SEO for small businesses

0:09John Mueller. Hello, and welcome to a new episode of Search Off the Record, a podcast coming to you from the Google Search team, where we talk all about search and maybe have some fun along the way. My name is John Mueller. I'm a search advocate here at Google in Switzerland. And today, I'm joined by Martin Splitt, who is working on my team also as a search advocate. Hi, Martin. Hi, John. Woo-hoo. It's great to have you here, Martin. I don't know about you, But occasionally I get asked by random people who know that I work at Google, like what they should do about SEO. It's like often it's like a small business owner, someone who has a website.

0:52And they're like, what do I need to do? Or is it even something I need to think about? I do get that a lot. And I find that surprisingly tricky. so i'm actually pretty happy that we are talking about it a little bit because i think everyone who is about to get in contact with seo probably has more or less the same questions and we should have a good answer i guess so my go-to answer is to send them to the quick starter guide okay it's like or seo read the documentation leave me alone no not leaving alone but like i i don't even know where to start like what's their level and i think the starter guide the seo starter guide kind of brings people on a admittedly low level but at least like we have common shared vocabulary to start the conversation okay but then from there on i'm not super sure I guess they should just buy ads and then no no no no no John no no but I think it's it's tricky I mean let's let's look at for instance someone who runs a business and has a website and they're like ah I want to make my food truck more well known um so I think I need a website and i'm like that's okay that's a good idea probably i guess and then they show me their website or they don't even have a website and they don't even know where to start that that already is a difference but let's assume they have a website and then you go to their website and they don't tell you what's on the menu they don't tell you where they are or when they are open and i'm like how did we get here how how did that happen have you seen that before?

2:51Yeah. Yeah. I think in some of these situations, one of the things I try to get people to kind of voice is what they actually want to get out of their website. What is the goal of your website? Essentially, it's like, from a technical term, what is the conversion that you want to track when someone goes to your website and like, what then? Because a lot of times that helps to kind of get them into the mindset of like, why am I making this website and what is its purpose? Rather than just like, I don't know, I have a website, now what? Because I think if you focus more on the purpose, then some things around SEO are a little bit easier.

3:46And other things, maybe you find like you don't need it all. And yet other things you find maybe you're missing out completely. So like taking, I don't know, a small restaurant, local restaurant. And if your purpose is to get people to come and visit you in person and have a meal, then you kind of need to make it as easy as possible for them to understand what it is that you're offering and where you're located what your opening hours are those kind of things okay fair enough all right so you need to figure out what it is that you want from your website but let's say like he wants more customers to come to his food truck then what would be like the next step i mean do you tell him oh uh i don't know install wordpress and the seo plugins for wordpress and then you'll be golden or i don't even know i i also i i think it's it's challenging because it's from a practical point of view.

4:59We have this mindset of technical things and all of these details already. So if someone comes to us, it's very easy to say, oh, you should do these five things. But I think what matters before that is also to figure out who are your customers or your potential customers and how would they be searching and like what do you even want to be found for kind of taking on the one hand your goal like you want people to come and visit you to you and figuring out from there it's like who do you want to have to visit you and buy something and how would you like be in the right place at the right time on their journey of like finding you Like what is it that you want to be found for?

5:53And oftentimes I think that leads people to, well, I will try out some of these searches and try to think about like how you as a person try to search for maybe a new business or a restaurant that you haven't gone to. Because probably you wouldn't go to Google and say like restaurant in Zurich. And it's like, I want to rank first for restaurant in Zurich, which probably is totally useless. and also very hard. Okay, so you need to understand better what is your specific offer and who is your specific customer. So you need to figure out how to phrase things or what the content is. Would you say that's this content strategy kind of thing?

6:40I think that kind of leads to content strategy kind of thing where if you know what your potential customers are searching for, then you have it a little bit easier to understand what you should provide on your site that could be visible in search. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So I think also all of this assumes that you have actually a website that is technically kind of reasonable. What do you mean? Which it's kind of something that, from a technical point of view, could be OK. Which I think for a lot of the smaller businesses, the people who are online, like if you're using some kind of CMS like WordPress or Wix or any of these, it's like technically you have a website that kind of works.

