Ever hear the joke that the best place to bury a body is on page 2 of Google?!
In all seriousness, small business SEO success is vital to rank well in google and to benefit from the exceptional power of free, organic ranking. A key component of your business’ marketing efforts in 2017 should be to effectively rank in search engines.
SEO is rapidly obliterating traditional forms of printed media when it comes to business listing or advertising for products or services. The question is, do you know what’s required for your website to rank well?
There are many effective ways to assist your business to rank higher in search results. SEO techniques are not stand alone, and need to be integrated with social media, traditional reviews and in many cases Search Engine Marketing (SEM). In this blog, we’ll provide valuable tips for you to achieve small business SEO success and help you rocket up the google rankings!
Content
Content is King! Quite simply, if you have great content you’re well on the way to small business SEO success. Let’s break down overall content:
Pages- Ensure each page on your website has enough significant content (minimum 300-500 words). Content should incorporate the keywords you want to be ranked for and these should be legitimate for your business. Don’t go overboard spamming your content with keywords, just mention your preferred keywords 2-3 times in your copy and ensure they are aligned with your page content.
Posts– Many people claim Blogging is dying. Actually, we believe the opposite for SEO. Although blogging is unmistakably changing, as users become more difficult to engage. That’s where pictures, infographics and videos come in. There’s no hard and fast rules to how often you should blog, but try and keep it consistent and frequent. The same content requirements for pages (above) applies to blog posts. Ensure there’s significant content in your blogs that’s meaningful for your business.
Pictures– Try and include pictures in each page/post. Firstly, it’s more enticing for people to read your pages/posts if they are visually appealing, and secondly ensure you enter ALT text keyword description for the image so it can be indexed effectively by google. Many businesses overlook this task as it requires effort for the often hundreds of photos on your site. Don’t overlook it!
Keywords
Keyword research is important (and time consuming)! Keyword planning and research is really the foundation of SEO, so it’s important to invest the time and effort planning and researching head and long tail keywords and deciding which is applicable for each page, post, taxonomy etc of your website. We’ve covered keyword research in more detail.
Local website listings
Ensure you are listed on local websites including google places, Facebook, yelp, yellow pages, gumtree, true local etc. These local sites are extremely important for small/local businesses and impact SEO significantly. Check your entries are listed, accurate and updated.
Links
External– Link creation and link building are vital for good rankings in Google. Links equate to credibility for search engines and the more genuine links you have, the more credibility your websites will gain. Please note, We don’t recommend “Spammy” or paid backlinks, as these are more likely to affect your ranking negatively.
Internal– Your internal webpages and blogs need to link to each other and there needs to be a clear chain of links from your homepage to all pages, to assist Google to crawl your website. Check regularly for broken links and correct them.
Invest effort creating a linking strategy for both internal and external links. You won’t regret it!
Performance
Are you aware of how long your pages take to load? Do you know the size of your pages? Slow websites are painful and significantly affect the bounce rate of users, as well as your ranking. Google needs to crawl billions of websites each day and you website will be penalised if it crawls too slow or has too any crawl errors.
Review the performance of your website monthly and tune it to make it as fast as possible.
Reviews
Have as many clients as possible offer testimonials and reviews in Google and Social media accounts. Reviews build credibility for your business and give new clients confidence in your ability to deliver. Maybe offer a reciprocal link, discount or other incentive to clients and partners to encourage leaving a review.
Social media
Social media engagement is necessary for all businesses. Social media is a great way to engage with your customers, don’t miss the opportunity! Although the mediums differ slightly between B2C and B2B businesses, Facebook is a good place to start for both. Don’t overlook Google+ and it’s impact on google rankings also.
This blog post is a summary of actions to take for you to increase your chances of small business SEO success.
For honest, responsive and cost-effective SEO services for your business, contact Evolocity today for a free website analysis.