SEO or search engine optimisation is one of the most important activities that need to be done in 2023, yet it is one of the most undervalued activities in the Caribbean.

Most business owners that have a website believe that it is a switch that gets turned on by their web developers but don’t realise that it is a list of daily activities that help grow a brand’s digital presence. So, in this article, I want to break down the three key components of SEO so that you know what it is and you can bring it back to your digital team to ensure you cover your bases.

The main thing you need for SEO is to have a website. What is SEO or search engine optimisation you ask?

Well, SEO stands for search engine optimisation, which is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial, or natural search results in search engines. It aims to improve your website’s position on search results pages.

One of the reasons why having your website and learning SEO can help grow your business in the Caribbean is the lack of websites that come from the Caribbean. In essence, there is very LOW competition.

In Trinidad and Tobago, there are 16,384 registered domains as of December 2022. In Jamaica, there are 21,949 registered domains as of December 2022.

Now that’s just registered domains, but it’s not an indication of how many of them are active websites or how many of them are businesses.

Here’s another key fact you need to know, there are 28,000 registered businesses in Trinidad and Tobago, according to Legal Affairs. This means that not every business in Trinidad and Tobago has a website.

So, if you are a small business, this is great news because having a website and learning more about SEO can help you start to capture even more market share in your industry, whether they are big or small.

Let’s break down the three components of SEO:

On-page SEO

Off-page SEO

Technical SEO

What Is On-Page SEO?

It’s the practice of optimising each page on your website to improve your ranking on the search engines and increase organic traffic. It involves things like publishing daily high-quality content, optimising your headlines, HTML tags (title, meta, and header), and images. Ensure it satisfies Google‘s E-A-T ranking factor (expertise, authority, trust).

The aim of search engines is to provide high-quality content that answers relevant queries placed on their platforms.

What Is Off-Page SEO?

The actions that are taken outside of your website impact your rankings on the search engines. These include getting high-ranking websites to link back to your website, getting mentioned in the news, media, press, social media shares and mentions, podcasts, and Youtube channels.

Google uses all of these factors as signals to help improve the ranking of your site.

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to improving the technical aspects of a website to increase the ranking of its pages in search engines. Making a website faster, easier to crawl and understandable for search engines are the pillars of technical optimisation. This involves things like page speed, page rendering, indexability, broken links, how your website is built, website security SSL, structured data, XML sitemaps, among others.

Having a well-built website that doesn’t take long to load, renders properly, and is secured with an SSL certificate all have immediate benefits. Not having these things will only discourage your audience/readers from viewing your website, losing potential sales. So, remember, Google is also ranking your website based on the technical side of things and will bump your website to page three or lower in the search results.

If you aren’t showing up on page one, max two on the search results pages, your competitors are and, ultimately, they will take bigger pieces of the market share, leads and sales.

You have heard that SEO is a long-term game and that may have been true years ago. However, Google has evolved and now SEO is more robust than it ever was before to ensure people using the Web have a great experience. That being said, SEO now has immediate effects.

Don’t have a technically sound website that loads fast or renders properly? People bounce.

Don’t have an SSL certificate? People don’t buy.

Don’t create daily high-quality content on your website? Then people will not find you online to begin the sales journey.

Learning more about SEO can help you learn more about your audience’s pain points, desires and give you the info you need to solve their problems with content, craft the right solutions or deliver the right products.

It will also ensure you are doing the necessary offline activities to build brand awareness and authority so that people learn about your brand and begin to trust your brand.

Finally, SEO will hold you accountable for having a technically sound website so that you provide the best possible experience when people are browsing your site.

Doing all of these things daily will help your business grow and expand your digital footprint.

Keron Rose is a digital strategist that works with Caribbean entrepreneurs. To learn more, visit KeronRose.com or listen to the Digipreneur FM podcast on Apple Podcast/Spotify/Google podcast.