Did you know that SEO plays a part in growing businesses, even if you’re just a small business in Miri? How does it benefit your business? How can you use it to meet your goals?
What is SEO?
SEO; search engine optimization simply means the practices created to improve your site’s visibility when the users search for your products or services on Google, Yahoo! and other search engines. In other words, it helps your website to show up on the first page of Google results.
So, how does Google rank all the online websites? Well, there are many automated programs called bots that crawl millions of web pages every day. The crawlers will determine how important the websites are and rank them to keep an updated and accurate database.
According to research, the majority of clicks go to the websites that are on the first page of Google results. The number of users that clicked on a website in Google will decline as they move down the page. And, given that 93% of online experiences start from search engines, being on the first page on Google results will give you a high potential to drive more visitors to your page!
That is why it is important to understand and make use of SEO to build a good online presence, especially for small businesses in Miri. The higher your website is listed, the more people will visit it. That means your page has better visibility and good website traffic. So, if you ever wondered how some businesses have a good online presence? Now you know the answer; SEO!
Why Do You Need SEO?
Trustworthy & Credibility
75% of online users never scroll beyond the first page of search results. Most users trust the websites that are suggested on the first page of Google results. They believe that the websites are more high-quality and most importantly, it is ranked by the search engines. Besides, it is also because the search engine has filtered the suggested result and eliminated the spammy websites.
In turn, the users know that your business is credible because your website is considered high quality and trustworthy by the search engines.
Brand Awareness
Besides, being on a high ranking helps your business to build brand awareness. Brand awareness refers to the users’ ability to recognise your business or brand. This means, your website needs to have a strong online presence by being on the first page of search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc. Therefore, it will be easier to make your brand and business more recognisable and trustworthy.
Connect More With The Customers
Moving on to the last point, you can also connect more with your customers. When you focus on giving a good user experience, your website should fulfill what they need. The factors like the trust built, the credibility of your business, etc. make your customers want to connect more with you. Therefore, the customers will believe that your business cares about what they need the most. This would be the other reason why they will return to your website.
How To Achieve SEO?
Now, you wonder what can you do to achieve SEO?
A User-Friendly Website
A user-friendly website is key to providing a good user experience. Think like a user, would you stay on a website that has complicated features? What if the website does not look interesting or takes some time to load, will you stay? No, don’t you?
Therefore, it is important to build a website that is pleasing to the search engines. A website must be built using an organized and well-structured layout. Most importantly, the designs should look pleasing to the eyes and are easy to navigate.
If you have a user-friendly website, your website will get a higher rank as it reaches many users. That means, there’s a higher potential that the users may return to your website!
Website Speed
Users would not stay on a website that loads really slow, right? That would just ruin their mood. It’s like lining up for a long queue at a food store. Research has said that 40% of the users will leave the page if the load page takes longer than the first 3 seconds. Almost 70% of users, especially online buyers, said that page speed affects their purchase decisions.
A poor page speed will affect your users’ opinion drastically and give a bad impression on your business. It gives slow customer service and a bad user experience to them. This will leave a bad first impression, especially to the new visitors as it is their first time visiting your website. Because of this problem, you may lose your potential customers because they may not return again.
To support this, page speed is also a factor that Google prioritize when ranking websites on search results. The faster your website is, the higher the possibility of your website getting a higher rank. Therefore, it is important to make sure your website loads fast to give pleasing experiences to the visitors.
SEO Elements
There are a few crucial elements to ensure it works. These are the keys to meeting your business goals!
1. Keywords
Conducting keyword research is a must to achieve a successful strategy. Keyword research is to find what words or phrases your target customers use to search for websites on the search engine. The keyword can be one or two words.
Conducting keyword research will make you understand and evaluate how often users search for the keywords and the competition level of the keywords.
Now, you know why there are keywords often featured in title tags, header tags and the website’s content. Choosing powerful words gives you the power to control your website ranking on search results. With that being said, your website will drive more visits and increase your website visibility.
2. Content
Content is another vital element to make search engine optimization work. Content is what your customers listen to or view. That would include blogs, social media posts, podcasts or webpage text. This is where you can use the chosen keywords to help your business build trust, engage, and communicate your business to the customers.
Make sure to avoid keyword stuffing as it will not help with your search ranking. Your content would not sound natural when you overuse the keywords. Google officially states “Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking”.
Good quality content must be informational and relevant to the current algorithms. It is important to keep your content updated. It would be the reason why the customers choose to return to your website because they believe that your business is trustworthy and cares about what they need the most.
3. Backlink Building
Your website will look credible to the users when you backlink the website to other pages, such as high-quality websites. The users believe that your website is trustworthy because the information included is from trusted websites. It is also a good way to avoid plagiarism when you cite the information obtained from the other pages. Therefore, this will improve your SEO and create your website carefully and ethically.
Using SEO gives a big opportunity to grow and build a strong online presence for your small business even if you are in Miri or other cities. According to Visual Objects for the 2022 Small Business SEO Report, only 63% of small businesses practice SEO efforts. If you are a small business and have not invested in SEO yet, you should start now so you can grow your business out of Miri! It will give your business a big difference because it benefits you in many aspects.
If you are interested to invest in SEO, Horizn Digital in Miri will gladly assist you. Feel free to contact us for more information.