All of us know that an important component of any small business marketing strategy is to efficiently position its brand in search engine results. But is it possible to dominate search results with your content? Yes, it is. There are many simple ways to improve visibility for your business in the search engine results, while simultaneously boosting marketing efforts in social media, reviews, ratings, and media outreach. For a small business, it is important to build visibility and brand awareness. Your business cannot grow if customers do not about you, your company, products, and services. How to improve your brand visibility? The answer is with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Here, we are discussing SEO tips for small business.
Nowadays, before making a purchase, more than 70% of consumers do product research online. So, regardless of the business or industry you are in, it is important to optimize your online presence. When your customers are looking for a product or service on Google, you must be visible to them. This is where SEO can be helpful. In simple language, it is a strategy that can help your website appear on top of the search engine results page.
Though SEO can deliver great results, you need to invest a lot of time. Thankfully, there are some tips for small business owners that can help in fastening this time-consuming process. Let us have a look at some SEO tips for small businesses that can help you improve the growth of your brand.
Important SEO Tips for Small Business
Display information on your website properly
Your website is your most valuable and important online asset, so you must make sure that it is rightly optimized so that it appears at the top of the search engine results page SERP.
Things to do:
- Create a domain name that shows your business type and location. For example, William’s Bakery uses the domain “williamsbakeryus.com”, which has everything.
- Include keywords in the page titles that relate to your business, its location, and services.
- Integrate your business’ name, phone number, and address information in not just the homepage and contact page, but every page of your site.
- In addition to showing your offerings, make sure that your website copy includes information about your local area to associate your business with the nearby location. Integrating this information will not just improve your website copy for customers, but it will boost your search visibility as a local business also.
Conduct a keyword research
Doing keyword research is one of the significant SEO tips for small business owners who want to start SEO for their website. Before you can start including keywords into your copy, you must know what keywords people are looking for about your products and services. One of the simplest tricks to do is through Google AdWords. It will tell you how often a certain keyword is searched for, from which region it is searched, and related phrases or keywords. This tool is invaluable and must be used at the initial stage of every new SEO campaign.
Choose the right keyword density
Now, while writing your website’s content, every other word mustn’t be a keyword or phrase. Google algorithms search for content that is relevant to the keyword. One of the methods they do this is by judging the keyword density. The right minimum density is 1%, but it is generally better not to go more than 3%. This means that we should use 1 to 4 keywords or phrases per 500 words of content.
Know where to place your keywords in an article
Now you have lots of non-competitive keywords and the aim of putting 1 to 4 of them as per 100 words into your written content. Deciding where to put them in that copy plays a vital role. This is one of the significant SEO tips for small business that every business owner must keep in mind. Usually, you must include a keyword in the title of your blog or article, at least one in the subtitle or bulleted list within the article, and the rest spread across the article naturally. This will prove to the search engine algorithms that your content is relevant to the keyword as it is not the subject of your copy, but it is referenced all over.
Develop a Business Listing
One of the easiest small business tips to boost online visibility is to create a Google My Business listing. Through this, business owners can control how search engine results pages of Google display their organization.
On the contrary, Google My Business Listings also help search engines to find the right information about your business. On the Google My Business Page, you can offer details like location, contact information, and business address. Also, you can add appropriate photos to give your customers a glimpse of what you do. It also allows you to write answers to frequently asked questions about your business.
Google My Business listings are mainly helpful to optimize your site “near me” questions or voice-based searches. It is an important step to outrank your competitors in the local search results.
Several third-party services and apps rely on Google to get data about businesses. When you update your current information on your Google My Business Page, it is transferred to these parties. Overall, it can show your information more perfectly and consistently across various platforms.
With the help of these listings, small business owners can also get an idea about their customer’s behavior. Using Google Insights, you can find out how customers can find you. Also, it shows platforms where your visibility is low. Based on this, you can customize your marketing campaigns.
Mobile optimization
The number of people who use mobile phones to surf the internet is rising. In 2018, smartphones generated 52.2% of the whole website traffic. Your business should keep up with this altering consumer behavior. The first important step to appeal to mobile phone users is to choose a mobile-friendly website design. Convenience and responsiveness must be at the top of your list while looking for an effective mobile-friendly site design.
If you have optimized your website for mobile devices, your visitors will not have to zoom in or out. A good mobile-friendly site is perfectly accessible from screens of various sizes.
Another benefit of this strategy is that it can help you to enhance your search engine rankings. Google has made a note of increasing the number of mobile phone users across the world. So, they updated their algorithm to show these changes.
With mobile-indexing, Google checks your mobile website page design to index and fix your rankings. So, you should not ignore mobile optimization in your SEO strategy.
Here are a few things that are recommended by Google:
- Your desktop and the mobile site should have similar content in indexable and crawlable formats. This recommendation applies to videos, text, and photos.
- Ensure that you are using structured data on both the versions
- Make sure you add the same title and meta description on both versions
Make video content
To engage your customers, create more video content. By 2022, studies reveal that video traffic will consist of 82% of all online traffic. Also, internet video traffic is set to grow from 2017 to 2022.
Video content can drive more traffic. But that is not the only thing. Google has started featured videos in the form of snippets in response to search queries. So, the first step to leverage video content for SEO strategy is to create more of it.
Secondly, you must ensure that Google crawlers understand what your entire video is all about. For this, it important to include a corresponding text reference.
Conclusion
As the owner of a small business, it is important to make people aware of your products and services. Your potential customers should be able to find your website when they are looking for a product or service.
These SEO tips for small business can help you to improve your visibility and boost engagement. However, small business SEO is a procedure that requires a lot of time, patience, and effort. But if you know the right SEO techniques, you can improve the growth of your small business.
Among these, which SEO tips for small businesses have helped you grow your business? Please share your thoughts in the comment section.