Most business websites do not have SEO. If we take that small percentage of business websites that do use SEO, most have incorrect SEO (where they use terms such as “Home” or a business name to try to attract customers).
This inhibits or holds back the business owner before they can even begin with SEO, making it pointless to even have a website since nobody can find them in Google searches.
In many instances small business owners or new business owners may not know if their website (or that of a competitor or friend) has been programmed with even basic rudimentary SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
What is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of registering a website with search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, in such a way that it shows up when a consumer looks for a certain word in a specific demographic region.
Let’s think of SEO as the center where one person who is looking for your type of business and you representing the business owner, both meet.
The center point or section where the two interests meet, is going to be where you would want to be found at the top of search engine results. The consumer wants to find your type of business using Google. You want customers or clients to find your business when they search Google. If we do not use SEO, those two interests never meet.
Taken even further SEO is where you have the possibility of outranking competitors and being found in Google search results. Since in many markets, online search results can be very competitive and quite valuable, SEO is known to be multi-layered.
Understanding SEO Value
Many new business owners want to be #1 in Google searches but aren’t really sure of what the value in such an accomplishment would be or how to measure that outcome. That’s a subject for a future blog post…but basically the question would be how you value new referrals, more phone calls, more store visits, and more customers contacting you more often. The more organized the business, the more valuable new customers can be.
Naturally, the more value you place on more customers contacting you or making purchases from your website, the more important it would be to you to be found at the top of local Google search results.
The irony here of course is that as a digital marketer, if I look at the vast majority of business websites, most will either have no SEO at all or incorrect SEO, thereby ceding online visibility to their competitors.
So How Can You Tell If Your Website Has SEO?
Today, we wanted to point out a very simple and quick way you can tell if a website has any SEO value at all or a basic rudimentary SEO value for the business owner.
How do we tell this? Easy!
Go to top right hand corner of your browser window, bearing a red “X” in it.
All modern website browsers have a red “X” or some kind of “X” in the upper right hand corner of the window enabling you to close the window when done.
Next to that red “X” are a box within a box and a minus symbol. Those symbols play other roles we need to touch on later. So for now, zip over to the tab your website browser window has that shows you the website you are looking at by title.
If that tab bears a name of a company or a generic title such as “Home,” you are telling Google that your website is “Home” or “ABC Company.” What’s wrong with that? Well, unless someone specifically types in the name of that company, they’ll be very unlikely to find your website.
And as far as finding a website called “Home,” that’s not going to happen at all. What should be there? What you should be seeing are SEO keywords describing the business type followed by location, descriptive search terms that match what the consumer….your customer or client…is likely to enter into Google.
For example, if you live in Denver, Colorado, you are not likely to look up a law firm by name in Google. You certainly won’t be typing in the word “Home.” You’d be likely to enter in a specific type of legal practice such as estate planning or copyright law. You might just type in the generic job title of “lawyer,” for which we know intellectually there will be considerable competition for, and then see what Google displays. Most Google searches unless disabled will by default display “lawyers near me.” Whoever has the best local SEO will be the first pick. Statistically few, if any, Google users will look at the second page of results.
SEO Examples
If you’re a lawyer, obviously you’d want to see your specific area of specialty up in that tab we mentioned with a city and state or at least zip code listed to denote what you do and where you do it. Two examples could be “Miami Business Litigation” or “San Bernadino DUI Lawyer.”
Just telling Google “Home” or any other page name does nothing to help SEO except tell it what page they’re looking at (which Google already knows). In most cases you’d want to place city name followed by business type so at least Google can index you by that means to begin with. If your area has fierce competition for a term or keyword or description, such as a large sophisticated metropolitan city such as Washington or New York, alternating city with business type can sometimes change the equation. Sometimes advancing requires a combination of factors depending on the area and the competition – but you don’t know if you don’t try. And the payoffs are always worth the minimal cost for entry.
Every page of a website, every image of a website, and even every link, can have individualized SEO keywords programmed into it so that it’s an additional nudge to Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, and every other search engine or directory out there.
Some websites won’t have SEO because they are low-budget or do-it-yourself projects where the person creating the site isn’t familiar with SEO best practices or the site may have been a “rush job,” or “low budget” effort where the site developer either couldn’t or wouldn’t embed proper SEO.
Regardless of reason for a lack of SEO, Search Engine Optimization is vital to being found on the web just as you as a business owner or consumer look up everything you want to find in Google on a daily or hourly basis.
If a business does not have any SEO at all, they simply will be found in Google searches only by looking up their direct business name, and not for specific terms or words (whereas larger competitors will). Sometimes, if the business name is similar to that of another business or simply has a weak online presence, that won’t work at all, as some websites only have the word “Home” as their (attempted or unknown) SEO terms, rendering them effectively invisible.
View the accompanying infographic on Behance.