Search Engine Optimisation is one of the most important things you can do to help the growth of your small business. It sounds a little complicated – which it is – but can be explained in simple terms.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, refers to the process of increasing your site’s visibility. Let’s say you have an Amazon business selling cycling accessories – in order to appear in relevant searches for your product, your page needs to be determined as an appropriate search result. This might make sense more later, but in order to filter out ‘bad’ products or sites, a website may require you to have specific attributes on your site. This could be as simple as having images or including reviews.
If your page qualifies within the terms that your respective site determines, the higher you might rank in searches for your products. If your page appears higher in a search, your site becomes much more likely to be visited. As a result, you’re even more likely to turn these prospective site visitors into well-earned customers!
So, How Does SEO Work?
Earlier, we mentioned that in order to appear in searches, your product or site has to be ‘determined’ to be relevant to the initial search. But who makes that determination? In the case of search engines like Google, bots are created to develop an index of all websites on the internet. These bots collate information about each site and store it, so that it can be analysed.
Whilst the bots are collating the information, algorithms are designed to analyse these indexes. These algorithms consider a variety of factors. Their aim is to determine where each page should rank in a Google search depending on how relevant the site would be to certain terms.
These ranking factors can be one of many things, here’s a list of some that might be helpful:
- Readability/User Experience
- External Links
- Mobile compatibility
Taking these aspects into account can help your business become more user-friendly. The algorithms mentioned above assesses whether your website is easy to read and if it provides useful or relevant information. Search engines are essentially designed to provide answers to questions or queries. These algorithms just want to analyse your site in order to find the best answer possible!
After they make this determination, the search engine will list websites in order of their relevance to the respective search.
Consequently, there are certain things you can do to help improve your ranking; take a look at our guide on improving your SEO here!
The more relevant or useful the information on your page is to the search, the higher your site will appear in the listing!
How Can SEO Help My Business?
This is pretty simple – if your site ranks higher in a relevant search, it’s more likely to be visited. Increasing the traffic to your site, provided the content supports the increase, makes it much more likely that a visitor will purchase whatever goods or services you offer.
Appearing high in a Google or Amazon search is essentially a seal of approval. Even if a visitor continues to scroll, they know those appearing near the top are valued by other customers. Making sure you have a website or product that is optimised to appear highly in search results is integral to the growth of small business.
With an Amazon product, for instance, potential customers are unlikely to scroll forever in search of the ideal product. They often trust that Amazon will show them the most ideal product – you should use this to your advantage!
For more tips and tricks on how to optimise your small business, take a look at our other guides!
Alternatively, if you need help optimising your Amazon site, take a look at some of our services here.