SEO for Small Businesses
In a Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout recorded on October 8, 2021, SEO for small businesses was discussed in detail and it seems there are quite a few unnecessary hurdles to jump for people looking to start a small business website. Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, highlighted the complexity of SEO beginner guides, and explained that the start-up process is actually much easier these days. So let’s delve deeper into Google’s opinion on small business SEO and how it’s changing.
SEO Is Not Scary
The first insight from Google HQ is that SEO doesn’t have to be scary. According to Mueller, starter guides on the internet with a title like, ‘What is SEO and how it works for small businesses’ are overcomplicated and full of outdated information. There’s often a lot of talk about creating HTML pages, for instance, in a world where people now rely on hosting platforms to do all the ‘techy stuff’ for them. This is what Mueller had to say:
“The tricky part with all of these starter guides, at least the ones that I’ve seen, is they’re often based on an almost old school model of websites where you create HTML pages.
For the most part, small businesses when they go online they don’t create HTML pages anymore they go into WordPress, or into Wix, or into any of the other common hosting platforms, and they create their pages by putting text in, and dragging images in, and all of these things.
And they don’t really realise that in the back there’s actually an HTML page.”
So a starter guide talking about tweaking the HTML for title elements is totally out of date when most small business owners simply have to find the relevant field in a hosting system and decide what to put there instead.
There are Information Gaps
When talking about content creation for websites and knowing how to populate fields in a hosting system, Mueller states that future guides will probably ‘shift a bit to cover that area a little bit better.” Put simply, there’s no point hammering on about HTML code when it’s of no use to a modern audience with access to hosting tools. Instead, there needs to be more specific guidance about how to make titles and sub-headers interesting while sticking to SEO best practices such as incorporating relevant keywords.
Content creation via sites like Wix or WordPress is vital for small businesses in this day and age and shouldn’t be overlooked. For example, if you want to attract a local audience, then populating fields with local SEO terms is a must, and this should be carefully researched with the help of analytics before the page is created via a hosting platform.
Contact Whitefish Marketing, a Kent SEO agency, for help with your content marketing strategy. We provide tailored solutions for your business.
