When Should A Small Business Consider an SEO Agency?
SEO For Small Business
What is SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is basically undertaking activities that help your website (or a page of your website) appear as high as possible in search engines such as Google or Bing.
On page SEO services
Google uses ‘bots’ to crawl the internet indexing web pages to make sure that they appear in the right place when someone types a search term into the Google search. With millions of possible results to trawl through, Google wants to make sure that it’s showing the user the most relevant result for the phrase or words that they have searched for.
To make sure that it’s providing the user with the best possible result, Google will use information from the pages on your website to index your site and categorise when it will appear when someone types in a term relevant to your business.
However Google bots don’t read pages in the same way in which a human would, so the way in which your pages are structured can help Google to understand this a little better, this is known as ‘On page SEO’ (more details here from the amazing Moz)
How your website is structured can make a big difference to how Google ‘reads’ your pages, and you want to make it as easy as possible for Google to index your web page for the right key terms.
Google wants to make sure that they are giving users the best possible experience, so will also factor in things like, the speed at which your page loads, how mobile friendly the website is (in fact this is key) and various other signals.
So should you consider using an agency to help you with your on page SEO? The answer is… maybe. If you have a fairly small site and are confident that you can make changes as outlined in the link above – why not try some few tweaks yourself
However, if it’s all sounding like double dutch – it may be worth calling in an SEO specialist to help you get on track.
Off page SEO Services
Ok, so you think you on page SEO I ‘on point’ but you’re still not showing up on the searches! What’s going on? With so many websites floating around on the web – Google may have to make a choice to order hundreds of thousands of websites that are all showing similar content. How do these robots choose?
Well, while the exact ‘recipe’ is constantly changing (and a guarded secret), Google uses a huge number of signals to decide which website has the most ‘authority’ and will therefore likely be the best for the person searching.
Signals include good quality links back to your website with decent ‘anchor text’ the click-through rate when your page appears on ranking and a whole lot more – for more info read this great article by Search Engine Land.
So should you look at off-page SEO yourself? Ok, we aren’t going to lie – this is one where the services of a good SEO agency will help (and the services of a bad SEO agency will actually do damage). Here at the Small Biz Expert, we actually don’t offer ‘link building services’ we offer digital PR. No two links are the same, and a raft of bad links will likely result in a penalty. The best way to acquire quality links is by providing quality content, be it on your own site or elsewhere. Social media can be a factor, but for the purposes of this article – let’s park that for the moment.
If it's something you want to get started yourself, be aware building good quality backlinks is time consuming, so prepare to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in!
Is It Worth Using an SEO Agency
The answer is…. It depends. Firstly think about the benefit that higher rankings on your website will bring. For many small business owners their website is a showcase mainly used to support offline activities. In this instance, it’s worth thinking about how much return on investment you would get if you ranked higher in search.
Also, is your business at a stage where you can afford the investment in using an external agency. Just like any other service, the returns must cover the outlay for the service.
If you’re unsure whether using an SEO agency would be right for your small business, you can take advantage of our free SEO consultation. We will give you an absolutely no obligation, no sales pitch completely free half an hour of our time to chat about your needs. We are completely honest, and can tell you what may work for your business (be it SEO, social media, PR or something else) and are completely transparent about what you may want to do yourself, and what you may need help with.
Why do we do it? Firstly, we care passionately about small business and want to make sure that every small business has access to the knowledge that big business has. We do understand that starting out is hard, and budgets are tight, so we offer no nonsense, no jargon, straightforward advice.
Secondly (and more selfishly). While you may not yet be ready to use the services of a digital marketing agency, we know that by giving you a totally free helping hand will help your small business becoming a profitable one – and we hope that you remember us when you do! Our business is built on recommendation, so if we help you out, we hope you mention us when speaking to other business owners.
