Free Small business SEO Course – Understanding SEO in 2024 Part 1

Small business SEO Course – Part 1

This course is designed for small business owners to help them understand small business SEO, so that you understand the basics and are not ripped off by unscrupulous SEO companies. Or even so that you can manage your own SEO without having to pay anyone else to do it for you.

In part 1 we will learn what “Off Site SEO” and “On Site SEO” and “Local SEO” are, how you can give your website a huge boost by choosing your domain name. How keywords are broken down in to short tail keywords and long tail keywords, what they are and how to use them, and what Keyword Research is.

Joseph started up in Website Design in 1998 and started working on Search Engine Optimisation in the early 2000’s. So has a great deal of professional experience spanning more than twenty years, which he is willing to share with you here.

Ideally your onsite optimisation should start long before you even have a website. How is that possible?

By researching your market and carefully choosing your website address.

Why is that important?

Well imagine a business called Jameson & Sons, everyone in their town knows them, the business has been in the family for generations. So they are just known locally as Jamesons. They are a building company, and are known for specialising in building extensions and loft conversions.

So they realise they need a website and they go & register a domain name, they register jamesonandsons.co.uk

Can you see a problem with that? It is their business name and that is how everyone knows them.  The problem is that Google is an algorithm and it didn’t grow up in their town, so the domain name Jamesonandsons.co.uk tells Google absolutely nothing about what that website is about, or who would be looking for it.

This type of domain is a brand domain, and only works if the brand is well known and often searched for.

Most small to medium sized businesses are never going to be able to build a brand like Pepsi or Coca cola, that takes huge marketing budgets. So that means that they are not going to have hundreds or thousands of people searching for their name. Instead they need to match their website to what people are searching for, and this is how most searches on the internet work.

The people on Google who are looking for someone to do some building work, will usually search for something to do with builders or construction companies.

Google then decides which websites it will show to the person and in which order. We will come on to looking at how Google decides this a little later in the course, but for now remember that Google has to choose which website most closely matches what the person is looking for.

So lets imagine someone searches for a builder, in their index Google has a website called Jamesonandsons.co.uk and a website called JamesonBuilders.co.uk which one do you think Google is going to think will be the best match for the person searching for a builder?

Obviously there are many different factors that Google looks at. But for the moment, let’s imagine that everything else on the 2 Websites was exactly the same in how well they matched what was being searched for.

Google would clearly see that the second website is probably about builders, and so would be far more likely to include it in the list of websites that are shown to the person searching. Even if they were both shown, if everything else was the same, then Google would rank this website higher than the one called Jamesonandsons.co.uk because the domain name is a very important clue to what the website is about.

Google has a long list of ranking factors and it gives each website a rating or a score for each factor, against any search that is made.

if you score well in these factors then Google will be more likely to include you in the results that it shows to the person.

Knowing this gives you an advantage as a business owner. Because you can research what people are searching for, and build your website to match that search. You can give yourself a huge advantage and a big head start by registering a domain name that closely matches what your customers are searching for.

You can also give yourself an advantage by identifying who you want to find your website.

Why is this important? Well imagine you have a Small Barbers shop in your local town, and you could have any domain name that you liked, you might think wow, ok im going to have mensbarbers.com great domain.

But if you are in your town and you start getting a hundred calls a day from Glasgow, Brighton, New York, Philadelphia etc from man looking for a barbers, what good is that to you?

So this is where you can include valuable information in your domain name. Lets say you live in Southend, you can use the domain SouthendBarbers.com now you are making your website a much closer match for your actual customers who are going to be searching in Southend where your actual customers are.

This is referred to as “Local SEO”. It helps to focus your website in Google and show it to the people who are really looking for your services in the area that you can serve them.

In SEO, what people search for are referred to as either keywords or search phrases. This can be confusing at first because a keyword is not always just one word. It can be a string of words or even a short sentence or a question.

Keywords that use just one or two words are called “Short tail keywords”.  These tend to be broad matching keywords, they are much harder to rank for, and cover a huge range of different possible searches.

For example drills.com could be referring to small electric drills, or to military training, or even to the giant machines used to drill for oil under the sea, or to sample ground when prospecting for gold or opal.

Keywords with more words that describe in detail what your website is about, are called “Long tail keywords”. They are often easier to rank for, and can bring you the right people that actually need your services.

For example “CheapestCordlessElectricDrills.com is a long tail keyword. (Or to return to the building company example who specialised in loft conversions, LoftConversionsSouthend.co.uk is a focused long tail keyword )

It isn’t going to bring people who are researching military training, nor is it going to bring people who are looking for different kind of drill.  The more specific you are with your keywords, the higher the chances are that your visitors will convert to paying customers.

It is important to research your keywords to find out what people are searching for. Otherwise you might find that you are ranking really high in Google, but your website is getting no visitors.

Unfortunately this is a bit of a scam that many unscrupulous SEO companies take advantage of. They will often try to steer you towards keywords that they know will be easy to rank for. They charge you the same that it would cost to work on a keyword that people are actually searching for, but because no one else is trying to rank for that keyword, they can rank your website very quickly and easily with almost no effort.

This makes it look like they are really good at their job, but in reality no one is searching for that keyword, and no one else is trying to rank for it. So it becomes easy for them to make your website rank quickly for that keyword, but it wont benefit you because no one is really searching for it, except you.

So how can you check what people are searching for? By doing “Keyword Research”. There are several paid tools that you can use such as Semrush, however if you just want to get a quick idea, go to Google and type in the subject and Google will show you a drop list down of suggestions.

Those suggestions are actual searches that people are searching for on Google. The higher they are to the top of the list, the more often they are searched for. This is a quick and free way to do basic keyword research. It can also be important to know how many people are searching for your keyword each month. If you have to choose between 2 keywords and one get 10 searches a month and the other get 7000 searches a month, you want to go for the one that is searched for more often. There are other factors to think about like keyword intent and keyword difficulty, but we will come on to those later in the course.

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So lets just quickly recap what we have learned in this first part of the course:

• Optimising your website by the way it is built and set up is called “On Site SEO”
• Optimising your website by linking to it or sharing it on other websites is called “Off Site SEO”
• What people search for on Google are called “Keywords”
• Broad generic searches with 1 or 2 words are called “Short Tail Keywords”
• Short Tail Keywords have more searches, but can bring the wrong visitors.
• Longer more specific & detailed searches are called “Long Tail Keywords”
• Long Tail Keywords can have less searches, but bring targeted visitors looking for your service.
• Including the name of the area in a keyword is called “Local SEO”
• Using relevant searched for keywords in your domain name can greatly help your SEO.
• Finding out what people are searching for is called “Keyword Research”
• Keyword research is important because it tells you if a keyword is being searched for & by how many people.