The first question is easy - if you want your audience and potential customers to be able to find you in Google searches and other search engines, then the answer is a resounding YES.

The level of SEO that you need is defined by how big a part in your small business plan that Google search plays. If you depend on it for a large part of your business then the SEO needs to go deep and wide. If it’s just a small part of your total income, then you need to define what SEO actions are going to be most useful to achieve your goals.

So as you’ve read this far, I’m guessing that your website needs SEO at SOME level. And I think at this point it would be useful to understand what Google’s priority is. And as a business that is looking to obtain organic, FREE clicks, I can assure you that your business is NOT their priority.

As a business, Google is interested in two types of customer: 1. Businesses that pay with sponsored ads and 2. Customers - people searching. Let’s concentrate on no. 2 for the purpose of understanding what Google is trying to achieve.

Its reputation depends on customers finding what they want, quickly and accurately. If Google fails to achieve that for its customers then people will search elsewhere and businesses will stop advertising. Therefore if you want to rank on Google, you need to show them that you are a trusted expert in your industry and that you are going to provide quality, accurate and regularly posted content.

If you simply stuff your content with keywords then Google is sophisticated enough to spot it a mile off and it WILL demote your content in the rankings. And for that reason, whilst keywords do help Google to “crawl” your content, there are many more ways and requirements that it has to demonstrate your expertise.

So the three words to keep in mind when planning your SEO are: TRUST, EXPERTISE and RELEVANCE.

Want help planning your SEO? Not sure to what level your small business needs SEO? Then click through to our SEO page and ask for an assessment.