You may have heard of the term SEO, you may know it means Search Engine Optimisation – but how can you use SEO to market your business?

In this article, we’ll break down all you need to know about SEO for business, without the confusing jargon.

What is SEO and do I need it for my business?

SEO is the process of optimising the content on your website to make it easier for search engines to present your pages to potential customers in search results. Search engine ‘bots’ scour websites to match the content of web pages to a check list of criteria to make sure they present the most relevant result to the person searching.

Knowing the criteria that they look for means you can ensure you are ticking the boxes that allow search engines to recognise your site for relevant searches, helping your business rise through the ranking system, meaning more traffic to your site and potentially – more sales.

How to use SEO to market your business

The best place to start is to identify keywords associated with your products or services. For example, say you sell equipment for swimming pools; there will be lots of other businesses out there who sell the same thing, so it’s not enough to just use the keyword “equipment for swimming pools”, you need to narrow it down. One way to do this is to add more detail based on what you think people will be typing to search for products.

For example, you may say “UK supplier of affordable temperature control equipment for swimming pools”, which in a sentence could be “We are a UK supplier of affordable temperature control equipment for swimming pools”. You could use this on webpages featuring that sort of equipment, or in blog posts about the temperature control products you offer.

When using SEO to market your business, it is also worth noting product descriptions – try to change these a little where possible, rather than copying them from the manufacturer’s brochure. All the other companies tend to just copy and paste item descriptions, so if you can tell the customer about that product in a slightly different way, search engines will log this as new information and rank it higher.

Once we have identified the keywords, we should use these in page metadescriptions – that’s the paragraph that appears under the page title in search engine results. It’s the bit you read to decide if that link is worth clicking. For more about keywords and metadescriptions, read our blog post Understanding SEO: the value behind the jargon. 

Be sure to use those keywords in main titiles (H1 tags) and sub headings (H2 tags), as well as the URL address, image alt tag information and in the core copy of pages and blog posts.

What are the key SEO trends for 2019?

Internal and external links are important for SEO. You need to add links into your page content to direct people further into your website and encourage them to explore more relevant content. You also need to add links directing people to other sites which contain useful information, to show search engines you research the subject you are talking about. The most important type of link is a backlink, which links back to your site. You can link to your site from your social media channels for example. In 2019, algorithms also take into account linkless mentions, where people have referenced your brand online, without linking to your website. You can find out more about that here.

One of the most important things you can do to improve your website’s SEO is to ensure it is mobile-friendly. Most of your customers will be looking at your products on a mobile phone, so it’s vital that the site will work on that platform. It’s even more vital now, because since March 2018, Google started the process of migrating sites to mobile-first indexing.

How do you know if your website it mobile-friendly?

If your website is difficult to navigate on mobile, if page load times are super slow or if your site is acting strangely, it’s probably not been optimised for mobile. Purple Sprout offers a handy SEO audit, which will tell you all you need to know, such as what keywords are most used on your site, if the alt tag information has been correctly filled in, if meta descriptions are correct, page load times etc. This is a great place to start, and you can take the report and decide what actions need to be taken.

For more information about how Purple Sprout can help you use SEO to market your business call 01782 644 456.