Tips for Business SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) form a strong foundation for the success of small businesses. If small business SEO’s are done poorly then they become like one of those TV shows that run on the obscure channel in the middle of the night. Despite it being a great show it will be hard for it to gain followings as it is hard to find it. Similarly, it goes with the business, if Google does not show it in its search results then the costumers will struggle to find out about us.

Entrepreneurs can lift their website traffic, brand visibility, and revenue if they get the right SEO. This will make the growth stronger and will also give more sales opportunity.

If we start our business without a strategy in mind to make our online presence grow, then we will see that our competitors will take away the business form us since these days search is becoming equally important as it drives revenue for both B2B as well as B2C companies.

Here in this post, we will cover some of the basics of SEO for a small business which is form keyword research on how to save time while we create quality content.

What Is SEO for Small Businesses?

Search Engine Optimization is that process through which we can optimize our business’s website so that it can be easily found and indexed by the search engine crawlers, these are bots that crawl the internet, finding and ranking the content.

The successful SEO for a small business involves the usage of several key components of content marketing. Once we master these fundamental and that will start our traffic will start to ascent upwards.

·         Keyword research- this will help us in learning what terms and phrases our potential costumer’s type in the search engines. We must know what people are searching for so we can find related businesses, they need to find information about our business, or they want to find the information about the topic related to our business with this we can create content that will be useful to them. It is always a flux of how people search so a good keyword strategy is to monitor it and update it regularly as per the trends. To stay on the cutting edge and investigating the use of SEO strategies used by our competitors we can use tools like Alexa’s Competitor Keyword Matrix. 

·         Copywriting- people might tend to bounce for your page as soon as they land there if your page is uninformative and is confusing people. On the contrary, if we give useful content to our readers we likely have more readers who are willing to read our whole page. Time on site is the average time that a user spends on reading our site. Average time of site on Google’s top 10 results is only three minutes and ten seconds, so we need to be critical in writing so that we can keep the attention of our readers on our suit.

·         Content Marketing- with a well-crafted content the marketing strategy we can emphasize writing blog posts with each of it we focus on specific keywords and give information that will engage our target audience. It depends on the type of the business we run we can make an online strategy as a key part and maybe not. If we want to test this out we need to create a few information-driven posts by using hub and spoke strategy. When we want to create a landing page it should be centered on the competitive keyword which has a decent amount of search volume as that is the core of small businesses, then we link it back to that post via other posts that have covered related long-tail keywords. This will lead us to create a site which will be easy for both readers, as well as search endian crawlers to navigate and this, will also greatly affect how high does the site gets ranked in SERPs list.

·         Link building- when several internal links i.e. linking to existing content within your site and external links i.e. when a different site links to your content this plays as an indicator that SERPs determine the quality of our site. It is more helpful if we get the high authority to link to our content this will be a strong indicator to the quality of our site.

·         Usability and UX- if we have a clunky, slow to load and hard to navigate website SERP will downgrade our site. Plus to keep visitors around for long we need to have a well-designed page.

·         Local SEO- with special focus to our immediate surroundings it is good to have a local SEO strategy which involves utilization of all the above tactics. Think blog posts on local topics, links from popular local newspapers, and Yelp reviews from local patrons.

Why Should You Care?

Our website will likely to struggle to appear in the search results without an SEO strategy. Even if the businesses have local customer base still their visibility online is very important. In today’s world, people no longer want to go down to the streets to stumble the product they like or the services they need. As instead to everything has become handy and they just fire up their phone and computer to find local businesses.

 51% of the web traffic is driven for both B2B and B2C as it is not a surprise that is due to organic searches. 

SEO Tips for Small Businesses-

Focus on technical SEO

To make the crawlers properly read and also index our site technical SEO is the only process of optimizing our site pages. If we want to personify the crawlers our goal should be to make them check out our site and then make them think “Wow, these pages load fast, the links all work, and everything is secure. I have no qualms about promoting this content.” 

Despite your amazing writing, there are possibilities that we have problems in technical SEO and it will hamper our ability to rank higher in SERPs list. We must take in stock of the quality of our content form the technical perspective as and before we start with fresh content to draw in potential customers.

Things like making sure your security and encryption protocols are up to date, page speed optimizations and the structuring of data are some of the problems whose solutions are to be best left on the engineers. We must give a try to the following tips if we are not from the technical background:-

     Create a sitemap and submit it to Google- it completely depends on what tools you use to build your site as there are some plugins that we can use to build our sitemap. For WordPress, we have Yoast SEO as a plugin that automatically generates a sitemap and keeps it up to date whenever we add any new content. There is a free service that Google offers that helps us to manage our presence in the Google Search Result and that is Google Search Console through which we can submit our sitemap to Google. 

     Prune old pages that don’t perform- your ranking can get negatively affected if we have a lot of pages on our site but there is no or zero traffic on them.

     Fix broken and old links- if we constantly send our readers outdated contents or broken links we will be downgraded by SERP. In some of the recent studies, it is shown that if they send users to high-authority outbound links they are favorably looked upon by Google’s ranking algorithms.

     Optimize your images- we must give appropriate captions with relevant images. We can as well use the “alt text” section to describe the image.

     Effort level required to excel at this task- low. Here it is a bit of hard word as we need to do some research but at the same time some helpful tools are readily available and also it is not that hard to implement actual files.

Focus on Local SEO

Let’s say most of the searches are based on queries such as “restaurants near me.” Nowadays we don’t even need to write the word “near me” because Google’s algorithm is such that it understands by its own that we want the list of “restaurants” that are close to my location. It’s paramount for them to capitalize on the opportunity as we see SERPs teeing up the small businesses to be successful with the help of local SEO.

