Small Business SEO: If you’re online and you’re hungry, the great thing about this virtual buffet that we call Google is that everything is served to steam hot on the first page instantly when you order.
On the flipside, you don’t get much time to prepare the plate if you are the one serving something. You have to anticipate and serve what the diner might like to eat.
That is what SEO is all about and we will look at it from both sides in this post- the chef and the hungry diner
When we talk about the small business space, note that there will always be a lot of hungry diners with their personal tastes. There will also be a lot of chefs trying to master their SEO to cater to those personal tastes.
For a better understanding of why SEO is important for small business especially, first we imagine you’re the hungry diner looking for something specific in the e-buffet. Eventually, we will see how SEO works when you order or serve at the great Google buffet.
So you search for something and you see so much in front of you. The trouble with search engines is that you are spoilt for choice. There is an information overload with a lot of content being thrown at you suddenly when you search for something. Like, having too many similar dishes in front of you, when you asked for just one.
These content pages or search results could be article links, images, YouTube Videos and of course Advertisements. So the same food item that you ‘ordered’ is presented in different forms for you to choose from.
Sort of like a tasting round at a huge buffet. You can picture it like having 10 tables at a time (10 search results per page). Start ordering and the tables will rearrange themselves when you decide to order something else suddenly. Convenient but confusing, isn’t it?
Let’s say you searched for “how to make pasta”.
Now Google will present to you on its first page the most relevant blog posts, images, YouTube channels and ads that show you how to make pasta. The one that you will click and pick out of those for 10 could be called the “master chef” of the web for that search term (dish). His recipe for success is a combination of various ingredients, one of the most important being SEO for relevant high-quality content.
The finest pasta that the hungry diner consumed had the right mix of spices, vegetables etc. cooked perfectly. Just like his content, which had good SEO with the perfect combination of words, phrases, and visuals. Ultimately making it click-worthy (tasting)
Now let’s imagine you are the aspiring chef who is preparing this content for consumption and you want to have your plate on the first table at Google when a hungry diner walks in. We know that the way search engine algorithms work is to present the user (hungry diner) with the most relevant dishes (content pages) based on what he has ordered (search term).
Your task is to get your content selected by Google for serving on the first page by employing great SEO. If you are able to optimize your content according to the search terms using the right SEO techniques, the chances of Google placing your content on its first page (table) are much higher.
Once it makes it to the first page, it all depends upon the quality and first impressions of the content. Similar to the way an appetizer is served, a compacted version of your content is served to the diner. Naturally, presentation matters a lot and this is where SEO can come into play to enhance it. Great SEO will serve the best (bite-sized) portions out of your content to the hungry diner in a nice plate for tasting so that he is interested in eating the entire dish once he has had a taste.
All this while all the other chefs are trying to make the same dish but it’s not reaching the dinner because of poor SEO. So if you are small to the medium business owner with an online presence in any form, invest some resources in High-quality SEO. You will surely see your products and services reach a wider audience online and hopefully sell like hot cakes!
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