5 Simple but Effective Tips for Small Business SEO

It is a truism that any small business needs to be visible to prospective customers in order to thrive. Considering that 65% of consumers search online for a product or service before making the purchase decision, the importance of building a visible online presence is higher today than ever before.

One of the most effective ways to enhance visibility for your business is via search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine optimization is the process of making a website easy for search engine algorithms to understand while also being valuable to users. If your website is serving its purpose of satisfying users and being comprehensible to search crawlers, then a search engine like Google is likely to rank your page high on search engine results page (SERPs) for the keywords you have optimized each page of your website for.

Although SEO can deliver outstanding results but it also requires investment of your time and repetitive trial and error. Nonetheless, if you follow a few basic tips, you can optimize your site for higher search visibility quite effectively with little but focused effort.

Tip 1: Do your Keyword Search Right

The first thing to do is to identify keywords that link your business and your customers together. You need to think about which words or phrases your customers may use to search for the products, services, or other solutions that your business has to offer. If you are selling shoes, for example, will your customers search with a generalized word like shoes or will they specify the gender, category, and the type of shoes they are looking for as well? These are some important initial questions to ask during the keyword research phase.

You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner or KWFinder to further zone in on the most relevant keywords that relate to your business. These tools are very simple and user friendly. Just type in your main keyword and it will draw all the relevant options of keyword combinations that you can use to enrich your content, increasing your chances of higher rankings on SERPs and drawing larger traffic.  

These searches will provide you with all the popular keywords that people are searching on the internet but it is not necessarily a good idea to utilize the most searched keywords. Large scale businesses having high domain authority are always competing for top rankings in search results for such generalized keywords.

So for small businesses in particular, it is a good idea to keep your focus on low-competition keywords, which are targeting your niche audience. This always helps in gaining the attention of specific target audience, which may be smaller in numbers but more relevant in terms of drawing sales and.

Tip 2: Careful Keyword Usage

Small business owners that are unfamiliar with SEO tend to make the mistake of stuffing a bunch of keywords in a copy, hoping that Google will rank them higher as a result. This is a counter-productive practice because search engine algorithms treat keyword-stuffed content as spam and will bring down your rankings.

Search engine algorithms have become far more sophisticated today and can determine the quality of content and its level of relevance to a given topic without requiring repeated usage of focus keywords. This is why it is recommended to use keywords naturally as the discussion warrants and focus on clear, concise, original, and helpful content rather than worrying about the number of times a keyword appears in your content.

Tip 3: Don’t Forget to Add Internal Links

Attracting audience to your website is not the challenge. The real challenge is creating engaging content that keeps yours audience hooked and wanting to read more. To keep the customers engaged on the website and make sure that users spend a reasonably good amount of time on your website, you can add internal web page links within the content redirecting the audience to another page of your website.

This has an effect on reducing the bounce rate and increasing stay time on your website – two important ranking factors that many search engines including Google use. Internal links are also beneficial in keeping your website organized as well as helping the Google crawlers understand the relationship between different pages and your overall site structure better.

Tip 4: Make Great, Helpful Content

The most important task of a search engine is to provide people with the answers they are looking for! A business is only successful if it has the solution to one of the many problems its customers have. So for a small business, the best strategy to attract a bucketful of traffic is to create interesting content. Content doesn’t necessarily have to be in the form of long-form articles or sales copy; it can also be videos or infographics providing valuable information to your audience. In fact, videos are the most viewed content type comprising 82% of online traffic.

It is always best to frequently update the website content, keeping it relevant and ensuring all information is up-to-date. A good content strategy should encourage you to stay ahead of the curve by frequently updating articles on the basis of latest trends, news, and information.

Tip 5: Loop in Social Media

Google is the most used online service, but social media platforms come next in line. Many users spend a good percentage of online time on social media, producing ample opportunities for small businesses to grab a prospective customer’s attention.

A short and crisp post on Facebook or daily tweets can do wonders for your business because not only will you be attracting numerous social media users to your business account but the referral traffic will also benefit your rankings for the focus page of your website. Don’t forget to mention your target keywords in your captions (with proper context and semantic sense), linking it to your website to get Google’s attention.   

In reality, most of the digital audience won’t even bother turning past the first page of search results but if you focus on keywords with little competition, you can rank high enough to drive pure organic traffic and grow your business.