SEO basics for Small Businesses in the Construction Industry
Unlikely Conversations: SEO Basics for Small Businesses
Last week, a persistent pain in my left elbow led me to seek help from a physiotherapist. An injury I found to be strange unlike having a dodgy shoulder and other football related injuries. Little did I know that this visit would offer more than just relief for my injury; it would also provide valuable insights into the world of search engine optimization (SEO) for small businesses. As I conversed with the physiotherapist, who also happened to be the business owner, our discussion veered into the realm of client acquisition, online advertising costs, and the elusive art of SEO.
The importance of SEO:
SEO is the cornerstone of online visibility for businesses of all sizes. It dictates how easily potential customers can find your website when searching for products or services online. Essentially, SEO is your digital storefront, it determines whether your business will thrive or languish in the vast landscape of the internet. It’s one of the key elements all companies with an online presence have in common differentiated by budget, content and expertise. For instance we rank first page on google for parking surveys and construction logistic plans and receive more online enquiries than any of our other services.
Key SEO Concepts for Small Business Owners:
Small business owners need to have a basic understanding of how SEO works. This helps when seeking expert help to ensure you ask the right questions and understand how your marketing budget is spent. I’m no expert and I have professional support with running the website. For almost everyone who has offered me SEO services promising first page ranking, I ask the question ‘where do you rank in your service offerings?’
The minimum you need to understand prior to engaging SEO services are as follows:
- Keywords: Keywords are the words or phrases that potential clients will type into search engines when looking for information. One needs to understand the way a potential client will search for one’s service offering. Small businesses need to identify relevant keywords related to their products, services, and industry.
- On-Page Optimization: On-page optimisation involves optimising various elements on your website to make it more search engine friendly. This includes how you name and present information on your website in relation to keywords and relevant content.
- Content Creation: Content is a critical aspect of SEO. Creating high-quality, relevant, and valuable content not only helps in engaging users but also improves your website’s visibility in search engines. Regularly updating your website with fresh content such as blog posts, articles and videos can help attract more visitors and improve search engine rankings. e.g. this post.
- Local SEO: For small businesses targeting local customers, optimizing for local search is essential. This involves optimizing your website for location-based keywords, claiming and optimizing your Google My Business listing, and ensuring consistency of your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) across online directories.
- Link Building: Building high-quality backlinks from reputable websites is crucial for improving your website’s authority and search engine rankings. You can acquire backlinks through strategies such as guest blogging, outreach to industry influencers, and participating in relevant online communities. This is likely the most difficult one getting reputable websites to link your site, magazines or blogs to backlink to one’s website.
- Technical SEO: Technical SEO focuses on optimizing the technical aspects of your website to improve its crawling and indexing by search engines. This includes ensuring proper website speed, fixing broken links, optimizing URL structure, using HTTPS for secure connections, and implementing structured data markup. A good exercise to undertake with your SEO support team is to compare the technical SEO elements of your website such as speed with the sites ranked in the first page. This creates a minimum benchmark to aim for.
- Monitoring and Analytics: Regularly monitoring your website’s performance using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console is essential. These tools provide insights into your website traffic, user behaviour, keyword rankings, and other important metrics, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to improve your SEO strategy.
- Adaptation and Continuous Learning: this needs to be an ongoing exercise as SEO is constantly evolving, with search engines updating their algorithms regularly
Putting it into PracticeWhile the business ranks well for certain services, others such as transport assessment, drainage design, highway engineering are work in progress with room for improvement. For instance, our Link Building and Local SEO are non-existent. In conclusion SEO is no longer optional for small business owners in this digital age but essential for survival and growth. Anyways turns out I have a tennis elbow from heavy bag sessions hence all the lifting I will be doing for the next few months involves Peroni’s, Moretti’s and Henny’s.
