When you’re running a small business, it’s hard to know if you’re doing search engine optimization (SEO) right. Are you choosing the right keywords? Are you doing enough to build backlinks? You might worry that you’re not doing as much as you could to improve your website SEO, or that what you are doing is all wrong.
SEO can be difficult to get right, but it’s worth taking the time to implement an SEO strategy. It’s one of the most effective forms of marketing available to businesses today. Here’s what you need to do to get more search traffic for your website.
Do Keyword Research
Keyword research is the first step to doing SEO right for your business. To start, think about what keywords and phrases your customers would enter into search engines in order to find your site. Write down 20 to 50 of them and take your list to Google Ads. See which keywords have a high search volume, or a high frequency of use in search. Remember that it’s going to be hard to rank for the highest-volume keywords, so improve your changes by using keywords that highlight your specific location or other unique aspects of your business – maybe you’re open 24/7 or have outdoor seating, for example.
Publish Strong Content Often
Good content is so important to SEO. Search engines want to give users results that are useful to them, so they push sites that have good, valuable content higher up in the search rankings. Your content should be well-written. It should contain your SEO keywords, but it shouldn’t be oversaturated with them. It should read naturally and flow well. And it should offer something of value to the user – information, news, updates, or entertainment, for example.
Go Social
Social media has become extremely important to SEO. It offers a way to build backlinks to your site and a way to interact with your customers on a deeper level. Many people turn to Facebook or Instagram to search for a business before they search for it on a search engine, so you’re also getting a segment of internet traffic that isn’t available to businesses without social media profiles.
Tinker with the Inner Workings of Your Site
There are a lot of technical aspects of SEO that you might be better off outsourcing to an agency that does SEO services in Phoenix or another major city. You need to optimize your metadata, write strong meta descriptions, implement schema, and so on. It’s all a lot to get your head around.
Strengthen Your Online Reputation
One of the ways you can push your site up in search engine results pages (SERPs) is by showing search engines that you’re an authority in your field. You can do this by accumulating backlinks to your site. Backlinks are links to your site from other sites, like social media, forums like Quora and Reddit, and the sites of vendors and colleagues. Ask other business owners if they’ll link to your site, and take the time to list your business in online directories to create more backlinks.
Make Sure You’re Optimized for Mobile
Search engines now ding sites that aren’t optimized for mobile, and they have for a long time. A healthy chunk of internet users are going online with their smartphones and tablets, and they aren’t going to waste their time with sites that aren’t optimized for mobile viewing. Websites that don’t display well on a smartphone or tablet simply aren’t user-friendly, and it will be hard to rank with one.
Track Your Results
It’s pretty easy to measure the results of your SEO campaign. Use a tool like Google Analytics to measure how much your SEO has improved and to learn more about your visitors. Get data like how long they stayed on each page of your site, where they’re located, and how they found their way to your site – whether they came from a referring site, or found it through organic search.
SEO for small businesses can be hard to do well, especially without professional guidance, but there are several strategies you can use to improve your website SEO and get more traffic. With the right changes to your website, you can start bringing in tons of new customers, increase awareness of your brand in your community, and build a good reputation for thought leadership in your field. Make sure you’re taking your website to its full potential – make sure you’re doing SEO right!
Be First to Comment