Small business owners are in a pinch between having to adapt to the digital age and not having the skills to do so for their company. When we're talking about digital adaptation for businesses, most of the time it refers to a company's website.
Websites are the digital gateway for people to find your company through search engines. In order to make your website comes up for a certain search queries, you need something called search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is a challenging subject for non-professionals to handle alone. There are two sides of SEO:
On-page optimizations.
On-page optimizations are adjustments that you can make in the content of a Web page like the number of words in your articles, the title of your pages, tags, etc.
Off-page optimizations.
Off-page optimizations include more technical adjustments like optimizing website load speed, formatting hyperlinks, etc.
Why does small businesses need SEO?
Online shopping is the real deal now - it's convenient and more secure than ever. And when it comes to online purchases 9 out of 10 transactions start from search engine result pages. Search engine like Google, Bing, and Yahoo have specific sets of rules that they use to determine which websites they will show first for specific keywords.
Optimizing your small business' website has one purpose: making your website appear in the number one spot in searches. This is because 75 percent of people don't scroll past the first page of search engines (Junto, 2017).