We must set a Google My Business Profile as it is the most important part of the local SEO. It is free and easy to maintain them.

Firstly we need to claim our GMB listing and then need to fill in all our details like local phone number and address. This information that we have now entered will show up on Google’s search results.

You will get in all the alerts as and when the customer reviews come in. then by responding to these costumers, we can start a conversation with them. We can bolster our stand in the community if we are personable and kind with the costumers.

The question and answer section is another critical part of Google My Business. We can always answer the questions proactively as it might come up as a factionless as an experience as possible with the potential customers.

In the final step, we must not forget to put up the local directions. The apps like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and the Yellow Pages help you register your business online and also exposes you to the new audience always.

 Effort level required to excel at this task- low. There are no excuses and hesitations as these platforms make it easy.

Find Keywords Customers Are Searching For

The best way to know what to write is to know what our ideal customer is searching for. We can be recognized by the SERPs as a leading business is when we answer the questions better than anyone else could and also get ourselves ranked on the top of the results that will be shown.

For the time-strapped business owners luckily many tools make our search for keywords faster and easier.

As to put a start to this we can analyze the suggestions that we get by Google’s autocomplete feature. We might notice that we get some suggestions as and when we type something in the search bar. Google does keyword research and gives us all the possible searched phrases. We can use the list as jumping off for content ideas.

Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty tool is a dedicated keyword research tool that can make it quick and easy to digest breakdown of keywords that are related to our sites or a particular topic that can give us a chance of ranking good.

We must create a page on our site or a blog post with each of those keywords that we have identified and think they are worth focusing on. 

     Effort level required to excel at this task- medium. As we know keyword research requires a lot of time, knowledge of crawler behavior, strategy, and knowledge of keyword research tools and for entrepreneurs with time-strapped it can be a tricky task to tackle SEO. But still, there are as we said some tools that can dramatically simplify the process.

 Optimize On-page SEO

On-page, SEO is only all about the words on the page. As we know the main goal here is always to create interesting content that will naturally incorporate our target keywords with this it is also important to structure our posts in a way that it gives us the best chance to be located in the search.

     Optimize page titles and headlines- though our headlines play a big factor in our click-through rate and this itself is a key part because due to this we know how SERPs determines our ratings. With the click-through rate, we can know the percentage of people who view our headline and end up clicking on it. We must make sure that it is something catchy and not of more than 60 characters so that it does not get cut off. In case our title is too long then SERP will leave ellipse at the end of the character limit which will leave the readers wondering what our post is actually about.

Use proper header tags- the headers that we have used in each section of our post can be optimized to certain relevant keywords. We can improve that ever-important time-on-site matrix by making our site digestible and clear for our readers.

     

Clean up your Meta tags- content management is something through which we can enter Meta tag in our posts which can just essentially be small descriptions of our contents. Using these the crawlers can make sure that the description of our site matches the content of the page. If we use relevant keywords and descriptions in our Meta tag we can ensure that our crawlers get to know what the page is all about.

Effort level required to excel at this task- low to medium. One of the biggest parts of the efforts would be identifying which pages are more important to invest in optimizing. We must use tools to tackle those pages first to save time and then get the most out of our on-page optimization.

Streamline Content Marketing

Small businesses are strapped for resources as content marketing takes a lot of time and energy. We have some tips for you to get the most bang for our content marketing buck.

Use templates- the cognitive load of coming up with new ideas might be reduced as some of our article content or landing page follow the same format every time. There are teardown posts which in-depth looks at on aspect of a business or product. For example, you can analyze, compare, and contrast the pricing pages of two businesses. Repeat that process for any two businesses, thus giving you a reliable format that doesn’t often go stale because you are always bringing new information to light.

Use videos- it is seen that we can create a video faster than writing a post. We have seen today internet users are voracious video consumers considering this peppering videos in our content is a good idea even though it isn’t that time-saving. To optimize our videos for SEO we can use tools like Wistia.

Leverage social media and other distribution channels- we must never only rely on organic searches. Small businesses are those who once hustle and have now successes. With posting our content over the social media we must also identify relevant distribution channels to post our content. A great place to start is near the infinity list of subedits and niche interests.

Effort level required to excel at this task- medium. We can see that streamlining is easier than that of putting little thought into the strategy, also we don’t see that there are any getting around with the hard work that goes into creating and sharing quality content.

Build Authority with Links

In the search engines, we can improve our position by giving links to our site in other sites. This is all possible because Google understands the quantity and quality of our backlinks as these are the indicators that our sites are worth reading. If researches are to be believed it has shown that the number of sites is linking correlates the high SERP ranking more than any other SEO strategy.

We need to have an outreach strategy to build local links. This can be as simple as creating an excel sheet with the details such as names, emails, and numbers of your potential contacts. This can also include local newspapers, bloggers, event pages and non-competitive businesses. Positive media mentions are a godsend to an up-and-coming small business.

If we want to know good places to find potential backlinks, we must see where our competitors are getting links. Then we can target the same places. By using Alexa’s backlink tool we can make sure that this work is done quickly and easily.

Effort level required to excel at this task- high. Link building is a lot of sweat equity with this it also takes in to be built on the foundation of solid content, service, and excellent word of mouth.

Conclusion

SEO might feel like something that small business owners can put off as they have so many other decisions to make, conversations to have, and sales to secure. If we tend to wait too long then we may tend to fall in search results and this can create a big impact on organic traffic and revenue. We must start today itself with these as actionable tasks to help us to ensure that people who could be our customers can find us online. 

                                                                                                                          SOURCE- Alexablog