The Hidden Value Of Seo And Why You Should Care
Let’s face it. The Internet is a big place. According to Siteefy.com there are over one BILLION websites online. How big is a billion? Well, if you were to visit one website per second, it would take you almost 32 years to see them all.
With all of these potential destinations, it's not hard to see the importance of search engines that can provide high-quality search results. This also raises the question, how do we get those high-quality search results? Furthermore, what as small businesses can we do to show up in those results?
Enter the World of SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. With roots as early as 1997, SEO is the process where website owners and managers try to tweak their pages to best appeal to what they think search engines will consider relevant content. These changes can make a huge difference in how your company appears online. According to an article from BizzyWeb, a web marketing firm, the stats are striking:
- Only 7% of users will scroll to get additional results!
- 6% of users are willing to go to page two results!
- While 71.33% of results on page one may get clicks, that rate plummets to 5.59% for page two.
I hope these numbers make it pretty clear why it is important for your small business to care about SEO. I have worked at companies where those three letters strike fear into the web development team. Get it wrong, you are almost invisible online.
There are many tools out there to help your website’s SEO performance. Google has an entire manual dedicated to helping you navigate the SEO waters. However, if you don’t want to wade through pages and pages of complicated web jargon, here are some basic tips for you to keep in mind.
1. Make a good webpage.
It seems a little silly I know, but people can tell when a website has been put together well.
- Does the layout make sense?
- Are there spelling or grammar errors?
- Is the content relevant and current?
- Does it look good on both mobile and desktop?
- Does it follow web accessibility standards?
Just these simple questions can greatly increase the performance of your website on search engines, and are likely to to increase your viewers engagement time. Engagement time matters to SEO because it tells the search engine your page has the information they were looking for and will in turn increase the likelihood it will suggest the result to others.
2. Take time to label.
Computers aren’t always as smart as we think they are. Since search engines can't read the mind of the web page author, they rely on the author to tell the engine what it needs to know. One way we can help the search engine is by labeling EVERYTHING. This labeling is found in one of the base languages of your website called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). HTML is written in a series of “tags”. You won’t see them as tags on your screen, but web browsers translate the text based HTML into the visual website you know.
Some of these tags relate more specifically to SEO. These tags can include but certainly aren’t limited to:
- Meta Titles – What are the names of your elements?
- Meta descriptions - What are your elements about?
- Alt descriptions - If a picture or video can’t be displayed or is being accessed by someone with a visual impartment what should be known about it?
The way to update these tags changes depending on your web architecture, but putting in the work can yield great results.
3. Make it small. Make it fast.
In addition to engagement. Web users love speed. It has been shown that fast websites have upwards of 15% better conversion rates. How many times have you left a page even before it loaded, because it wasn’t fast enough? Search engines for years have included performance as part of the ranking metrics. One of the most basic ways to increase page speed is to make things smaller. Here are a few ways to accomplish this:
- Make sure your media is appropriately sized.
The larger the image is, the more resources a web browser must use to go get it. If the display size is much smaller than the retrieved size, you could be wasting valuable resources. That waste manifests in slower load times.
- Try to use modern media formats.
Many people may be familiar with JPG images and MP4 videos. These formats have been around for a long time. However, they weren’t optimized for today’s web landscape. Consider switching images to PNG or WEBM and videos to WEBP formats. Many times, the file size can be reduced by close to half without sacrificing quality.
- Consider Caching.
Caching (pronounced cash-ing) is a process of storing info for quick access later and computers love to cache. For example, have you ever noticed that the first time you visit a webpage it takes longer to load than the second time? That’s caching in action! Your computer can access the cache locally rather than having to go all the way back to the source server. Large tech companies also have caching systems that allow companies to store information on computers all over the world. The shorter the cable distance between you and the source the faster the page will be. You have the power to define how long a cache should exist before being refreshed. Consider shorter cache times for things that change often and longer cache times for parts of your webpage the hardly ever change.
4. Credit Your Sources.
Nobody likes a plagiarist. That includes Google. Make sure you cite your sources. If you are using syndicated content such as blog publications label them as such. Better yet, conder creating content yourself. Are there websites you consulted as you were creating? Give them credit, and other sources should credit you. This works like academic journals where credibility is built through interweaving.
How Do You Know It’s Working?
While web performance and SEO can seem like a black hole, there are tools available for gaining insight into how visitors interact with your website. Bonus, several of these tools are FREE!
Chrome Inspector
As was already mentioned Google Chrome Inspector is a great way to understand how your website is being displayed by looking behind the scenes. It can tell you information about load times, network traffic, memory usage and more. While each tab has multiple uses, Lighthouse, I found, is one of the best tools you can use for SEO information.
Lighthouse allows you to get a snapshot of how your page performs when loading. It’s important to look at both mobile and desktop loads as elements load and display differently depending on device formats. Your report will tell you what elements of your page work well and what elements are causing issues. The higher your scores the more favorably search engines will view your page.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a great way for you to gain insight into the nature of your audience. You can get information from how many people are viewing your website, what pages they are looking at, and where in the world they are viewing from.
This is all data you can use to improve experience for your users. If you find they are engaging with a specific type of content, consider leaning into that. Perhaps it will develop into a niche custom built just for you.
This tool is not without caution though. While the data is anonymized be sure to check what your region’s rules and laws are around data collection and privacy protection.
Google Search Console
While analytics are good for gaining insight into your audience once they’re on your page, Search Console is great for understanding how they are getting there. In search console you can really dig into how Google looks at your page. You can see what search terms bring up your name as a result and where you are in the rankings.
Using this data make decisions about your page. Track it over time to see how changes influence your position.
SEO takes time, effort, and continued maintenance. Unfortunately, there’s no magic pill that will fix everything. If you hear of companies offering instant success, there’s a strong chance even if their methods work for a moment, they won’t hold long term progress. Pay attention to the websites you visit on a day-to-day basis.
- What websites do you like?
- What websites frustrate you?
- Why?
If you can start to develop these insights, you can then apply them to your own website, which should in turn bring you increased website visibility.
'til next time.
-Matt