How Can My Business rank Higher on Google?
Building a website that ranks high for your keywords can be challenging for small businesses with larger, more resourceful companies competing for the same search terms. And when you search for SEO tips & tricks for your small business website you get confronted with hundreds of strategies, guidelines and tactics.
12 SEO Tips & Tricks for your Small Business Website
In this post, we are going to outline a series of small business SEO tips that you can put into action today to massively improve your SEO results without spending huge amounts of resources.
There is a process to SEO, so we will guide you through the steps of improving your website SEO in a structured manner and improve your visibility as you go.
Before we start – Can you REALLY do SEO yourself?
It’s a worthwhile question. SEO can get complex quickly and you might find yourself going down the infamous SEO rabbit whole. However, for small businesses, you can do a few key things before entering the deep waters of optimisation. You may run into problems when it comes to some of the more difficult elements like link and authority building, but there are almost certainly improvements you can make before you get to those more complex areas.
If you do find yourself a little lost and confused, feel free to drop us a line with your questions or book one of our free website audits. During the audit, we will review your website design and SEO structure and provide you with 15 mins of jam-packed feedback and actionable next steps to improve your website SEO and user experience.
12 SEO Tips For Small Business Websites
SEO Tips 1 - 8: SEO Begins With Your Website Design
The first 7 SEO tips to improve your website visibility should be implemented when building your website.
SEO Tip #1: Have a SEO strategy prior to building your website
Your website design will end up having a significant impact, whether direct or indirect, on where you rank in search engines. Here are a few things to consider when designing a SEO optimised website for your business:
Site Structure: By planning your website structure prior to designing, you will be able to strategically attract the right customers to your website.
URL Structure: Your URL structure ties into your website structure. Base your URLs on the key subject of each page.
Internal Linking: Map out the flow of your customer through your website to ensure your visitor lands on relevant pages whilst also starting to rank for certain words by optimising links with anchor text
Outbound Links: When creating outbound links, you want to ask yourself “does this link add value and is it relevant?” If the answer is no, then you shouldn’t use that link. It’s also important that you’re linking out to sources with a high page authority or domain authority.
SEO Tip #2: Analyse your Competitors
When analysing your competitors SEO, look out for:
Keyword Consistency: What keywords are they using? How often do they reference these keywords? Are they using specific keywords in their headings?
Website Structure: What kind of website pages did they create? What URLs are they using?
Highly Ranked Keywords: Get a feel for what keywords your competitors are ranking for and where they’re ranking to help you determine your plan of action.
Content: Is their content meaningful or is it too SEO-friendly? Develop an understanding of how they’re trying to attract customers and what their main selling points are.
SEO Tip #3: Use Google Keyword Planner
Using Google’s Keyword Planning tool allows you to see the amount of traffic specific keywords receive. Or in other words, how many people are searching for these terms. Based on these insights you can determine your keywords, discover related popular keywords to include in your content and which specific niche your business could tackle.
SEO Tip #4: Focus on Your Website’s User Experience
This is where your small business can really shine! By creating an outstanding user experience on your website, your small business can even outrank the largest cooperations. The two most crucial points to consider are:
Your Website Design: Is your website designed with your consumer in mind? Does it navigate naturally? Does your website answer your key consumer questions?
Your Content: Does your content read naturally? Instead of including excess keywords to help you rank higher, include keywords where it is relevant to do so and where it adds value to your audience.
SEO Tip #5: Optimise your Website Design for Mobile
Over 50% of website traffic originates from mobile devices – number growing! Having a website that adapts to different screen sizes and ensures the very best experience for your customer no matter which device they are using has the highest priority.
SEO Tip #6: Set up Google Analytics
If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics, it’s time to familiarise yourself. Not only is it free to use, but it offers businesses insight into where website visitors are coming from, which landing pages’ people are clicking to from search engines, and what people are searching for before visiting your site. Based on the insights you can optimise your website design to drive more traffic and direct bookings!
SEO Tip #7: Test Your Website Speed
Let’s be honest, who would leave a website if it takes only a second too long to load? Unfortunately A LOT of people would! Having a slow loading website could cost you valuable traffic. Testing your site speed frequently and optimising your images and videos for web will give your SEO an instant boost.
SEO Tip #8: Add a terms & conditions, privacy statement and disclaimer
This SEO tip will help your pages gain more trust among search engines. They serve a variety of roles. The Privacy Statement explains how your data is collected. Terms of Use explains the rules and regulations of the website. The disclaimer states the limitations of your liability when someone uses your website.
Content is King: SEO Tips 9-12
Creating content that is optimised fro search engines will help you drive traffic to your website organically. Let’s take a look at some key SEO content production tips.
SEO Tip #9: Create a Blog and write Consistently
While creating a blog shouldn’t be done solely for SEO, blogging offers several SEO benefits, on top of providing interesting and relevant content to your audience. It will help you build legitimacy for your business and showcase your expertise to your audience. All whilst you can improve your internal links across your website and being picked up by search engines.
Top Tip: Google loves fresh content! Writing unique content in alignment with your brand has a better chance to be picked up!
SEO Tip #10: Aim for longer content – when it makes sense!
Whilst statistics show that long-form content ranks better (much better!), your blog doesn’t need to include long articles only. First and foremost, your content needs to be valuable for your consumer. Mix up in-depth educational articles with short and snappy insights.
SEO Tip #11: Have a clear Keyword Strategy
By now you should be clear on what your keywords are, so let us tell you how to use them! Ideally, you want your keywords included in:
The beginning of your page’s title
The first 100 words of your content
Your Heading tags
Your Image Alt tags
Your URL
The Meta description
While including your primary keyword in these places might be ideal, it doesn’t always make sense to, and it really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.
SEO Tip #12: Mix it Up with LSI Keywords
This is a pro tip: LSI keywords are words related to your main keywords. Google is able to pick up related search terms based on the search behaviour of your audience. Including related words across your website, content will unlock a wider audience for your business!