7:44Ah, so the technical foundations are solid, I guess that's what you're saying. Yeah, that's kind of my assumption. But if I have no idea about the technical bits and pieces, how do I know? Or how do I find out? Like, is there like a score for are you okay? OK. For someone who is tech savvy, there are lots of ways to kind of tell if it's OK or not. But it's hard to have something like a simple test, I guess, to see if technically it's kind of reasonable. What I would tell people to do when they get started is search for their site in general, like search for it by name, search for it by the domain name that you have, and see if anything shows up in search.

8:40If things are showing up, probably you're okay. Because for the most part, sites made by people who are not super tech savvy are kind of general web pages. It's not that someone who doesn't know what they're doing accidentally creates a PWA with JavaScript and runs it with React. It's like, I don't see that accidentally happening. OK. OK. Right? I mean, who knows with like Vibe coding and all of these AI tools, maybe you go to ChatGPT and you're like, oh, make me a website. and it goes, wow, I know a lot about JavaScript frameworks. Here you go. It's possible, but it feels very unlikely. Or at least I think someone would learn a lot while doing that.

9:42That is true. That is true, yeah. Yeah, I think for the most part, if you're using something common like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, any of these systems, probably the technical foundation is kind of okay. And you can focus more on the content side of things. All right. Okay. And how would I know how to go about content? Because now I know who I want to address and probably also roughly what I want to do. But I mean, that's a whole different skill set, right? that's like copywriting and probably like some researching and maybe some lecturing and editing and wow that's a lot i love to write i love to have your developer hat you're like i don't do documentation no that's not true and you know that that's not true but i love having a technical writer on the team lizzie is a tremendous help with anything that is writing and i thought i honestly i honestly thought i'm a good reasonably good writer and then lizzie came and asked like three questions on a piece of documentation that i thought was almost perfect and i basically started questioning the foundations of the universe because i was like okay no this this document doesn't even make sense i haven't i haven't answered the fundamental questions that i need to answer before i can even start writing and i've written like three pages so holy moly That is a skill.

11:15That is an amazingly tricky skill to acquire, I think. So how do I start writing? Just write what I think I should be writing, I guess? I think if you have absolutely no inspiration, one approach could be to ask your existing customers and just ask them, how did you find me? What were you looking for? Where were you looking? Were you just looking on a map kind of thing? like, what is it that brought you here? And this is something that you can ask anyone who kind of, especially if you have a physical business, like it's pretty easy to kind of just ask this randomly without scaring people away.

11:59That's kind of one aspect I would do and try to build up this collection of these are different searches that people have done in different places, maybe on different systems and I want to make sure I'm kind of visible there. And then I would take those and just try them out and see what comes up and think about how reasonable it would be for one of your pages perhaps to show up there. And how reasonable it can be, I think, is something where you have to be brutally honest with yourself because it's sometimes tempting to say, well, I would like to appear first for the search bookstore on the internet.

12:43And probably that's not going to happen. I mean, who knows? But there's a lot of competition for some of these terms. But if you're talking about someone searching for bookstores or bookstores in Zurich or bookstores on maps or something like that, then that's a lot more well-defined and a lot easier for you to kind of look at and see like what are other people doing there um maybe my pages are already there and based on that you can try to build out like what is it that i need to at least mention on my pages okay fair enough okay it sounds a bit like market research as well which i think is generally a good idea if you want to have like a website yeah i i mean like it all depends on how serious you take your goal right if you're like a small local business you're like saying well i have a website and i hear i should make it seo but i don't really care then it's like do whatever you want kind of thing like if you have enough business and you're happy it's like there's no one to judge you to say like your website is not seo optimized i mean there are people who will but it doesn't really matter like whatever who cares yeah okay but if i want to like try things out let's say like i asked a bunch of customers and i got two different answers pretty much across the board and it's like a 50 50 split and i want to try something out should i can i just do that or do Do I hurt my website when I just try things out?

14:29JOHN MUELLER - I think it depends on the website. But for the most part, you can just try things out. One of the nice parts about websites is often, if you're using a CMS, you can just edit the page. And it's live. And it's done. It's not that you have to do some big elaborate, I don't know, work to put it live. So it's very easy to try things out, let it sit for a couple of weeks, see what happens, and kind of monitor to see, is it doing what you want it to be doing? And I guess at that point, when we talk about monitoring, you probably need to make sure that you have the various things installed so that you actually see what is happening, right?

