Dec 23

Small Business Search Engine Optimisation - Research

HowToWebsite.co.uk have been working on a number of Search Engine Optimistaion campaigns over the past 5 years for local businesses whose target market are in the local and surrounding areas. This article has been split into 3 separate parts, the first is about research and its importance in Search Engine Optimisation for Small Businesses and Local Search.

Research

1.  Establish your goal

Why do you want people to find your website? Is your website purely informational or do you have a set list of clear objectives that you want your visitors to accomplish? e.g. increase downloads of sales brochures, increase leads for a particular product or do you want people to contact you by phone? You need to set some clear objectives for your website, start with a list of five, implement the functionality, test and revisit.

2.  Begin Brainstorming

Brainstorm in a group or on your own and create a list of some potential search queries that you believe your target audience may type into a search engine to find your website, for example a Car Trading company operating in the West Midlands area may brainstorm such queries as; ‘cars west midlands‘, ‘used cars west midlands‘ etc. Try and establish a list of 2-4 key words for your homepage and then 1or 2 keywords per product page, for example a Car Trading company may offer different types of products/services e.g. Car Insurance, in this example they may use key words such as ‘cheap car insurance‘ or ‘budget car insurance‘.

3. Research Your Keywords 

Use the Google Keyword Tool to research the keywords you should use on your website. Be careful not to use keywords with a lot of competition. For example optimising a new website (with little online presence) which is quite small in size (total pages) for the key word ‘cars‘ may not generate the desired amount of traffic quickly, you may not appear high enough in the search engine result pages (SERPS) as the competition is too fierce.

Optimising for a more niche long tail key word (longer phrase) will probably generate more traffic in the short term as competition is usually lower. Furthermore optimising for niche long tail keywords will deliver more targeted traffic. Somebody searching for ‘used cars in the west midlands‘ will probably not be in a position to travel to Edinburgh for example if there are used cars for sale in their local area, you should ideally try to use your local town or county within the keyphras as long as it delivers a substantial amount of traffic. Below is a rough estimate of search queries for the terms shown below: -

‘used cars west midlands’ : 1,600 searches

‘cars’ : 414,000,000 searches 

4. Once you have a clear list of keywords write them down or enter them into a spreadsheet under each page heading e.g. Homepage : ’used cars west midlands‘, Product 1 (Car Insurance) : ’cheap car insurance companies’.

5. Your Competitors

Enter your search terms into the search engine(s) of your choice, www.google.co.uk, www.yahoo.co.uk etc and analyse the current search engine results pages (SERPS). Make another spread sheet and record who is ranking for that keyword (top 5 will do), furthermore record what they are doing effectively and ineffectively. You need to be in a position where you are aware of who your competition is and what sort of online presence they have.

6. Referring Traffic

Use Google Link Command or Yahoo Site Explorer and discover who is linking to and sending traffic to your competitors. Make a list of your competitors referring sites.

7. Check Inclusion

If your website is already up, you have low traffic and believe your website is not appearing in the SERPS go to www.google.co.uk and type in the following entering your domain name as shown ’site:www.YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME.com/co.uk’ for example HowToWebsite.co.uk would use ’site:www.howtowebsite.co.uk’. If your site has not been indexed you need to figure out what is preventing this from happening.

If your website has been indexed by the search engines perform searches for the keywords that are present in your page titles, web page titles can be found in the very top left hand corner when you have your website loaded in your browser. If you are ranking for these keywords make a record of what position they appear in the SERPS.

Go to Part 2 >

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