Is Your SEO Ethical?
Ethical search engine optimization is one way to ensure organic growth through Google. SEO that follows ethical guidelines provides residual growth opportunity and revenue potential..
An Easy Guide To Ethical Search Engine Optimization For Small Business Owners
Here’s a question.
Has anyone ever actually been to the second page of Google? Are we even sure it exists?
SEO is constantly evolving.
And, it’s finicky. Things that worked in the past do not work any more — for good reason — Google wants:
The best and most relevant sites ranked
Your site structure to match their algorithm specs
Constant updates
What Do We Know About SEO?
SEO is much like Aesops’s Fable, “The Tortoise and The Hare.”
We all know what happened. The hare was fast out of the gate but failed to win the race. The wise tortoise paced himself and emerged victorious.
An ethical SEO strategy will benefit from slow and steady growth. Just like the tortoise, your business will succeed by a paced and efficient optimization strategy
Creating organic growth for your business starts by developing a comprehensive and ethical search engine optimization strategy.
What Would Make My SEO Strategy Unethical?
There’s a lot of ways to stray down the wrong path here. It is common to want to find the easiest solution for a given problem — this can be a slippery slope when it comes to creating an effective SEO strategy.
But Why?
A business will need tons of stuff to create a competitive SEO strategy. Some things, like backlinks, you can purchase. Other stuff, like content, you can put together hastily. These methods also have the potential to destroy your websites ranking opportunities.
How Does This Happen?
Unfortunately, many budget SEO strategies will cut corners by purchasing backlinks, using duplicate content, and keyword stuffing. This has the potential to negatively affect your business. If Google flags your site for any of the above, it can mean no more organic search results, ever.
Quick Links:
How Can A Business Owner Avoid Hiring The Wrong SEO Expert?
The best route to ensuring your business has an ethical search engine optimization strategy is by hiring a professional to carry out the research and implementation.
Things to avoid:
Budget companies. If the price is too good to be true, it might be. Often, the low cost comes with a lot of cut corners. Doing things the right way takes time.
Guaranteed Rankings. Optimizing content for search engines is not an exact science. If there is a guarantee made, ask for the corresponding data and timeline.
Fast Results. Successful Google rankings take time. A realistic timeline for an ethical SEO strategy is 6-12 months. A shorter timeline or guarantee is a red flag.
Billions and billions of searches… every day. Is there an opportunity for your business? Creating a solid SEO strategy with ethical guidelines is a great way to improve your businesses online health.
How Can I Make My Businesses SEO Ethical?
A problem only exists if there is not a solution. That solution — play by the rules. Which, can be:
tedious
time-consuming
expensive
This is where hiring a professional helps. Not every business will benefit from a comprehensive SEO strategy. However, if there is an opportunity to generate organic traffic for your business, ethical SEO is often the straightest line. Hiring a professional minimizes error. Done correctly, optimizing your website for search engines is not a small task — it requires leg-work and research.
That’s a bummer, right?
Sort-of. Each business I have worked with is willing to go the extra mile for their customers. It is part of the reason they are successful. Due diligence pays off. The work it takes to rank on Google is significant, however, the potential ROI is also significant.
What Are Some Ways My Business Can Start Improving its SEO Ethically? (The Basics)
Great question!
These are some easy & ethical fixes you can make to your website to start seeing improvement in search engine results:
Generate Keywords. This is step one. “SEO 101”. If this is done incorrectly, the rest of the strategy suffers tremendously. Using third-party software is a great way to compare data. Many of the platforms offer free-trials, which are helpful when gauging your business needs. I use Ahrefs —it is user-friendly and the data is unparalleled.
Compress all existing images. Having images on your site is great. However, load speed is an important component to search engine optimization. I use Optimizilla to compress images. It is free, easy-to-use, and has a fun name.
Ideally, images should be below 500kb and total page size should remain below 5MB.
The reality: those sizes can be hard to hit with high resolution photography generated from free online image platforms.
If you are looking for the best selection of free online images, Unsplash is the way to go.
Rename all image files and videos. Are the images on your site labeled “image.00987” or similar? That doesn’t help search engines. Renaming the files to accurately represent your business will help search engines read the relevant material on your site.
What does that look like?
“image.00987.JPG” <changes to> “your.services.JPG”
These changes require very little technical skills. If you can work a computer you can make the above improvements to your SEO content strategy. Here is a great resource for developing a keyword plan.
Quick Links:
Here’s a fun fact:
Nobody really knows what Google is doing. Google is arguably the most sophisticated company in the world. Select programmers within Google know, the outside world does their best to keep up. This happens through ethical search engine optimization and aligning with Google Best Practices.
Search engine optimization is not a quick fix. Building a website correctly is an investment in the future of your business, and using SEO ethically is the best way to build a firm foundation.
How Can A Business Start Improving Its SEO On Its Own? (More Advanced)
Here are a few more tips that a business owner can do themselves to boost their SEO rankings and potential. Some of the ease will depend on which site-building platform you are using. As a general rule, use Squarespace or Wordpress.
Customize your URL slugs. These are your subdomains. Everything that happens after the / in your .com address. When adding a new page to your own site, the new page will be labeled “new-page-1” — or something similar. That’s not ideal.
Change “New-page-1” to “Your-relevant-business-info” — this will help search engines identify the important details of your site and direct traffic there accordingly.
