Launching a small business is no easy task. There are a number of things to take into consideration, such as products and stock, payment processing and of course marketing. If no one knows about your business, how is it possibly going to succeed?
In the digital world that we find ourselves living in, it’s important that all businesses have a website, regardless of their size or what types of service they offer. With everyone connected online all the time, it’s important that people are able to find out about your business at any given moment.
With a company website, people are able to check out your products or the services you offer from their mobile, tablet or home computer at any moment. Your website, in effect, becomes the 24/7 shop window for your business.
Getting started with a new website
Once you have got your small business up and running, the next step is getting a website built. There are several options for this. You could hire a company to build a website for you, or you can give it a go building one yourself. There are lots of tools online that can be used to create a website, and you don’t need to know any programming or have any technical skills.
Most online builders such as WordPress of Wix are all visual builders, so you simply drop and drag elements into place. There is still a learning curve when it comes to building your own website, but it is a lot easier and quicker to do that it would have been 10 years ago.
What is SEO and why is it important?
SEO, or search engine optimization to give it the full name, is a series of processes that are applied to your website, both on and off page, which will help it rank better in Google for your targeted keywords and search terms. If no one can find your website on Google or Bing, how are they going to know about what your company does and offer.
For a new website for a small business, SEO is a very important factor in your marketing and promotion, and is something that you will need to consider. There are lots of SEO agencies and professionals such as Ryan Darani SEO that can help with optimizing your website for the search engines, as well as building high quality backlinks to your website. There are two forms of SEO that will need to be done – on and off page SEO.
On-Page SEO
This refers to everything that is done on your website. It can range from optimizing the title and description meta tags on each page, fixing up headers, adding schema, optimizing image and creating better content.
Another important aspect for a good website is the speed. It’s important that your website loads quickly in no more than a couple of seconds, and is responsive, which means it performs well on all types of device – mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop.
There are a lot of factors that go into making a successful website, and many of these are things that operate behind the scenes, and aren’t things that every web developer will have much experience with.
Off-Page SEO
This refers to all elements of SEO that are done away from your website. The main part of off-page SEO is building backlinks to your website. This is something that needs to be done carefully, and it’s important to note that emphasis must be placed on quality, rather than quantity.
A backlink from an authoritative website in the same industry as your business is going to be much more powerful than 100 backlinks from random low quality websites. A good SEO agency will be in a position to create these important backlinks for you, rather than you trying to do it yourself and end up causing more damage to your site than positives.
Some final thoughts
SEO is a huge industry and there are so many different types of SEO that can be applied to websites, as well as lots of different techniques that are used. For new websites, it might take a little time before the website starts ranking for the search terms and keywords being targeted, but having good SEO put in place right from the start is the best way forward.
For the short term your business should consider running some ad campaigns with Google or on social media such as Facebook. Most SEO agencies will be able to help you with these types of advertising campaigns.
Though you’ll be paying for these, it’s a good technique to get some targeted traffic to your business while your website is finding its feet and starting to rank naturally in Google. This is the aim for every website – to be found in the top positions in Google and other search engines for your most important and valuable search terms.
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