If you're here, you're likely a small business owner (or one of our competitors - HEY!) looking for ways to boost your visibility online. Right? For small businesses, SEO is a powerful tool that helps drive more website traffic, boost their online presence, and create sales or leads. But it can be challenging to know where to start when it comes to SEO for small businesses. We get it - our clients struggled with this, too!
Fortunately, there are several tips and tricks that small business owners can use to optimize their website for search engines. From optimizing content for keywords, to using the right tools (and often free!), these five SEO tips can help your small businesses improve its online visibility and reach your business goals.
Getting Started with SEO
If your business already has a website, you're in good shape. This section talks about how to get started with search engine optimization and SEO tips for becoming (and maintaining) SEO compliant.
#1 Do an SEO Audit on Your Website
A website audit is never a bad idea. Doing an SEO audit of our website is critical. We like to use SE Ranking for our audits but we typically use three crawlers to scan our clients' sites. Do you need to do that? No. A basic website audit works just fine. Either SE Ranking or SEOptimer will get the job done. Here's why you need to audit your website- you'll:
Uncover SEO barriers
Fix what’s broken
Analyze new opportunities
When you audit your site, you're looking for things that create barriers to SEO success like broken links, slow page load speeds, improper metadata, and missing pages. Once you understand what the barriers are, you can either fix what's broken or hire an SEO company to do it for you.
#2 Measure & Analyze Your Website
Let's make this easy - there are two free Google platforms that should be connected to your site:
Google Analytics: measures the entire website and its contents
Google Search Console: measures and tracks SEO-related pieces from Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)
Google Analytics
When you review your info in GA, you should be looking at where you get the majority of your users and traffic from. Is it organic search or direct traffic? You want to know how people find you. Then you need to look at the information under Engagement - specifically Pages and screens - this helps you visualize the pages that are doing well on your site and the pages that need more attention and should be re-optimized.
Google Search Console
The Search Console is one of the greatest tools for SEO. You can see how your site is performing in Google SERPs, analyze the keywords driving traffic, and take auditing your site to a new level by reviewing Mobile Usability, Core Web Vitals, and Page Experience in one place. When you start to understand how people get to your site from Google SERPs, you can create better content.
Creating Better Content with SEO in Mind
#3 Build Out Your Content
You probably saw this coming but you need to build out content...and a lot of it. Single-page websites don't cut it anymore. So, take the knowledge you learned in tip #2 and pair it with these steps...
Research YOUR Keywords
Since you know the keywords driving traffic, half of this is done but you also need to look at the keywords your company is ranking for. Turn to a tool like SE Ranking to make that easier (and because you'll need it in the next step). Look at the keywords you're already ranking for, review the URLs ranking for those keywords and optimize those pages if the keywords aren't driving traffic to your site.
Scope Out the Competition
Who are your local competitors? If you don't know, head to Google and use a keyword that triggers your business in the local 3-Pack. Look up their websites and see how many reviews they have linked to their Google Business Profile. Then, plug their website URL into SE Ranking or SEOptimer to view how your competition is doing. You'll see something like this:
These are the pieces of information you should care about. You want to know the keywords and content they rank for so you can try to overtake them for those keywords and content in SEPRs.
Look for NEW Keywords
Now you have a starter set of keywords between the keywords your site ranks for and keywords your competitors' sites rank for. Start plugging them into SE Ranking to look for new keywords that are similar that you can use in content.
Try it for yourself:
Write for Your Audience
Alright, you've got a great set of keywords, now what? Start writing. Remember who your audience is - your current and future client or customers. Write for them, not search engines. Think of topics you discuss with current customers and write towards that first.
The User Experience is KEY in SEO
#4 Focus on Your Niche
While you might have competitors, you do things differently than they do - right? Focus on explaining how you do things differently, not on how it's the right way. Not everyone will like how you do things but when you focus on your niche and how you approach it, it'll guide you in picking more appropriate keywords, leveraging your existing content, and even creating social content.
#5 Link Appropriately
Website links have a few purposes including:
Navigate between similar pages
Create authority by linking externally
No one wants to come to a page with a million links so use your internal and external links sparingly. Link similar pages together through text links, CTA buttons, and even images. External links can help provide more context or authority on a topic but should be used no more than three times on a page because there's a decent chance you'll send someone off your site with too many of them, which defeats the purpose of linking.
Get SEO Help
Got stuck in a bind? We get it. SEO is hard and can be confusing. If you want to leave it up to the pros, know that SEO is ongoing because we're never done optimizing. Not all SEO companies are built alike - some have a specific focus on an industry while others will only work with larger corporations. If you're hitting roadblock after roadblock, schedule a 30 minute consultation with us - we can help.
