I recently looked at an article by Rob Chant entitled ‘SEO for Small Business: Getting into Action’. Rob addressed the very real issue that SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is often a roadblock for businesses.
Some of the issues he identified were being:
- Bogged down trying to know everything before you start
- Worried because Google and the internet changes constantly
- Paralysed by plenty – too much information, too many desires, don’t know where to start online
Rob covered some great ideas to simply make SEO work for small businesses. Essentially he talked about:
- Know who you are, what you do and where you are going.
- Start with what you do know, small steps builds confidence.
- SEO can become habit forming – in this case, regular use is a positive.
- SEO tasks seem to fall into the important but not urgent category – but unless they are regular, they will become urgent, or your business simply will not keep up with the market.
So Rob advises to develop a structure, a series of simple habits, with short term targets to get measurement and reinforcement of those regular actions. He suggests…
- Frequent action (at least once a week)
- Regular action (do it the same time every day or week)
- Recording (keep your actions noted so you can follow your progress)
- Short term targets (see your steps reach goals in the foreseeable future)
- A stick and a carrot (you set both positive and negative consequences for your actions and inactions – have a mentor, boss, client, or trusted peer to help enforce them)
It wouldn’t matter what task you set yourself to become a habit, these five points would be valuable. I felt very enthused when I read these, as they reinforce an SEO principle as well. Whatever you do with your website to make it more search engine friendly, try to consistently and regularly keep up the good work. If you can only write one interesting article for your websites users this month, keep it to a regular monthly article. Your visitors will look out for your content and information, they will look forward to it and search engines will begin a regular monthly visit to your site to find out about the newest updates, thus, you will be indexed for results sooner after you upload your article rather than later.
Rob talks eloquently about creating negative cycles by having unachievable targets for SEO. My takeaway from this part of the discussion is to ensure you adhere to the main rule of target setting – set realistic goals. The assumption here is that you have a good knowledge of SEO outcomes when you are setting your goals. This may be a long way from the true situation, so here you may need to rely on experts to give you true information on what is actually achievable in the timeframe. He notes that clear short term goals can also make it clearer to you the progress being made.
One crux of this informative part of the article seems to be looking at what may seem old fashioned, but is never really out of date, that is, to adhere to best practice goal setting. Make any goals you set:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable/attainable
- Relevant to your business goals
- Timely
- Only fuss over what you can control
Rob Chant has succinctly covered the critical aspects of getting small businesses on the road to successful SEO; know who and what you are about, put in place both a structured plan and realistic targets and then just ‘do a Nike’ – get out there and do it.
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