5 Things Business Owners & Entrepreneurs need to think about when embarking on the SEO Journey

With the increased importance of technology in business and the use of the internet for customer engagement, more are more businesses and organisations are taking to the web. This trend although great poses a new set of challenges for businesses and consumers alike, such as:

• Consumers are having a harder job weeding out the real experts and professionals from the mediocre. These days, anybody can profess to be anything and look amazing; thanks to stock images and Photoshop.
• As technology continues to improve and the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) increases, customers seek to access information about products or services almost in real time. Therefore businesses need to be agile to keep up with customer needs and fads.
• There is a lot of emphasis on being found online and businesses are losing focus on improving their products, services and processes.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has now become common place in our conversations, and for the technically savvy it means a lot of things like; carrying out keyword research, ensuring they use the most relevant terms, placing keywords throughout webpages and so on, but for the entrepreneur, executive or business owner who’s goal is run a viable and sustainable business, for them SEO simply means;
“making sure that my product/service or business is easy to find and comes up as the most relevant when anyone searches for what I offer via search engines like google, Bing, etc.?”

SEO has significantly changed since the days of simply owning multiple related domain names and redirecting them to a beautiful website with lots of hidden pages and repeated random keywords thrown into the mix, but with the advancement of AI, the best strategy today is really thinking holistically about how to be present and relevant in your marketspace and communicating that to as many people as possible.

According to research carried out by BrightEdge, Organic search is responsible for 53% of all site traffic. By implication, Organic search, also known as natural search, is based on relevance to the user’s search query and other natural ranking factors. Therefore by creating a consistency of brand, the correct narrative and using multiple social media and relevant website channels to tell your story, you will attract over half of your potential web customers. By inference, you can almost say that intimately knowing your business and brilliantly telling relevant stories about what you’re doing can account for more than half the battle won in cyberspace!

We must always remember that, technology is really an enabler for businesses, and in this instance, it is enabling businesses tell a brilliant narrative to a lot of people. After all, without a brilliant product there’s nothing to search for and also no one plans to search for useless commodities.

So in a nutshell, there are five points businesses must always consider as part of their Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) journey: