Search engine optimization (SEO) is evolving every year and has become one of the primary aspects of website ranking. If you are a small business owner looking to get started with SEO? Then you have landed on the right article where we are going to highlight some of the best SEO tips specifically for small businesses.
Today’s SEO process is not the same as it used to be in the early days, enterprise-level businesses are making it more competitive by implementing various innovative SEO strategies for their website, leaving small businesses struggling to rank their website.
Yes, it’s true the many small businesses fail to rank on the top in the initial stage and many more fail to get the desired ranking in the five-year mark. But it’s not that all the business fails to rank on the top, with the right SEO strategy, plan, and more important advice you can make to the first or second page.
Undoubtedly marketing is difficult and SEO is much more difficult due to more competition in the digital space. But with the right approach, even a newly started startup can scale its business in a highly competitive market. Getting your business website listed on the top helps you to showcase your expertise, build authority, trust, and more.
In this article, we are going to highlight some of the important SEO tips that you can use to grow your small business website. We are going to share all the points that we have used to scale different small businesses form the past 17 years. You can also reach our SEO experts to create a result-driven SEO strategy for your business.
If you are looking for the best link building techniques for your business then make sure to check our blog on 5 Effective Link Building Techniques Through Content Marketing In 2020
SEO checklist to grow your small business in 2020
1. Create a Search engine friendly website
Whether you are a small business or an enterprise-level business one thing that will help you to grow your business in the competitive market space is your website. Google asks businesses to create a Google-friendly website to get it ranked quickly in SERP. To know more about google friendly sites guidelines click here.
Coming back on point if you want your website to rank on the top in search engine result page then you need to build your website with a logical link structure, optimized navigation, loading time, and more. In simple words, your website should make sense when users navigate your web pages and all the pages on your website should be linked to the home page.
The main problem with small businesses is that they start pretty nicely and build the website structure very logically. But as they start adding pages over time, their website starts losing its real and optimized structure.
This should not be the case because google considers every web page as a single website no matter whether its a blog page or the product page. So while adding a new page into your website make sure you look at every page with the fresh eye and create a logical structure.
2. Identify your potential customer’s problem
Before you start optimizing your website for SEO you need to identify the problems faced by your customer and understand how your small business and its product or services can solve their problem. Well, now you might be thinking why are we considering this point for small business SEO?
Well, remember SEO is the process of ranking your website in the top but your ranking depends on how your product and website relates to the customer. Because search engine is also known as an answer machine, if your product solves user problems then your website is likely to appear in the search results (if it meets search engine guidelines).
Including this step in your small business SEO strategy will offer you insight about it. How and when you potential customers decides they need your product? Are they using desktop to search for your product or using a cell phone? Why they are searching for your product? What type of problem your product or services solve.
Getting insight into these questions will help you to identify the language you customer uses to search for your niche product which will help you to optimize your website depending on the results.
3. Optimize your website for technical SEO
When it comes to optimizing your website for search engines, Technical SEO optimization plays a crucial role in offering website owner desired results. It is the process of optimizing the structure of your website so that search engines crawler can easily crawl and understand the pupose of the website.
Your website will look absolutely fine if designed with the right approach i.e with attractive graphics, color, fonts, and more. But if your website has technical errors then it could lead to website ranking downfall which will directly affect your website traffic. Before jumping onto link building techniques and more we recommend optimize your website for technical SEO.
For that, you need a strong website structure to help the search engine crawl your website more smartly and index your web page easily. Even if you are producing quality content that solves user problem without technical SEO optimization your website will lack in quality and will hamper your traffic.
If you don’t have a technical background you cab either approach a website design and development company or optimize your website by considering below points
- Create a Sitemap for your website and submit it to Google
- Delete all the web pages that are not used or not needed for you website
- Optimize your website images
- Repair Broken and old links
If you are looking to know more about the Technical SEO then make sure to check our blog on
Technical SEO Guide: Tips To Optimize Website For Search Engine In 2020
4. Keyword Research
This is one area where many site owners get into trouble. They think that they need to stuff every page with every relevant keyword for their business. However, search engines are crawled by bots that don’t know a whole lot about how to distinguish your site from other sites.
They use a limited number of factors to determine your relevancy. Choosing the right keywords is one of the most important ways to let Google know what any given page on your site is about. Additionally, over-optimizing your page for keywords can appear spammy and give site users a bad experience.
