Quick SEO Guide For Small Business Owners

As a small business owner, you’ve likely already got a professional website up. If not, it’s time to get one. Having a website can exponentially grow your reach among your customers, both locally and abroad.

Once you have a website up, however, it’s time to get your SEO engine revved up. Getting your webpages to rank highly on the major search engines should be one of your top priorities to help make it a lot easier for potential customers to find you. But SEO doesn’t have to be a complex process despite what many believe. As long as you keep a focus on a few specific things, you can achieve your SEO goals for your small business. Here is a quick SEO guide for small business.

Keyword Selection

Your starting point should essentially be with keyword selection. After all, the terms that people are using to search for services or products that you have to offer will be directly tied to how they are able to find your website. It’s critical to select keywords that are specifically relevant to your business, and are words that people are actually searching for on Google. Just make sure that they aren’t too competitive, or you will have a tough time ranking. Limit yourself to 5-10 keywords to start and build from there. If most of the keywords you are trying to rank for are highly competitive – try using long-tail keywords, they are much easier to rank for and can still generate a high ROI.

Create Good Content

Every keyword that you choose needs to be within the content of your webpage. It’s important that the content you create meets the intent and requirement of those who are looking for that specific keyword. Ideally, it should be better and offering something new to the reader compared to what’s already showing up on Page 1. Duplicating content will not help your cause.

Optimize Your Site

Once the content is created, your website needs to be optimized. Add your chosen keywords to each page’s URL, page title tag, and meta description. While there are many more things that go into on-site optimization, these are the most important ones to focus on to start. Always remember, that for each page you are trying to optimize – you should always choose a focus keyword.

Build Backlinks

Good content and on-site optimization can result in a high rankings for your website, however, it may not be as good as you want it to be. The number of backlinks and most importantly the quality of those backlinks matter when it comes to page ranking and off-site optimization. Generally speaking, ranking on the first page of Google for a keyword means that your site needs to have a lot of relevant, good quality backlinks compared to the websites that are currently ranking on the first page. Start by trying to replicate these backlinks, do some digging and see who’s linking to them and inquire if these website are willing to link to your website as well.

Keep these tips in mind and help grow your small business website traffic and ultimately grow your business!