What is SEO and How Does it Benefit My Business?

SEO is one of the most important abbreviations you’ll need to understand as a small business owner. Whether you love it, or you hate it, you’ll have to use SEO to optimize your business’s presence online. So you may be thinking, “what is SEO and how does it benefit my business?”. Let us explain!

What is SEO?

SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is what allows you to be discoverable in popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Think about when you go to type a question into Google. You probably don’t realize it, but your question likely contains popular SEO keywords. These trigger words trace to articles and websites that frequently use these same words or terminology.

Once you type your question into your preferred search engine, around 10 or so links will generate that have the largest likelihood of containing your answer. The first page of links on the search engine will be your instinctively, most trusted sources for your question.

Why is SEO important?

SEO allows you to be discoverable by your target audience, increase your performance rates and sales, improve ranking and testimonial data, generates traffic to your business, secure the trust of your consumers and more!

SEO will give your business an increase of credibility. If links to your website are ranking high in the search engine on Google (or other popular search engines), then consumers will more likely trust that you are an expert in your scope of work. This then leads to trust, and inevitably loyalty, to your brand. Not only does SEO help generate new customers, but it also allows you to maintain confidence by your current customers.

How to utilize SEO

Now that you understand what SEO is, how do you incorporate it into your small business? The key to SEO is simplicity. You will want to use SEO keywords and phrases for everything you post that involves your business. For example, product descriptions on your website or shopping platform, blog posts (if your website has a blog), any social media outlet (YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) How do you find SEO words though? There are a couple things you can do…

1. Don’t make it too difficult. Simplicity is key – remember? Think of questions that you personally would ask if you were a customer for your specific business. What type of language would you use? What are some common terms or words that you know would repetitively be used? These are the words you will want to use as apart of your SEO. Make a list! It’s likely they key terms won’t change, however, they will expand.
   
2. There are also tools that can help you with finding your SEO vocabulary. For example, the website Word Stream. Word Stream will help you break down and find your SEO by industry, help you determine the search volume for that particular word, and more! We recommend using a platform like this to get started if you’re not super comfortable with generating your own SEO yet.

Aside from making sure you’re using the correct terminology for your business, you’ll want to make sure you’re doing a couple other things too, like backlinking! To backlink means to hyperlink a word or phrase. Or in other words, make a word or phrase clickable that leads to the original source of content. Anytime you are referencing something you should backlink it for two reasons. This is an example of a backlink if we were referencing Inventora.

The first reasons, it’s important to always source where you are getting your information from. Give credit where credit is due. Secondly, these links will help attach your specific content to the original link, thus making it appear more credible to your viewers.

To help lift your SEO strides off the ground, we recommend being active in online communities of your niche, and sending newsletters to your customers. You can find small business communities on places like Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, and more! The more places you can assert yourself and your small business, the better!

After reading this article you should now be able to answer the questions “what is SEO and how does it benefit my business?”. Our SEO suggestions in this article should help you be able to get started on SEO for your small business and guide your efforts to the right place. Have more questions about SEO? Or want more tips about how to effectively utilize SEO for your small business? Let us know in the comments!