If your site is well organized (as in the navigation is logical and easy to understand), you shouldn’t need to use more than one or two keywords per page — each page will serve its own purpose. Don’t repeat keywords across your site, or you run the risk of cannibalizing your own search results.
Use Google’s Keyword Planner to choose keywords you want to compete for. If you don’t yet have an Adwords account (Google’s search advertising platform), you’ll need to set one up.
5. On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization is something that should be discussed with your web developer before your site is ever built. That person should either know enough about basic SEO to set up your pages correctly or have a consultant to collaborate with. On-page optimization should be done with every page on your site, from the first pages your developer creates, to any new pages you or anyone else adds. Here are the basics:
An H1 tag is for the heading HTML element on your page. You can think of it as the headline. Depending upon the styling of your page, it will usually be the largest text element on the page. Any text that defines a new section or topic on a page may be emphasized with a heading tag, such as an H2 or H3. H1’s should usually only be used once. The H1 is one of the first things search engines see after the title of your page. Read more about H1 and other heading tags here http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/headers/
Your keywords belong in the title of your page, in the H1 and in the body of the text a couple of times where they fit naturally, preferably within the first 200 words of copy on your site. They must also be in the URL or domain when possible.
Make sure that your website works on mobile and desktop browsers. This is known as responsive web design. Basically, all of the same information is available to the Googlebot whether a person is viewing on mobile or desktop, and CSS determines how the content is displayed. Like much of SEO, this is a matter of providing a good user experience. If your site serves users well, it will probably do better SEO-wise. With the prevalence of mobile traffic, this should be a no brainer.
Meta descriptions and meta keywords will not help you rank, but meta descriptions are often used as the text describing your page. Make sure it is informative and makes natural use of your keywords. The more people click on your search results, the more page authority each page will have.
6. Structured Data
Structured data is one of those things that seems like a trick, but it’s actually just another element of SEO. It can definitely be abused, but those who do so will be punished by the search engines. Structured data allows you to present machine-readable information to the search engines, which will enable them to display more content from your site on the SERPs. This may include store hours, blog post author name, recipe instructions, or answers to common search queries.
Google calls these bits of data ‘rich snippets’… Some sites are winning more real estate on the SERPs and standing out visually on search results pages by using them in the html markup on their site. Google’s algorithm is capable of fetching the information from some sites without additional markup, but in order to take full advantage of the potential for enhanced SERP presence, you should manually add them. Find out more about how to use rich snippets and structured data by visiting this site. http://schema.org/
7. Backlinks
Backlinks are the number one ranking factor for search engine optimization. They’re also one of the most misunderstood. Many bottom-tier SEO companies promise short term results, and they accomplish this because they have a network of sites that they own, operate or share with other SEOs, and they write low-quality articles on these sites and then link back to your domain.
Doing this is a sure way to get negative attention from Google and other search engines.
Essentially, this amounts to buying backlinks. In general, there are very few types of popularity that you can buy in digital marketing. You can advertise, but that’s vastly different. Any time you’re paying for placement on a site, you should be sure that the site uses the rel=”no follow” attribute
So how do you get quality backlinks?
If you’re creating a product or service that people trust, customers will write reviews about you on merchant sites, review sites, or on their own sites. If you’re doing something noteworthy, you’ll get attention from the press. If they don’t know about you, reach out to them.
If you’re taking steps to get your name out there, other sites will invite you to write about your domain expertise for their publication, and you’ll have the opportunity to link back to your site in your bio. If you’re writing valuable content on your own site, people will link to it on their site and will share it on social media.
All of this comes down to content. It’s very tough to rank in a vacuum. Backlinks emerge when you take steps to market your business, grow your personal brand, or take other steps to reach out to your audience or customers. The rule here is that high-quality products deserve high-quality content and high-quality content generates high-quality links.
If you’re a restaurant, try to get an alternative weekly or popular, relevant food blog to write about your site. If you’re a unique bookstore, try to get a site that focuses on unique things for tourists to do to write a review of your site, or try to become the preferred local bookseller of the authors and publishers you care about most. If you’re a vintage cocktail bar, try to get a drink featured on a popular recipe site.
This is all about outreach. Where else can you appear naturally? Once you start taking these steps, other people will start to find you and this type of content will start generating itself. It does happen that great businesses languish at the bottom of the SERPs, undiscovered by the customers who would love it. But it rarely happens when great businesses take the necessary steps to be discovered.
Be proactive about your SEO strategy and your traffic will grow. Grow your traffic with the relevant audiences and your business will grow.