15:17perhaps set up search console for your website so that you see the searches that people are doing and of course some way to measure the goal that you want which could be something perhaps in analytics or perhaps there's i don't know some other way that you track in person if you have a physical store is like are people actually coming to my business after seeing my website because it's all all well and good to kind of like do seo but if you have no way of understanding like has it even changed anything you don't even know if you're on the right track or recognize if something is going wrong yeah that's that's true okay so i need a way of measuring the impact of my changes.

16:08And I don't know, like, if I make a new website version and I have, like, different texts and different images and everything is different, will I immediately, like, see things change in Search Console or will that take some time? It depends on how big the website is. But if you're talking about something like a homepage, maybe one or two other pages, then probably within a week or two, you should see that reflected in search. And you can kind of search for yourself initially. That's not forbidden to search for yourself. It's not that something will go wrong or anything. Searching for your site and seeing like, is whatever change that you made, has that been reflected?

16:57So things like if you change the title to include some more information, you can see fairly quickly if that got picked up or not. Okay. Oh, nice. All right. But still like a week or two. So if I burn my business website to the ground and I rely on it to give me people and I burn it for like a week or two, that sounds very scary. I mean, hopefully if you're doing something that's in line with what your customers actually find useful, you wouldn't be burning it to the ground. But... Okay, okay. No freak experiments. I see, I see. Yeah. I think within the developer community, there's kind of this notion of having a staging site where you try things out and see if they work.

17:50And then at some point you switch over to the real website. And I think for SEO, especially for smaller sites, that probably doesn't work so well. Because the staging site is essentially something where someone would go if they know exactly what they're looking for and they can test something. But for SEO, you kind of want search engines to go there and understand the change that you've made. And that's not really something that you can test with a staging site because for the most part, you don't want search engines to look at your staging site. So it's like technical things you could check on a staging site, but everything around content, like you can't really kind of try that out on a staging site.

18:44Okay. Yeah. I mean, that sounds fair. and that all of this sounds pretty manageable but I know people are hiring agencies and SEO experts when is the point where you think an expert or an agency should come in what's the bits and pieces that are not as easy to do while I do my business that I should have an expert for yeah i i don't know if there's a one size fits all answer there because it's a bit it's a bit like asking like when i when should i get help for marketing and especially for a small business like you do everything yourself and at some point you're like oh i really hate bookkeeping i'm going to hire a bookkeeper at that point where you're like well i don't appreciate doing all of this work or I don't have time for it, but I know it has to be done.

19:45That's probably the point where you say, well, okay, I will hire someone for this. And I think for an SEO, it kind of makes sense when you realize there's kind of concrete value in working on SEO for your website, where there's some business result that comes out of it, where you can actually measure what you say. I was like, when I started doing SEO for my website, I made so much more money or whatever it is that goal is that you care about. And I'm happy to invest a portion of that into hiring someone to do SEO. So that's kind of one way I would look at it, where if you can measure in one way or another kind of the effects of the SEO work, then it's easier to say, well, I will invest this much into having someone else do that for me.

20:43And someone else ideally would be someone who has more experience doing SEO, because as a small business owner, you have like 500 hats to wear and you probably can figure out a little bit about each of these things, but understanding all of the details, that's sometimes challenging. OK, so there's no one-size-fits-all answer for this one. But you have to find that spot for yourself whenever it makes sense. All right, OK, fair. Yeah. And I think we also have a help article on how to hire an SEO. So I would look at that. We can link to that in the description or in the notes. One of the things I would watch out for is if an SEO makes any promises with regards to kind of ranking or traffic from search, that's usually a red flag.

21:41Because a lot of things around SEO, you can't promise ahead of time. And if someone says, I'm an expert, I promise you will rank first for these five words, they can't do that. They can't manually go into Google systems and tweak the dials and change the rankings. Fair. Do you have any... So that being said, do you have any other resources that you would like people to reference when they're at this point? So they've read the starter guide. What's next? What should they dig into? JOHN MUELLER - I think the starter guide is great for understanding what you can do, what kind of things can be done.

22:29The search essentials are also good. Those are the old webmaster guidelines, which includes the things that you should or shouldn't do. Understanding some of the, or at least knowing, the search essentials, where they are and roughly what they contain, also helps to make sure that any SEO that you hire kind of stays on the right side of things. So that I think is kind of useful. It's like if you're building a house, you kind of want to know that your architect is not breaking any obvious rules or laws. If you're not that much into reading, we also have a video series called SEO for Beginners, which probably covers a bunch of this as well.

