Learn How to Do Your Own Small Business SEO
Competing in the small business landscape is hard enough, but to do it using an unoptimized website is like choosing to come to the fight unarmed.
Luckily for us, there are clear guidelines that can help you rank your pages better, and most of them are able to be accomplished without being the head geek at Google.
To help you learn how to do your own small business SEO, here are 10 tips for small business SEO that will help.
10 SEO tips for small business
Create compelling, rich content – Longer, highly relevant content is prized by Google and is part of their ranking algorithm. Write for your readers, not for SEO!
Make your URLs simple and telling – Make your page URLs an indicator of what is on your page by simply looking at them, using your primary keyword here if possible.
Have a keyword strategy – Know which keywords you want to rank for, make each page focus on one primary keyword, and keep your keyword density on the page low, between 1-3%.
Create your Google My Business listing – Google's latest local business incarnation is a suite of all things local business: Google+, Maps and more. It's essential you have an optimized Google My Business presence if you want to do well in local rankings.
Have a mobile ready site – Recently Google announced that starting on April 21st, 2015, not having a mobile friendly site will set you back in the search results, which at this time account for about half of all search traffic! Time to pay attention!
Optimize images – Making sure your images have accurate (not-keyword stuffed) ALT tags, as this is a ranking signal in the search algorithm.
Mind your NAP data – Make certain that the information you present to the world is consistent across all your web platforms. Get all names, addresses and phones, along with any other identifying info straight.
Encourage reviews – Do your best to encourage your visitors to leave reviews for your products or services, particularly on Google+. These make a large difference in your local rankings.
Meta data – Make sure that each web page has optimized Meta data, in particular title tags, description, along with only 1 H1 tag per page.
Use Google Analytics – Or something similar to make sure you know what is going on with your site. Analytics, along with Google Webmaster Tools is a great start!
If you need help generating leads, please call us. We have an excellent lead generation program where we pay for all your advertising expenses and take all the risk for you. You only pay when you get results. This is a massive undertaking and understandably we're limited in how many companies we can help at any one time. If you're interested and find the program paused or not available, just leave your details and we'll let you know when it re-opens.
Comments
Hi Rudy, your blog is a must read for small online businesses on how to start off optimizing their websites. Very informative blog. Thanks for sharing.
“Start a blog” – is clearly a good idea but depending on the industry it can be a really hard thing to get to work without a lot of investment. Sometimes this is outside the financial reach of a small business – especially in competitive areas.
“Don’t obsess over rankings” – I follow this advice myself, but there is value in looking at regularly large fluctuations for individual keywords on a daily basis. It might indicate that different landing pages are cannibalizing rankings for certain keywords as Google can’t recognize the authoritative page on the site.