Some predicted that the future is digital. It’s fixed, it’s destined. Small businesses, no less, should expect that the future web will be as overcrowded and hyper-competitive. Enter small business SEO or search engine optimization, which by the way is a very important part of small business marketing. If content is king, SEO is the speaker of the house, each with its own roles to carry in order to make your brand found online.
In layman’s explanation of things around SEO, the general idea is that if you aren’t found on the Web, chances are you won’t be able to attract customers to visit your page. When you have no visitors, you’ll surely not have new customers. Without conversion, there will be no new sales and no new business for you. Think of your brand with no traffic, no visitors, and no transactions and am sure you’ll arrive at the same conclusion which is the same as ours here at Big Outsource: you’re never going anywhere up by rejecting SEO for your small business.
Then of course, we understand you are a busy, busy business person, so here, we’ve lined up our list of small business SEO tips as your reference. The tips are presented in easy-to-follow sections. Tackle these tips one at a time at your convenience, bookmark or share, it’s all yours. For the meantime, let’s hop right into it.
Implementing Google Analytics
Everything about what happens on your small business website should always be first in our list of SEO tips. That means learning to track. Tracking here extends to knowing what your visitors are doing on your web pages and there are a lot of useful and freely-available tools to use online.
The best of these analytics tools (well compared to Piwik, Adobe SiteCatalyst and WebTrends) remains to be Google Analytics. Simple and easy to implement, Google Analytics is also super free to use.
Implementing Google Webmaster Tools
Let’s not go any farther and this is another step that you will need to take before actually optimising your website. This has to do with another Google platform for your small business SEO tactical works – the Google Webmaster Tools. Use this tool to gather data about impressions, clicks to page load speed and errors.
Best of all, Google Webmaster Tools is free (which earns it another awesome point) and easy to use. Its purpose is provide you with data about your website’s visibility on Google.
Optimising a Title Tag
We’ll start with the most important SEO element – the tags! OK you can debate us on that, but really, it’s what’s more important than your small business website’s URL. The title tag functions as a way for you to tell search engines what your page is about.
To do it right the first time, we’d advice you to keep your words under 70 characters. Don’t forget to add your city and your state with 1-2 keywords and the name of your business. One great place to start optimising your title tag is your home page, which is regarded as the most important page of your site.
Place your title tag within thesection of your HTML code. After implementing your optimised title tag on your small business homepage, proceed to the other top landing pages.
Optimising an H1 Tag
Another important on-page SEO element is the header or H1 tag. Like the title tag, it’s another important way to tell search engines and your users what your website is about.
Compared to title tags, you can write pretty longer here to include the full name of your small business and the blog post you’re describing. Again, the key to an effective H1 tag is your chosen keyword, so be strategic.
Writing a Meta Description Tag
Another step to our small business SEO is the meta description tag. For the uninitiated, this on-page element is the small snippet underneath the title of the page that you see when you perform a search on Google or Bing. Such snippet describes what the page is about to the user.
While some say meta description affect your organic ranking, others claim otherwise. But it can be your best shot in driving audience traffic. How? Call to action. It’s your chance to invite potential customers to try your product or service and get something out of visiting your website.
Placing Internal Links
A hyperlink within your own content, ‘internal link’ serves as guide for search engine spiders and your users. But which content should be internally linked? There is no simple rule that work for every website.
You might use as your internal link guide your list of 2-3 terms per page that you’d like to optimise. Some regard that it’s best practice that each piece of content should include at least 2 links to other relevant pages on your website.
Building an SEO Footer
After of course talking of some heady technical stuffs above, don’t forget the very simple reason why you have to have a footer. It’s useful and helpful at the same time for your small business SEO, especially by coming up with a complete website that incorporates your name, address and phone number (NAP) in every footer of every page of your small business site.
Make sure your NAP is marked up with Schema code to help Google, Yahoo and Bing understand that these vital contact information is actually associated with a business.
Creating Compelling Content and Engaging Experience
Having an engaging content for your readers is a must and its importance cannot be overstate. When you have well-crafted, hard-to-resist content, you’ll benefit from conversion and SEO, which is more likely to be shared and linked to.
Content with many misspelled words, wobbly sentence construction and syntax leave a bad taste and footprint, both onsite and offsite.
Using Content Marketing
One very important small business SEO tactic is to get as many backlinks as possible. If you’ll ask us where you can buy backlinks, then skip this blog and go somewhere else (just kidding!). But seriously, you should not buy backlinks as they leave a bad footprint.
Our tip though is for you to use content marketing, which can allow you offer content with value or quality. Over quantity, quality content is considered acceptable SEO because these are content that engage and appeal to your audience and customers.
Focusing on Quality over Quantity
Automation is a standard practice often utilised and where companies invest their money to be efficient. But that is if you belong to an industry that praises automation, such as the automobile sector. But when you apply automation in SEO, wait for Google to penalise you because it’s definitely bad.
Automation results in poor quality experience for your users. As a best small business SEO practice, you need to respect this Google policy to see your rankings increase.
Conclusion
By knowing these SEO tips, you are empowered more than ever before to get your site seen and found by your customers. Always remember, these guidelines in a way gave you SEO prowess so be careful how you use your power and be responsible. The most important thing is to always respect the rules set by Google and what your customers demand from you as you would not like to be fooled with misinformation and poor content.
The rules of the game in small business SEO do shift and updates are frequent. Always update yourself with what’s new and useful to maximise your site’s full potential in reaching your customers and at the same time earning better rankings.
