Does a small business need SEO?

You Need SEO 

Once digital all you hear about is SEO. In turn, small businesses constantly ask themselves if they need it. The short answer is yes, but only to varying degrees. As most things business related, how much they do depends on whether the benefits exceed the costs. For those unfamiliar, SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the process of trying to get your website to rank as high as possible in Google’s organic search engine search result: also known as SERP.

Who Doesn’t Want to Be #1

What business wouldn’t want to rank #1 in any of the trillion google searches each year. Number one in the SERP means you capture people with the full interest in something related to their product or service. It’s the equivalent to a stall selling oranges positioned directly in front of everyone who wants oranges at any given moment. Plus, the competition must lurk in some unscrupulously dark alley behind you. Or, they are forced to display a sign saying “I paid to be upfront, I’m not here because my oranges are good”.

Technical SEO is a Must 

Holding #1 position is as near priceless as it comes in the digital space. Suffice to say, getting to such a position of privilege is not easy. Google’s algorithm takes two broad categories in mind when ranking your website. The first category is largely technical, dealing with things like the speed of your site, how it is structured, are the search words you want to match for, (known as keywords in the industry) in the right place, etc. In today’s day and age, the technical aspect of SEO, to the degree that it matters, can easily be covered off by a small business. 

Backlinking Is a Drag

Acing Google’s second broad category, which involves having a sufficient number of reputable websites linking back to your page with the keywords you want rank for, is a lot more difficult. Add the extra dimensionality of picking the right keywords at any given point of time, business owners start to find themselves falling down a rabbit hole. Unfortunately, it is against this second category that small businesses tend to over stretch themselves both in time and money. Suddenly, you are hiring swaths of SEO specialists, blog writers and other content producers.   

It’s Not All About Gaming the System 

The inconvenient truth most SEO specialists don’t share with you is that there is a degree of meritocracy involved in Google’s search algorithm. In other words, a large part of SEO isn’t about gaming the system at all. Say you are a French Restaurant, and hundreds of millions of others refer back to you as one of the “Best French Restaurants in the world”, there is a degree of fairness to say you deserve to rank highly in search results. Trying to be #1 in search results as the “Best French Restaurant” is a pretty bravado move. 

Final Thoughts 

So, what should a small business do? Well, there is no excuse for bad technical SEO. Whether you’ve commissioned a WordPress or Webflow site, or a fully custom one, the solutions and frameworks to ensure good technical SEO are readily available to a good developer. You must make sure the technical aspects of your SEO are right from day one, otherwise it will hold you back in other efforts. Just don’t go overboard, Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will be your SEO.