SEO for Australian Small Business: The Essential Search Engine Optimisation Guide for All Small Business in Australia

By Sam Hemphill and Elyse Maberley

Small businesses don’t need to run prime-time television ads to effectively compete with the big end of town anymore.

With great SEO, businesses can be listed alongside, and indeed, in front of their top-end competitors.

SEO for Australian Small Business is essential reading for anyone running or starting a business in Australia.

Sam Hemphill & Elyse Maberley break down complex topics around SEO into easily digestible and actionable pieces.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Meeum
• Release date: Jan 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648764311

Book preview

Hello

Thank you for your time.

For the first time ever, a small business can effectively compete with the big end of town. If you’re a local audio-visual store, you can compete with the Harvey Norman’s of the world, on a relatively even playing field.

Whether that’s via social media, paid advertising or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), a small business doesn’t need to run prime-time television ads to effectively compete.

This book is about Search Engine Optimisation, otherwise known as SEO. Even though we mainly talk about optimising for the search engine, you’ll find that what we really emphasise - from the first page to the last, is user experience.

What this means is to always put your customer first. We’ve seen many businesses stumble when they put too much stock in What’s good for my SEO?, as opposed to What’s good for my customer?. We have found time and time again, that great user experience will almost always lead to great search optimisation.

While we cover a lot of content, this book is not an exhaustive list of resources and techniques. We encourage you to keep up to date with the changing face of SEO and digital marketing.

Having a website is only the beginning of the digital landscape puzzle. While it may have taken a lot of money and time to create your website, it’s not much good if no one can find it.

This is where SEO comes in. Once you have your SEO sorted, your website can become one of your biggest sales tools, and obviously be a huge part of your online marketing.

SEO is not magic. It is a skill set that takes practice and perseverance to get right.

Most of it comes down to:

Best practice

Great content

Making sure people know about your content

Technical know-how.

How this book came about

Across Meeum’s public workshops, in-house engagements and numerous lectures at universities and colleges around Australia, we have spoken to hundreds of small business owners and digital professionals.

In 2019, we were invited by the Australian Department of Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business to be a corporate partner in the Small Business Digital Champions Project, alongside companies such as Facebook, Google and Xero.

We wrote and produced an eBook outlining how the participating businesses could improve on their own SEO and not rely on external marketing agencies if they didn’t want (or couldn’t afford) to.

We received such wonderful feedback for that version, so we decided to release it to the public. Expanded, updated and with even more content added.

The result is what you have in front of you now.

We hope you enjoy reading this book as much as we enjoyed writing it.

Sam Hemphill & Elyse Maberley

Melbourne, January 2020.

How to use this book

As you’ll soon discover, there are literally hundreds of different ways to improve (or hurt) your SEO. As you’ll also see, there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to SEO (or any type of marketing for that matter).

A gym is going to rely on locals while an online travel agent will require a wider reach. Someone selling $5 toys online is going to have very different requirements to someone selling $500,000 cars.

Some businesses have greater technical overhead than others. While rewriting a web page to include more relevant keywords might be a couple of hours work for one business, it may be near impossible for another if their website is difficult to log in to and edit.

Our point here is to use the parts that you can action relatively quickly. For the things that may require some outside help or other intervention, bookmark them and come back.

There is no ‘right order’ that SEO needs to be done.

Something we’d like to point out is that this book can’t cover everything to do with SEO. That would take thousands of pages and would stray away from our point of offering the easiest ‘low hanging fruit’.

Even that ‘low hanging fruit’ takes quite a few pages!

It’s also important to note that while SEO is not ‘easy’, it’s also not difficult to get moving in the right direction. And yes, there’s more to it than finding some great keywords, moving to a faster server and getting a few random blogs to link to you.

SEO also takes time. You won’t launch a new website and be on the front page of any search engine straight away. The day you plant the seed isn’t the day you eat the fruit.

We invite you at this time to come and join our Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/meeum/

This is an active group of people who have done workshops with us, read our books or otherwise participated in learning through Meeum. They are as motivated as you. This is a space for you to ask questions and see what other people are doing in their businesses as well.