23:13That might be useful. oh yeah yeah who is in that video series i believe that's cherry cherry but you also have i have seo made easy yes seo made easy yes but i think cherry covers like a lot of topics in a more like learning path kind of way i have like ad hoc episodes on specific things that people have been struggling with but that might also be useful but they are more specific like oh what is a canonical. If you don't know, one of these very short episodes is probably a good first stop to learn more about that. Right. And I guess another question that I sometimes hear with regards to hiring an SEO is like, how long does it take for them to kind of make visible changes?

24:08Yeah, how long does it take? I'm pretty sure it's not instant. If you say it takes a week or a couple of weeks to pick things up, is that the reasonable time horizon or is it even longer? I think to speak in SEO lingo, it depends. Some changes are easy to pick up quickly, like simple text changes on a page. They just have to be recrawled and reprocessed, and that happens fairly quickly. But if you make bigger, more strategic changes on a website, then sometimes that just takes a long time. And I think that's something where a good SEO should be able to help monitor kind of the progress along there.

24:52So it shouldn't be that they go off and make changes and say, OK, now you have to keep paying me for the next year until we wait what happens. like they should be able to tell you what is happening, what the progress is, kind of give you some input on the different things that they're doing regularly. But it is something that is more of a longer term thing. And I think if you have a website that has never done anything with SEO, probably you'll see a nice big jump in the beginning as you kind of ramp up and do whatever the best practices are. and at some point it'll kind of be slow and regular more from there on.

25:34Okay, so that's a tricky thing to track, I guess. Or you have to be patient and I'm absolutely not patient. So that's challenging. I think being patient is good, but you also need someone like an SEO as a partner to kind of give you updates along the way and say, OK, we did all of these things. And they can list them out and tell you exactly what they did. And these things are going to take a while. And I can show you when Google crawls. We can follow along to see what is happening there. And based on that, we can give you some idea of when to expect changes. OK, fair enough.

26:22OK. Cool. OK. Okay, I think that's pretty good. And last but not least, with generative AI and chatbot AI things happening, do you think there's still value in learning these kinds of things? Or can I just enter a prompt and it'll figure things out for me? Absolutely value in learning these things and in making a good website. I think there are lots of things that all of these chatbots and other ways to get information, they don't replace a website. So especially if you're a local business, maybe it's fine if a chatbot mentions your business name and tells people how to get there. Maybe that's perfectly fine.

27:13But oftentimes, they do that based on web content that they found. So it's like having a website is kind of the basis for being visible in all of these systems. And for a lot of other things where you offer a service or something, some other kind of functionality on a website where you have products to sell, where you have subscriptions or anything, a chat response can't replace that. So if you want a T-shirt, it's like you don't want a description of how to make your own T-shirt. You want kind of a link to a store where it's like, oh, here is like T-shirt designs, maybe T-shirt designs in that specific style that you like.

27:51But you go to this website and buy those T-shirts there. Okay, that's very fair. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So you think AI is not going to take it all away from us? Well, we'll see. I can't make any promises. I think at some point I would like to retire, and then maybe AI takes over my work then. But there's lots of stuff to be done until then. And there are lots of things that I imagine AI is not going to just replace. OK, OK, fine, fine, fine, fine. OK, John, thank you so much. Cool. Well, that's it for this episode. Good. Martin, if people want to ask you more questions, or you want to ask them more questions, where should they find you?

28:41Oh, LinkedIn is probably the easiest way. I usually only connect to people I actually have talked to in person. But feel free to pop me a message or mention me in a post or something, and I'll probably pop into the comments. MARTIN SPLITTMANNIKOVSKY - Fantastic. Cool. Wow. MARTIN SPLITTMANNIKOVSKY - Thank you. And thank you, folks, for listening. And goodbye. Thank you, John, and bye-bye.

29:08We've been having fun with these podcast episodes. I hope you, the listener, have found them both entertaining and insightful too. Feel free to drop us a note on LinkedIn or chat with us at one of the next events that we go to if you have any thoughts. And, of course, don't forget to like and subscribe. Thank you and goodbye.

29:33Thank you.