SEO for Small Businesses: Things You Should Be Doing

If you are the owner of a small business, you might feel like big-time efforts to make your internet presence more noticeable are out of reach for you. Your life is already chock-full of things to do every day, the last thing you can afford is to take more time out of your day to learn the basics of SEO.

One thing's for sure: small business SEO can be complicated. But with a little bit of hard work, you can put this incredible advertising tool to work to place your business in front of the customers who need it.

If you're not sure what you should be doing in terms of SEO for your small business, we're here to help walk you through it. Read on to learn more.

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. This is just a fancy term for increasing the amount of traffic to your website through high-ranking search engine results. When you optimize your website and blog for search engines, you increase your chance of ranking high, and when you rank high on a search engine people are more likely to visit your blog.

How Does It Work?

For the purpose of this article, we're going to consider Google as the main focus of your efforts for SEO. It's the most popular search engine in the world, and if you're not optimizing for Google, you're not optimizing at all.

Google sends out crawler bots to look at and scan every page out there on the internet. Those bots follow links and gather up info on different websites and send it to Google. Google does this so they can make sure that their search engine offers people the most up-to-date, accurate, safe information possible.

Basically, when a Google user searches for "how to deep clean a car," Google sifts through billions of bits of information and immediately decides what websites are the most relevant, then they push those websites to the top.

How to Practice Small Business SEO

As we mentioned before, small business SEO can be a little bit complicated. However, with a little bit of practice and a knowledge of the basics, you can work to put your website on the map.

Keywords

One of the ways that Google determines the relevance of a website is through the use of specific keywords. These are the words or phrases that users are more likely to type into the search bar.
In order to make use of Google's need for these keywords, you need to incorporate the keywords that people use to search for your kind of business into your website.

When you do this, you increase your chances of Google pushing your website up towards the top of the search results.

So, how do you use keywords in your website?

First, you want to find the ones that people who are looking for your product are going to search for. You can do this with a variety of different keyword research tools, paid or free. Do a little research, make sure you pick one that gets a fair amount of traffic with the least amount of competition possible.

Once you have your keyword list, just use those keywords everywhere you can on your website. Just don't go overboard. Too much density in your keywords is going to look like spam and Google will pass you right by.

Title Tags

The title tag is the HTML title element that works to show what your webpage is about and what sort of content your website has.

Make sure that the title tags are relevant to your website, contains the correct keywords, and, most importantly, make sure that they follow a consistent format all through your website.

Keep it short and, if possible, include your brand name!

Engaging Content

The next thing you want to do is think about how to add engaging content to your website. The easiest way to do this is through a blog, and it's the best way to increase your small business SEO.
Think about what it is you sell and come up with a list of topics related to that. People use Google to help them solve problems, so troubleshooting and advice posts are great ideas.

Whatever you do, just make sure that your content is high-quality and readable. Those Google crawlers we talked about earlier look at your content the same way a human would, and if it is low quality or full of typos, it's going to flag your website.

Make sure you don't overstuff your keywords and proofread everything before you publish it.

Heading Tags

When you write your content, make sure you separate things with heading tags. These are certain coding tags that let the Google crawlers what the most important parts of your content are.
This makes it easier for them to identify what each of your pages is about, but it also makes life easier for your readers!

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are the little bit of text underneath your webpage in a Google search. If you use it right, it gives your audience an idea of what your website is about and whether or not they can trust you to give them the content they're looking for.

Make sure that you give Google a good description of your blog so that it doesn't show random text from your content that confuses your readers.

Small Business SEO Is Important

This is a lot of information to work with all at once, and it can feel pretty overwhelming. But small business SEO can be the key to unlocking a higher audience and becoming a voice of authority in your niche. Just make sure that you take this advice and you use it to create a strategy that works for your company.

A good starting point is to look at your competitors who are where you want to be in terms of audience and sales. See what they're doing in terms of SEO and work to get there as well.

If you're interested in learning more about SEO for small businesses, or you would like a little help to get your blog where you need it to be, contact us today!

Previously posted: August 10 2018 https://wp.me/pa5mCe-9v