In this article “SEO tips for small business”, we will discuss the various tips, tools and strategies to garnish you more website traffic, leads, and business moving forward.
Afterall, what is the point of investing time and money into building a beautiful website if your potential customers can’t find it on the web?
SEO (Search engine optimization) is a common Google Marketing practice to help your customers find your website when they are searching for products or services on Google and other major searching engines like Bing and Yahoo.
So by building a great looking website the right way that utilizes correct off-page SEO and on-page SEO practices, you will achieve your goal of driving more website traffic to your page to generate leads and new business sales.
With this in mind, here are some SEO tips for Small business in Canada, US, or globally.
1. Choose the right keywords
For every business there are going to be different keywords that are using to market a business on Google. What are the right keywords to use?
If you a commercial cleaning company then you will want to use keywords like “best office cleaning”, or “affordable commercial cleaners”, and other long tail keyword phrases that will get you found at the top of the SERPs (search engines results pages).
Create a list of the top 24 keywords for starters for your business. Use a good variety of these chosen keywords on the various pages of your website including the blog area where you will write content (articles) to promote your products or services, or to educate the public on the various topics of your niche.
The more you write for the public and not just to self-promote, the more valuable your content will be and you will eventually get rewarded more algorithm points by Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Use top keywords in the URL, the title, the first paragraph, as well as 3-5% keywords throughout the whole article suggested by Google Best Practices, and other areas like metadata descriptions, categories, tags, and image alt tags.
Remember to write for humans first, not search engines – very important!
2. Build Off-Page Links to Your Website (Backlinks)
Writing content on related sites and social channels is important in creating valuable authority backlinks that point to your website. The more quality websites that carry links that point to your site, the more page rank points you will be rewarded by Google and other major search engines.
Backlinks that come from sites with a good PA / DA score (page authority / domain authority), according to MOZ, tend to rank higher on Google! Sites with a vast number of high quality PA DA external links (such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and Google.com) are at the top end of the DA (Domain Authority) scale.
Smaller businesses with fewer inbound links that don’t employ good SEO practices, will have a much lower domain authority score. So the end game is to focus on quality and not quantity when speaking about generating backlinks for your website.
3. High Quality Content
Your main goal when writing high quality content is to help search engines like Google show people where the best search results are for any given search term or keyword. People want answers to their questions, and Google wants to show they the best quality results. Companies that write good quality content with the end user in mind, will often get rewarded with a higher page rank as a result.
The SEO strategy is simple, write good quality content (articles, videos, pics) that generates lots of website traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Make the content relevant to what the user is searching for on Google. Quality content will make you an authority in your niche and you will, as a result, get reward with a higher page, rank, more website traffic, more leads, and more sales.
4. Social Media Presence
Creating a social media presence online is a valuable tool in not only advertising your products to potentially thousands of new customers, it is an SEO tool that may produce valuable backlinks and a target audience in which to advertise your products or services directly to.
Search engines like Google will pick up on your social footprint and reward you will more algorithm points, that will increase your page rank. Your Business page on Facebook will attract lots of new customers through likes, shares, contest, and comments.
The content you write on your website blog and share on top social channels like Facebook, the more backlinks, website traffic, and business you will produce for your products or services online.
5. User Friendly Website
Building a user friendly website is a key practice in keeping users on your website once they have found you in a Google search!
So by creating a clean website that is easy to navigate, with large print for mobile users (mobile friendly), and gets found easily in the search engines (SEO friendly), your visitors will have a better experience (UX).
Try to use a variety of headings and sub headings to improve the readability. Heading and keywords are important to your users and search engines alike, so this one should be a no brainer. Make it look nice, stand out from the crowd, and use good HTML and SEO practices in the process and you will get rewarded with more website visitors and possibly more customers.
Another tip in creating a user friendly website is site speed. It is hard enough to get visitors to your websites so you don’t want to annoy them by building a sluggish website that loads slowly. Keep the images minimized for quicker page loads times and your visitors will stay on your site longer.
Don’t forget to make the website viewable and optimized for mobile browsers and various platforms and devices. Mobile friendly websites are rewarded by search engines that provide a great user friendly experience, as well as decent page load times.
6. Analytics To Measure and Track Results
Analytics are important to measure and track website traffic. Where do the visitors come from and how did they get there? These are great questions and the answers will help you write content that produce better website traffic and leads.
Analytics offer keyword insights as to how a visitor landed on a page or post on a website. What search terms did they use to find your products or services? Google Analytics are widely used by website design professionals and SEO experts alike in Canada and the US.
Put Google Analytics in your bag of SEO tricks, along with Google sitemap and Google Search Console and you will have more customers than you know what to do with.
Webmaster tools (now Google Search Console) will directly allow you to partner with the top search engine online (Google) to give you insight into ranking a site higher, alerts, indexing issues, and bad links.
There are many more SEO tips and tricks that we can talk about in upcoming articles, but for now the above topics cover about 80% of what is important to users and search engines like Google.
Follow these SEO tips for small business on a regular basis for all website pages and blog articles and you will become and authority in your niche with great page rank results on Page #1 of Google for your products or services.
Publishing good quality “relevant” content that is user friendly, SEO friendly, and has all your keywords in the right places, will get you the results you desire – improving search engine results! This combined with authority backlinks and a good social footprint, will turn your business on fire with more visitors and sales.
More Reading: Here is a question posed by a user on Quora that may anser the basic question as to why SEO is used in the first place.
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