Exploring Fitness

This SEO consultant breaks down the basics of search engine optimization to make it less daunting for small business owners.

SEO is an amazing long-term marketing tool for small business owners. Unlike channels like social media and paid ads that stop working when you stop engaging or paying, search engine optimization continues to build on itself if you do it correctly. 

As an SEO consultant, I’ve loved helping hundreds of clients and students get their websites and content on the first page of Google. 

But I’m no gatekeeper. As an SEO educator who regularly posts tutorials on my YouTube channel and has taught 20+ workshops (including a DIY SEO course for solopreneurs), I love breaking down SEO basics in a way that feels approachable.

Which is exactly what I’m here to do now. Read on to learn some of the foundational steps any small business owner can take to improve search engine optimization.

I promise it doesn’t have to be as technical or complicated as you might think, and you don’t even have to use fancy or expensive tools.

By the end, I hope SEO feels less daunting and you have some clear steps forward.

What is SEO?

In case you’re starting from zero, SEO stands for search engine optimization, which means tailoring web pages to show up in top results on search engines like Google. 

These search engines have little robots (called “spiders”) that crawl the web to find new content and check on old content. When they get to a page on your site, they scan the content to try to get an idea of what the main idea is so they can put it into Google’s Index, which I like to think about as a big filing cabinet filled with literally every website on the internet. 

When you search on Google, it’s like Google goes into the filing cabinet and pulls out what it thinks best matches what you searched for, based on the words you used to search (also known as keywords or queries).

The goal of search engine optimization is to look for ways to prove to the search engines that you are the best match for the topics your target audience is searching for so that you can show up on page one of the results.

3 steps to improve your small business SEO

1. Get clear on the right keywords to target

Keywords are what connect your web pages to search results and clue the search engine bots into what each page is about. If you get keywords wrong, you’ll likely be continuously frustrated with SEO.

Getting keywords right is not about deciding what words and phrases you want to show up for — it’s about understanding what your target audience is searching for and how search engines view different keywords. 

My favorite example of this is from a public speaking coach I worked with who wanted to show up on page one for the keyword “powerful speaker.” The problem? When we searched that term, the results were all for stereo speakers.

If we had targeted that keyword, she never would have been found by people searching for what she actually offered. We ended up targeting keywords like “become a powerful speaker” and “public speaking coach” instead.

To do your own keyword research:

• Talk to your target audience: Send out a survey or have 15-minute conversations with your existing customers to ask what they would type into Google to find you. 
• Look at your competitors' websites: What terms are they using on their pages? These can give you ideas for keywords to target. 
• Use AI: Go to Gemini or ChatGPT and ask for a list of keywords related to your business.
• Start Googling: Once you have a few ideas for keywords, type them into Google and see what auto suggestions come up. 
• See what you’re already ranking for: Are there any keywords that Google is already associating with your business? (Google Search Console can help you figure this out.) Trying to rank higher for those keywords can be low-hanging fruit.

Once you have a list of ideas, you’ll want to hone in on the keywords that have people searching for them (search volume) but aren’t too competitive (keyword difficulty). You can get this information with tools like:

• Semrush: My hands down favorite tool, free with limited results
• Ubersuggest: A great free option for up to three searches a day
• KeySearch: A budget-friendly paid option if you need more searches per day

Google Search Console and Google Analytics are free tools that can also help you with this process by helping you understand your SEO data and how users engage with your website. I have a series of free tutorial videos that walk through how to use them to und