Improving your small business exposure across search engine platforms like Google is a crucial marketing strategy for 2020 and beyond.
In today’s world, most people only go straight to search engines like Google and Yahoo when they want to search for products, services or the answers to their questions. SEO is essential to ensure your business is seen online by the people who search for whatever it is you provide.
Pay per click campaigns to advertise your website on google could work out to be extremely expensive for your company, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Organic SEO, on the other hand, is a long term investment which can help you gain online exposure, stay on the googles 1st page without the need of ads meaning you’ll always be easily found online.
How To Get Started With SEO For Small Businesses?
To ensure that search engines understand your content, you’ll want to sign up to some search engine tools online. Tools you can use include google analytics, keyword tools, and keyword planners. Here’s a list of things to do to get you started.
Register with Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool, which lets you track your website’s health. From how easily the site can be reached and crawled by the search engine and how many pages it indexes. Search Console will also make suggestions on fundamental changes to the website’s code.
Register with Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing has a range of tools for webmasters, too. It’s sort of a Google copycat setup, but that’s not to say it’s useless. Any search engine diagnostic information is worth its weight in Gold SEO.
Claim or Create A Google My Business Listing
Your physical business is reflected digitally by Google My Business, and it can ensure your business and website is visible in your local area. Google My Business is essential to ensure that your business information is 100% accurate and to inform people of your opening hours and contact number if you have one. If you haven’t already done this, get onto it right away!
Conduct Keyword Research
Understanding your customers’ search words is crucial to managing your website and digital presence around the internet correctly. This can be easy for certain companies such as plumbers, electricians, etc. However, customers also search in more detail using what we know as longtail keywords. Even basic keyword research will give you an insight into what people search for.
Insiders Tip: There is a website called Answer The Public which is an excellent tool for finding your longtail keyword questions to improve your website’s content.
Organise Your Keywords Into Logical Groups
It is highly unlikely that any keyword you decide you randomly want to try out on your homepage will rank you in search engine results. Even if it did, would one page be enough to fit in ALL of the keywords people are searching for? Would your homepage offer absolutely everything your customer is looking for online? It’s highly unlikely.
You should organise your focus keywords into logical classes. This will allow you to see which pages on your site can be optimised with which keywords.
Then organise your keywords again to create more pages from those pages (sub-topic pages) and link them back to your main subject page to ensure google understands which pages are more relevant to search results.
Test Your Keywords With PPC
This may seem an odd recommendation for a collection of SEO tips, but the importance of a given keyword can easily be overestimated. You can check by running a short-term PPC campaign and decide whether clicks for that keyword can lead to the customer actions you would like for your small business.
Website SEO Tips For Small Businesses
When we have our keywords grouped together, our website can be checked and optimised. Here you have full influence and your SEO website provides the best overall opportunity to boost your rankings.
Improve Your Website Pages
Armed with your clustered keyword list, take a look at whether you have all of the pages you need on your website. Using our example of a locksmith providing emergency call-outs as well as safe engineers and access control services, all of these areas would need to be pages:
www.example.com
www.example.com/emergency-locksmith/
www.example.com/safe-engineer/
www.example.com/access-control/
Make Your Content For People Not Search Engines
Search engines don’t purchase your services or goods. People do. However, content is often bent out of shape so much so that your potential customer hasn’t a clue what they need. Keep things informative, accurate and find your content references from reliable sources. Write real-life material. Weave marketing into your copywriting and focus your content on the name of the page. Repeating content on every page of your website won’t work.
Speak conversationally in the style your customers would expect if they were to get advice and guidance from you if they called or had a face to face meeting with you. Improving your site interaction will boost the performance of your SEO, so make sure that your content is as strong as possible.
Optimise Your Navigation
Optimising the navigation on your website will help search engines understand each given page’s meaning. Ideally, the navigation should align with the site’s layout.
Optimise Meta Descriptions And Titles For Clicks
You metadata descriptions should be of optimal length and should speak to your potential customer when your page appears in search engine results. It’s crucial to make sure the copy is appealing and convinces users to take the next move and proceed to click on to your website. Put your marketing head-on and write page titles and meta descriptions as you would write ads and watch your click-through levels increase – even if you aren’t on the top spot just yet.
Insiders Tip: You could use a headline generator to get ideas for your website page and blog titles. One of the easiest headline generators to use is ‘Title Generator‘.
Examples of headlines and titles to inspire you:
- You Don’t Have To Be A Big Corporation To Start An SEO Campaign
- The Truth About SEO in 3 Minutes
- 27 Ways To Improve Your SEO
Keeping these title and headline examples in mind – if you were looking for tips on how to improve your SEO or invest in SEO services, then you’d be more likely to click on the above titles than you would a generic title like – SEO Agency Kings Lynn. This applies to all online businesses and is the key to success.
Brand Your Search Results
When reviewing your page titles, decide whether the page titles or meta descriptions should include your company name or logo. If the page titles are short, you may want to pad out your title with your companies name. This may not work if your page titles are longer and more descriptive, so the approach on this can vary.
Optimise Your Images
Photos are often a forgotten factor in the optimisation of web pages for search engines. If a potential customer can look through images and click on what they are looking for and that something is you because you optimised your images then your sales leads should go through the roof.
Most google searchers check the images page so if your images are optimised well, you’ll be there! Get your Alt text in good shape, add titles and metadata to them if you know-how.
Insiders tip
If your business operates in a specific location or you only cover your local area, you can optimise your images so they appear in local search results by geotagging them.
Don’t Over-Optimise Your Website
Using the above techniques is great, but you need to know when and where to use them. Over optimising your pages may not help your site as much as you think. Finding the right balance is essential to be found online.
If your mind is and a little mangled with all the information, we have provided you with, or you simply don’t have the time to focus on SEO yourself then get in touch, we’d be happy to help.
