Getting your small business's website to rank high in search engine results can be a challenge, but it is worth it to invest the time and effort into SEO. Luckily, you can take some simple steps to improve your ranking in organic searches. Check out this article for our top 5 tips on small business SEO.
1. Understand What SEO is and What it Entails
First, small business owners need to understand what SEO is and how it can help their business increase their online visibility to reach their target audience. SEO stands for “search engine optimisation.” It is the process of improving the visibility of a website on search engines like Google and Bing to bring in organic traffic. When people search for something on a search engine, the results that appear are usually in order of relevance to what was searched. The higher a website appears in the results, the more likely people will click on it.
Many factors go into how search engines rank websites. These include the quality of the content, the number of backlinks, and the user experience. SEO is an ongoing process that requires regular effort and attention to see results.
Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for SEO success or a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to SEO. What works for one website might not work for another. There are, however, some basic principles that all businesses should follow if they want to see results from their SEO strategy.
2. Do Some Keyword Research
Keywords are a set of words (or longer phrases) used when searching using a search engine. Choosing the correct target keywords is essential, so thorough keyword research is essential.
If you want your small business to succeed online, you need to find out what your target audience is searching for when looking for businesses like yours. Once you know this, you can optimise your website and content to ensure you appear in search results.
There are several ways and different SEO tools to do keyword research. One way is to use Google AdWords Keyword Planner. This tool lets you enter seed keywords and see how often they are searched. You can then use this information to create optimised website content and blog posts for these keywords.
Learn how to do this in our SEO WTF course!
Another way to do keyword research is to ask your potential customers what they would search for when looking for a business like yours. You can do this through surveys or by asking questions on social media. Once you have some ideas, you can create content targeting these keywords. This will benefit your online content but also help your site visitors because you'll be writing relevant content for them.
Keyword research is an essential part of small business SEO. By researching and targeting the right keywords, you can create valuable content that ensures that your website appears in front of potential customers when they search for businesses like yours.
3. Optimise Your Small Business' Website Content
If you want your small business website to rank high in search engine results, you must ensure that your site's content is complete, accurate, and answers users' basic questions. Make sure everything on your site is consumer-driven: can visitors easily find out who you are, what you sell/services you provide, why you're qualified to provide them/sell them and how to contact you? If you're not sure, get an acquaintance not associated with your business to have a look for you and see if they can answer those questions by looking at your site for 1-2 minutes. Can the user find all the information they need? Is there anything about your user experience that is frustrating for them? It's better to know now and fix it than spend money on advertising campaigns that don't convert later.
We can't talk about website optimisation without talking about keyword content. For your content to perform, you need relevant keywords and phrases so that search engines can easily find your site. You should also ensure that your website content is well-written and informative, so this means creating quality content on keyword target topics but being careful not to write solely for keywords. Google will favour helpful content that isn't written exclusively for the placement of targeted keywords.
Learn how to do this in our SEO WTF course!
This means writing articles, blog posts, and web pages that are informative and helpful. Your content should be relevant to your business and include keywords that people will use when searching for information about your business. By taking these steps, you can help ensure your SEO efforts pay off by ranking in search engine results for search terms related to your business.
4. Use Social Media to Build Your Small Business' Brand
Another way to improve your small business SEO is to create a Google My Business profile. It's a quick and easy way to guarantee your business information and website will at least appear when people search for your business name. Your Google Business Profile features a link to your website, opening hours, location, contact information, products, services, and more. A Google Business Profile is beneficial for your site's SEO and for people looking for you.
Create profiles on popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, and LinkedIn - whichever is most relevant to your customer base. You can help increase your personal brand and website's visibility and reach by being visible on social media.
You can also use social media to share links to your website and blog posts. By doing this, you can help increase traffic to your site and improve your search engine ranking. Oftentimes small business owners will be surprised by where new users are coming from - it's not always from the most popular platform.
