Grow your online presence with our essential SEO tips for your small business.
If you want to start ranking first on Google and get thousands of clicks to your website each month, you are going to have to use SEO. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the act of trying to rank higher on search engines to ultimately increase your website's organic traffic and visibility.
As a small business, improving your website’s SEO can be a great way to get more customers and raise brand awareness.
With the help of several tools and strategies, improving your search rankings isn’t all that complicated. However, these improvements take time to notice, and some of them can call for a lot of work.
In this guide, you will learn how you can improve your website’s SEO with the help of tools and strategies.
Google uses many different factors to rank your pages. Some of them carry more weight than others.
Here are the ranking factors that you should be focusing most of your time on. This list comes from Backlinko’s page on Google ranking factors.
In this guide, we will go over how you can specifically improve these factors on your website and provide additional tips to get your small business website ranking higher on Google.
If you have been around in the SEO space at all, you have probably heard the phrase “content is king.” This message is not an understatement in the world of SEO.
Having good content can be the difference between a failing and a successful website. Many think that content is Google's most important ranking factor.
You may be asking, what does Google classify as having good content? Google itself says it should be helpful, reliable, people-first content. Try to create content that answers all of any visitor's questions and points them to other useful pages if you don’t answer them.
Another big thing that you should focus on when it comes to content is EEAT. Following these quality standard guidelines put in place by Google will help your page rank higher if implemented correctly. Here is what it means:
Matching a visitor's search intent should also be a goal for your content. This means that if the user is looking for the “best running shoes” to buy, talk about shoes and which ones you recommend. Talking about how far you should run would fail to match the search intent.
To get a more in-depth explanation of this concept, check out Backlinko’s article on search intent.
If your small business’s website has any content on it, you need to make sure that you are covering topics that potential customers are looking for. This allows you to attract visitors that may be interested in your product or service.
The Semrush keyword tool will give you an estimate of the volume and difficulty of each keyword. This makes it easy to find low-difficulty keywords that still have a decent amount of traffic.
Start by identifying the topics important to your brand. Let's use the example of running shoes again.
After putting the term “running shoes” into Semrush’s keyword tool, it shows us a list of similar keywords. As you can see in the keyword difficulty column (KD), these are not the easiest terms to rank for. To find lower KD keywords, you can sort them.
Now you have a list of keywords that are related to running shoes that you can start making content for.
Website speed itself will affect how your page ranks on Google. Luckily, there are a few easy things you can do to ensure that you have a fast website.
PageSpeed Insights is a tool from Google that helps identify any performance and SEO errors with your website.
All you have to do is enter your page and have it scanned. It will then give a rating for each category and tips to improve your website.
If your website is on WordPress, you can use plugins to make your website quicker. Check out Elementor's 5 Best Caching WordPress Plugins if you are interested in getting a plugin for your WordPress site.
If all else fails, you may just have to get a better host for your website. A good host can increase your page load time.
Hostinger is an affordable option for small businesses. They have plans starting at $2.99/month with a free domain included.
Whether you like it or not, Google uses backlinks to decide where to rank your page. Getting backlinks is a pain for new website owners.
Some people just avoid the process of getting them completely and hope to have them come naturally. Others will dedicate time to reaching out to other website owners, asking them for a guest post in hopes they can insert links to their website.
There are plenty of strategies out there that work for getting backlinks. However, some take longer than others. I will go over several of the popular ones that you can use to get started.
Guest posting involves reaching out to other websites in your niche and offering to create an article for them. The article you create will then be posted on their website. In your post, you can include links that lead back to your website.
This is one of the more time-consuming methods, as you have to do a lot of reaching out.
By using an SEO tool like Semrush, you can find broken links on websites. By looking for broken links that you can fill with your content, you can inform the site owners that link to these broken pages and then offer them your content to link to instead.
This method takes the least time overall, but you may not see results with it for a while. By creating a useful page such as a tool, infographic, or statistic page, other writers might link to your website naturally.
This method is great because once you get the linkbait pages created, you can just sit back and watch the backlinks come. However, you will need to be getting decent traffic to your page if you want to get backlinks for it. To speed up the process, you can run ads on these pages.
Having old content on your site that doesn’t perform well can weigh down the success of your other pages. To ensure this doesn’t happen, regularly update your content.
In some cases, it is just better to remove content rather than update it. For example, posts that relate to a certain year in the past probably won’t be receiving much traffic.
The process of removing these old pages is known as content pruning. For a more in-depth guide, check out Growth Collective’s article on content pruning.
The Google Search Console makes this process of finding low-performing pages easy. For this to work, you will have to add your website to the Google Search Console and wait for it to get some data. If your website has already been added, navigate to the performance section. You will then see an option below the chart to sort by page.
Here, you can see which pages are failing to get traffic. These poor-performing pages are the perfect place to start your content pruning.
The concept of internal and external linking is important to SEO and user experience. Here is a brief overview:
Whenever you link to one of your own pages from within your website, it is known as an internal link. Internal links make navigating your website easier for visitors. Also, they serve as a guide for search engines to crawl and understand the structure of your site.
Aside from navigation, internal links can be included in articles when relevant.
Linking out to external pages can also make the user experience on your website better. For example, if you don’t cover a topic on your business’s website but feel that it would be useful to users reading your page, link out to a site that does have a page for it.
This tip isn’t only good for SEO and increasing user experience, but it may also increase your conversion rate for any products and services you sell on your website. Think about it, if users can find your products and information about them more easily, they will be more likely to buy.
Several elements go into creating a website that is easy to navigate.
Including useful images in your content can provide value to your visitors. Good images can entice readers to stay on your page longer.
Images can also rank on Google separately from your page. In order to get your images to rank on Google, you will have to first optimize them. Here are some factors that will help search engines pick up on your images: File name, alt tag, context, and uniqueness.
Be sure to not add images to just add images. For example, a stock photo that doesn’t serve much of a purpose will not be useful to your visitors.
Having a mobile-friendly website is a must for all businesses, especially if most of your website visitors are on mobile. Google has made it clear that mobile responsiveness is a ranking factor for your website.
If your business is based in a physical location or serves a local region, having a Google Business Profile, which is completely free to create, can be a great way to get some organic customers online.
A Google Business Profile will appear on maps and can be found in search results when people search for your business.
The benefits of creating a Google Business Profile include:
In the end, any small business with a website should take time to improve their website’s ranking with SEO. With the strategies I mentioned, it is possible for you to make your way to the first spot on Google.
However, as you try to rank for higher competition keywords, you will have to put in more effort as more businesses compete for these high-traffic search terms.
The next step is to start using these strategies to improve your website’s SEO. Unfortunately, many of these changes will take time to take effect, as Google doesn't always pick up on them quickly.
