SEO or search engine optimisation is the process of adjusting a website to the algorithm of search engines. This process has been known for a while to be the best and most cost-effective way to manipulate website traffic as well as being a quicker way to connect with customers and boost search engine rankings over competitors. Why should SEO tips and tricks be utilised by small businesses? In simpler terms, SEO is defined as a tool to allow your website’s content to help potential customers find your products or services easier. 

“At the core, Google (and other search engines) is a place to go when people want to answer a question or to learn more about something,” said Jenn Mathews, SEO manager of GitHub. “When we understand the nature of why people search and help them with content that provides the answers they are looking for then our business benefits from it.”

SEO enables businesses to create a user-friendly website, find potential customers, and convert them while building a website’s legitimacy. To do any of this, you must first understand your target market’s interests and vocabulary.

This practice is necessary, especially for a small business’s online presence. Without it, leaders will basically be investing money in content that most likely goes nowhere. Targeting your audience is essential in marketing. Without the right SEO tactics, your website will be a  needle in a haystack.

Both eCommerce and brick-and-mortar businesses can benefit from search engine optimisation. It helps eCommerce businesses to gain leads and convert them into customers, and then into returning ones. Brick-and-mortar businesses rely on local SEO to interact with their local marketplace and direct customers to their physical stores.

With all this in mind, it’s clear the bottom line is that SEO is an effective way to attract consumers to your online platforms if used correctly. 

This optimisation is constantly evolving, which means staying on top of the latest updates and trends can be a challenge. However, it’s well worth the effort. To get you started, here are just a few of the SEO tips you could use to grow your business in 2021:

Embrace local SEO

The pandemic has taken a toll not only on human life but also on the health of small businesses across the world. In times like these, smaller, local businesses have never been popular and people are very interested in giving back to their communities. 

To ensure your local SEO is effective, start by optimising your Google My Business account. A fully optimised account can increase your visibility in search, drive more traffic to your website, social channels, and any other online platforms your business uses. 

Optimise for EAT

EAT is undoubtedly one of the most important SEO trends for 2021. Google’s 2018 EAT algorithm update was primarily aimed at medical websites, in an effort to ensure that the information provided thereon was legitimately expert, authoritative, and trustworthy. 

E‑A-T- stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It comes from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines—a 168-page document used by human quality raters to assess the quality of Google’s search results.

Businesses will have to make sure their content is relevant, accurate, somewhat unique and trustworthy. Aside from strategic writing, this can be achieved by ensuring you build up your backlinks, using a good number of reference links to relevant websites, writing your own authoritative blog entries on what you do and know best and proving to the search giant and users that you are a trustworthy authority.

High-quality hosting

Be sure to get the best hosting service you can afford. Your site’s speed will affect SEO rankings, as will a lack of security, a low uptime, and poor support. 

In-depth content

Your online content needs to be relevant, informative, compelling, well-written and of increasing importance in the SEO stakes, in-depth. This means writing quality content for your site, your blog, your information pages, your about pages.

Longer content is currently the way to go for good SEO results, according to research done by Brian Dean from Backlinko after analysing 11.8 million Google search results.

Mobile optimisation

Mobile optimisation and ensuring your website is mobile-friendly will continue to be key to both Google and your customers. Google has made it clear that mobile-first is the way to go, and the fact that there are over five billion mobile phone users in the world today confirms this.

The post SEO tips for small businesses: How to progress in 2021 appeared first on U2B.