These days there are plenty of great tools available that do most technical SEO markup and tagging for you automatically.
Whether it’s written content, video content, or your business information, they’ll automatically the right data to give you the best shot at showing up in search engine results.
In fact, most modern website builders have these features built-in and do it automatically, including our small business platform.
But none of that matters if there’s nothing to optimize. For it to work you actually have to 1) produce content that 2) doesn’t suck.
Gone are the days where small businesses can just throw up a website with a few pages and hope to rank. The answer isn’t just to produce content. It has to be valuable, quality content that people want.
This is hard to do consistently, but the first step is to understand why. Once you understand why, you’ll stop looking for the latest SEO trick, the newest shortcut, or a quick way to get quick results because you’ll realize that there is no such thing.
There are almost 1 billion websites on the internet. Why should Google put you at the top of search results? If you don’t know the answer to this question, neither does Google—and thus you both agree that you shouldn’t be at the top of the search results.
If all it took to rank highly was throwing up a few pages on your website then Google would be unusable. The top search results would be low quality websites and you’d never find what you need.
Google is in the business of giving people what they want. If you consistently give people what they want, Google will consistently give people you.
It’s simple, but it’s not easy. There are no shortcuts. It’s a grind, but it’s not hard to keep you from succeeding. It’s hard to make sure only those who deserve it succeed. Believe me, as Google users we wouldn’t want it any other way.
So, although your website tools may automatically do the technical SEO for you, it’s still up to you to 1) produce content that 2) doesn’t suck. Do that and you’ll be doing better that 99.9% of websites out there.
Want to learn more? Check out our guide on basics of SEO for small businesses here.