear “Search Engine Marketing” and “SEM” are the keywords we’re going for: Other on-page elements you can exploit are the alt text for your images (being sure to always include an image is an easy way to enhance SEO) and including your keyword in relevant headings and subheadings.

09

Pro Tip:

Keep in mind the title and

meta description aren’t only

for search engine crawlers.

These can also help users

decide whether or not to

click through to your page

when faced with several,

seemingly identical, search

engine responses. Write in a

compelling, detailed way to

appeal also to users and not

just computer algorithms.

Write for people, people!

Title Tag Blue Highlighted Text

Meta Description sumarizing the content of your page below

Turbo-charge Your Site

Vroom, vroom. Site speed is critical. You may wonder how it relates to search, but consider how Google has gained such market dominance. People count on its results to be reliable. If Google consistently sent you to sites that took forever to load and weren’t useful, would you keep using Google? Probably not.

Pages on fast-loading sites rank significantly higher with search engines than slow-loading sites. They also rank higher with users. One survey found 40% of people will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. And that’s a 2009 statistic, so imagine how much patience has dwindled since then.

With a mobile takeover upon us, you want to be sure your site remains reliably quick to load for mobile users on the move. User metrics and engagement across devices are making a difference to your SEO ranking. Be sure you’re giving site visitors what they want in a relevant way that they can act upon by booking an appointment, filling a shopping cart, or commenting or sharing on their social media.

When you’re making changes to your site or adding content, keep in mind that more code can mean slower loads. Some ways to adjust:

• Watch file size. Optimize images and videos to load faster, even if it means sacrificing clarity juuust a tad.

• Don’t try to be all things to everyone. Add only what is necessary to be relevant to your audience.

• Avoid being overly loyal to your web host. If you need to, switch to faster hosting.

10

Pro Tip:

You can easily evaluate your

site’s speed by entering

your website address into

Google’s testing tool which

grades mobile friendliness,

mobile speed and desktop

speed. Look at how YouTube

fared below.

Google tells us more Google

searches take place on mobile

devices than on computers in

10 countries, including the US

and Japan.

Optimize for Local Intent

Users today are more often seeking and expecting local search results.

We already mentioned considering geo-modifiers in your keyword strategy. If you’re a bricks and mortar business looking to reach prospective customers within a certain range of you (or even a travelling service provider who only works within a specific set of zip codes), adding local area modifiers can be especially helpful.

How else can you optimize for local SEO?

Relevant keywords and links pointing to a website are still influential, of course. But locally, you could also look to ensure your business is listed on directory sites and listing pages. Again, this is not about quantity. Think quality. A listing on a well-known directory such as Yelp, YellowPages.com or the Better Business Bureau will add SEO value while also helping you improve direct traffic.

Also, check out your Google My Business page. Confirm the information on the Google page so that it becomes an Owner Verified (OV) profile, and add reviews and photos to this page to see higher ranking as a local business in a Google search.

11

Search Engine Watch recently

cited digital marketing expert

Jordan Kasteler’s finding that

1 in 3 of all Google searches in

2017 have local intent.

Anticipate Voice Search Impact on SEO

As more of your customers adopt smartphones and embrace the voice assistant functionality of those devices, it will be increasingly important to account for voice search. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said 20% of 2016’s search queries came from voice.

Voice search will mean:

• Anticipating how searchers will phrase their query when speaking will make a difference. In particular, question phrases are on the rise with use of “Where” and “When” rising by almost 300% from 2015 to 2016.

• Adopting a human, conversational tone in your marketing efforts is even more important.

• Customers will be making increasingly dynamic demands based on their I-want-to-do (transactional), I want-to-know (informational), or I-want-to-go (navigational) moments.

12

Pro Tip:

Don’t forget to share

your new content to your

own network via your

blog, social networks

and email contacts.

Link-building relies on

relationship-building to

be successful. Be consis-

tent across all channels

to further boost your

keyword traction.

13

Key Takeaways

The search engine market is a lucrative one. McKinsey estimated the total gross value of Internet search across the global economy at $780 billion — and that was in 2009.

With search worth so much, it’s not surprising that Google, Bing, Yahoo and other competitors in this market regularly change their algorithms to ensure they are providing the best quality for users.

Plus, an ill-conceived or messy approach to SEO at this point can actually hurt your site. Sloppy maneuvers such as keyword stuffing or focusing your efforts on a single, one-word keyword actually lead to your site being punished by the ranking gods.

So, business can no longer “hope for the best” when it comes to marketing online. Ultimately, you need a strong website that has solid design, utilizes mobile best practices and is accruing authoritative links. With SEO responding to so many factors including keyword targeting, links, on-page optimization, user friendliness and more, small business owners need to optimize for both the algorithms and the human audience. SEO isn’t the simplest thing, but with the help of these strategies, your efforts can return value and make your site a favorite find for both the SERPS and the consumers you’re trying to reach. Win, win.

Ready to get serious about SEO but worried about it taking up too much time and energy?

Let Thryv help you own your online presence and get better noticed on search sites.