Here is an example — this is the URL for this article: https://tombostrom.com/blog/responsive-web-design-services/ethical-search-engine-optimization. I build websites and this article is about ethical SEO. Easy-peasy.
Add a linking system. Google loves links. All the links. A great rule to run with is this: do not have a page on your website that does not have at least two links for every 500 words of content.
These can be links that take you to other areas of your site (internal links) or links that route you to another area of the web (external links).
If you know how to add a link to an email you can learn how to add a link to a website.
Add an SEO description. Many site-building platforms allow you to add a specific SEO description. It will give you a specific amount of characters to explain what the page is about, including a title. It’s a great way to tell search engines exactly what is on that specific page of your site.
Important takeaways: Don’t go overboard with the keywords, one or two combinations per description is sufficient.
Squarespace makes this super easy. If you have a Squarespace site, here is a link to how to add an SEO description to a Squarespace site.
Think Kung Fu Panda.
Keep your SEO content strategy sincere and authentic to what your business offers.
Keep improving by adding new content and updates.
Buy dumplings, not backlinks.
How Can Search Engine Optimization Help My Business?
Organic search results. Another key internet statistic, there are 5.25 billion internet users world-wide. Safe bet there are customers and clients searching the web for what you’re offering.
92% of internet searches happen on Google
The average person makes 3-4 google searches PER DAY
There are two-trillion google searches per year.
People are finding everything on Google. But are they finding your business?
“If your business is not on the internet, then your business will be out of business.” ”
What Else Can An Ethical SEO Strategy Do For My Small Business?
Brand elevation. Increasing the visibility of your product or service through social media, web development, visual & written content.
Creating a brand — an identity for yourself online— is a good thing.
You’ve invested a lot of time into your:
Services
Values
Reputation
Skills set and education
YOU and your business.
Those investments should shine in your online presence. The reality is, people are discovering who you are and what you offer based on Google searches. That presence should reflect the quality of your business.
The importance of hiring a brand copywriter is vital. The voice, tone, and direction of your advertisements will chart the trajectory of your business marketing.
There is some misconception that SEO involves complex coding but that’s not necessarily the case! It is possible for small businesses to develop
How Much Coding Do I Need To Learn To Do SEO for My Small Business?
This is the good news! There is are tons of effective and quick solutions you can make to the ethical optimization of your website without needing to know any code or complex web-jargon. That being said, knowing how to develop websites, utilize various coding languages, and the ability to work in the backend of digital resources is a huge plus.
This come especially handy with:
UX Design: This just mean user design, or user experience. How is the relationship between your website and the people engaging with it — are they enjoying the experience? Naturally, search engines are designed to register which sites retain traffic, not simply generate traffic. If your site is shinier and built correctly, it’s likely to rank higher.
Altering Sitemaps: This is not a feature available in every site building platform. It basically gives a site owner better/more power over the “sitemap” or skeleton of your site — the framework Google sees. As you can imagine, this is an advantage. Currently, many site building platforms do not allow sitemaps to be altered. Wordpress on the other hand, does — however, it is a more complex site building platform and not always ideal for small businesses managing their own sites.
That being said, it doesn’t hurt to bring on a professional for competitive SEO rankings OR if you don’t have the bandwidth to learn yourself as a business owner. There are tons of great resources to learn more about CSS, JavaScript, and Python if you want to deep dive!
Quick shoutout regarding web development learning:
I am a firm believer in every kid learning to code. That’s why this link — why every kid should learn coding — is an amazing resource for any one trying to give a young person in their life a leg up. It's user-friendly, increases problem-solving skills, and fosters creativity — while being simple to learn and engaging. They also have the best Javascript Projects For Kids.
Back to business.
Can Ethical SEO Help My Business Generate More Business?
Conversion. Directing relevant traffic to your site will help you generate relevant business. For many businesses, traffic alone will not suffice. That traffic needs to be warm and hot, consumers legitimately interested in your services.
Directing traffic to a website is ineffective if the website is not designed to covert the audience. Pairing SEO best practices with compelling copy leads to lower bounce rates and higher conversions.
More traffic will mean:
New customers reaching out
Past clients who have strayed away reconnecting
Consistency with your existing customers
Directing new and existing customers to your site with promotional offers and note-worthy content is an effective audience-building strategy. This will enhance your any SEO strategy while creating several lead avenues.
Research and analytics are critical for any SEO content strategy. Tracking data and researching competitors is a time-consuming but necessary component of ethical search engine optimization.
Does SEO Help My Business Distribute Content?
Content distribution. An effective SEO content strategy will carry its content across platforms. The visual and written content used to enhance an ethical SEO strategy can be used on socials, email marketing, and print ads.
Have you ever re-posted something on Facebook? Instagram? Twitter? It was likely funny, informative, relevant, or otherwise quality. If a business distributes quality content — it is likely to be redistributed at a higher rate than content that is not high quality.
An effective SEO content strategy will allow a business to repurpose written and visual content across its marketing strategy as well as generate better leads to convert and re-market.
And guess what ya’ll?
Global reach. Houston, we just went global. Your business, no matter the size, can command an audience world-wide. That’s not a hype statement. Those are facts. There is opportunity to expand in nearly every niche, no matter how large or small your territory. That can happen if your website is optimized for search engines ethically.
Will Ethical SEO Help My Business Right Now?
Yes! I am here to help — request a free-consultation through the form below!