Creating social profiles and keeping a regular presence on social media can be time-consuming; however, you'll thank yourself later. Posting on social media and building your brand is just as important as building your small business's brand. Expertise is one of the many factors search engines consider when ranking websites. Look at your online presence and think, from the search engine's view, does it look like you have the expertise to speak on the topic you are posting about?
Let's consider this example:
Say you own a small accountancy firm. Your website lists you as the company owner, and you have a few blog posts on your site talking about accounting. Other than that, you have an old LinkedIn profile you last updated in 10 years ago and a Pinterest profile you used for your crafting hobby. Do you think there is enough evidence online for a search engine to connect your personal brand with being an expert accountant? Probably not.
Fortunately, taking a few steps to expand upon that content will help boost your credibility in the eyes of a search engine. You can start by completing your LinkedIn profile with your experience and accreditations. Then, commit to posting from it a couple of times a week to comment on trending industry posts or, even better, write your own.
Learn how to do this in our SEO WTF course!
5. Promote Your Website
Promoting your website actively is one of the best ways to improve your small business SEO. Be sure to include your web address on your social media profiles and to regularly share blog posts you've written on your site on your social media channels. You can also promote your website by creating a newsletter and using social media marketing to build your audience. Creating a newsletter containing valuable insight into your industry niche or tips for potential new business customers can lead to more traffic if the articles you promote in your newsletter are hosted on your website. Once you have built an email list through a newsletter, you could try doing an email marketing campaign to build engagement with your brand or sell more products or services.
Another way to promote your website is to create compelling content that will draw in quality backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites that point back to your site. Simply put, the more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher your site will appear in search rankings.
There are a few ways to earn backlinks, and they vary in time, effort, and budget. Some easier wins for small businesses looking to get backlinks include:
Find podcasts looking for guests and pitch yourself to speak on them. According to a podcastindex.org report on U.K. podcast listeners, there will be an estimated 28 million podcast listeners by 2026 (in the U.K. alone). So, as you can imagine, there are many opportunities to contribute to this mammoth-sized industry. Pitching yourself to speak on a podcast can be a great way to get more visibility for your website and your personal brand, too. Just be sure to request that the podcast host links to your website from the episode notes!
You can also flex your expertise by offering commentary to journalists writing on the topic you specialise in. A popular (and cheap) way to do this is by following the journorequest hashtag on Twitter and watching for requests you can contribute to. Be sure to give the journalist your quote, a link to your website, and a detailed bio and contact information.
Last but certainly not least, using data to create compelling Digital PR campaigns is a very popular way to get many high-quality backlinks. You can hire a Digital PR expert to create campaigns for you, or you can do it yourself by looking for interesting data trends within your small business sales or your wider area of expertise. If you can come up with a great idea that will be useful to your industry, newsworthy (if outreaching to journalists) and hasn't been done before, then you're potentially on to something worthy of backlinks. If Digital PR campaigns are a bit out of reach for your small business at the moment, consider doing some research on some smaller industry blogs that you'd like to get backlinks from to see what type of content they prefer, what type of posts are popular on their site, and then think of how you can provide value to them. A backlink from a small but hyper-relevant website can be just as valuable as one from a large site with less relevance to your small business.
Promoting your website will increase its visibility and, if done right, get more people to visit it from the source of the coverage and search traffic.
Wrap Up
Now you've had a good start on increasing your small business's site visibility, commit to updating your website regularly. This means adding new, high-quality content, updating existing content, and removing outdated content. You should also schedule quarterly checks to make sure that your website is still easy to navigate. This means having a clean and user-friendly design, yes, but you should also keep on top of the new content you're adding to make sure it doesn't turn into an unorganised mess on your site.
Remember, your website should be easy to navigate so that people can find what they are looking for easily - if they can't, that will lead to a poor time on-page and a high bounce rate, which means people are telling search engines through their actions that your site does not contain the information they expected to find when they clicked on it.
Keeping your website up-to-date and well-maintained will ensure that it is relevant and informative for visitors, which makes search engines happy, too!