SEO can feel a little overwhelming, oh-so-techy, and ever changing, so we sat down with our SEO specialist, Ben Vonthethoff, and asked him to shed some light on all things SEO, as well as share some great tips to get that SEO strategy on track. Let's dig in:

1) Why is SEO important for small businesses?

I think SEO matters for businesses because it’s one of the best ways to put yourself in front of people who are actively searching for a product or a service. There are lots of ways to grow your business by driving traffic to your website, e.g. paid ads and social media, but the majority of traffic is generated by organic search. If you can get into the top spots for keywords that matter for your business, it can help set a really strong foundation for attracting new leads well into the future.

2) What are 3 must-haves when it comes to SEO?

The first and most important is content. Without good content you’ll always find it challenging to rank for competitive keywords or topics. The more effort you put into creating strong content that has expert knowledge and answers what the searcher is looking for the better chance you have.

Good technical SEO is also a must-have. This can sometimes sound intimidating but especially for small business sites, it can often mean making sure there aren’t any broken links and that your pages load quickly. There’s plenty of tools and plugins that can help in this area.

And lastly, I’d recommend putting some energy into developing a strong keyword strategy. Making sure you’re focusing on the right keywords will help attract traffic that’s more about quality than quantity. Look at what kinds of terms your competitors are focused around and think about how your target market might search for what you offer. Again, there are some great tools online to help with this.

3) Is SEO just about optimising my website?

There’s should definitely be an emphasis on creating a strong website, but it’s not necessarily just about that. Platforms like Google My Business can produce some incredible returns and should be part of your overall SEO strategy.

Google My Business is free and is integral to a good SEO strategy

Likewise, areas like digital PR can help by growing your businesses visibility but also establishing your brand as an authority in your industry. This can have flow-on effects in terms of the value and expertise associates with your website, which in turn helps your SEO.

4) How can my business use video content to help with SEO

Video content can help in a couple of different ways. For example, for some keywords you’ll notice a number of the top results are only video results, which means while it’s not impossible to rank for without it, it’s likely you’ll need some video content to compete.

But video can also help in making users engage more with your site and content. While this might not directly help in terms of boosting your rankings, video content has demonstrated its effectiveness in turning more traffic that does land on your site into leads.

5) What are some simple SEO tips/changes businesses can implement straight away?

Some simple things business owners can do straight away include adding new content, optimising your meta information and adding internal links to your site.

Adding new, quality content can help improve your existing pages. While things like your title tags and meta descriptions are what actually shows up in search result pages, so making sure they are keyword-focused and written in a way that encourages searchers to click through to your page is really important. And, adding internal links between your pages is a really simple way to make it easier for Google to find your content.

6) Are there any new SEO trends on the horizon that businesses should be aware of?

Google has recently announced a big upcoming update in May called Core Web Vitals. Essentially Google has announced some specific metrics around which they are going to measure the quality of a page experience, e.g. how long it takes to load a page and how quickly it becomes interactive. So there's a big focus on improving the speed of websites at the moment.

If you want help with your SEO, get in touch with Ben Vonthethoff here: benvonthethoffseo@gmail.com