What is small business SEO?
Small business SEO refers to optimizing your website so customers can find it whenever they search on Google (and Bing). A well-optimized website will rank higher in search results so customers are more likely to find you as opposed to a competitor.
If you want to grow your small business, you cannot afford to ignore SEO. Investing in your website’s optimization will provide several important benefits.
Set up your site for SEO success
The first and most important step is to focus on getting the basics of SEO right. That means creating a logical website structure and having all your technical ducks in a row so Google can easily find and understand your site.
1. Install Google Analytics
In order to optimize your website’s SEO you need to know that your efforts are working. Therefore, you need to install Google Analytics on your site. It will give you a wealth of data showing how much traffic you get, from what sources, and how people behave on your website.
You will need these to find out what’s working, what isn’t, and how you can improve. Google Analytics is completely free to set up and highly intuitive to use. Considering all the information it offers, it is a must-have resource for all small businesses.
2. Fix technical seo
Technical SEO refers to the ability of search engines to crawl your website. Anything that either improves or impedes their ability to crawl, index, and rank your website. A common problem that hurts a website’s rankings are various technical SEO issues that need to be fixed.
3. Find and fix any broken pages and links
The absolute biggest technical issue on your website is a broken page. A broken page can’t be read either by users or Google, making it a terrible experience for everyone. If you want to delete a page, make sure it redirects to a working page on your site. If it was broken by accident make sure it gets fixed as soon as possible.
The same thing applies to any link you have on a page. If it’s broken, that’s a bad experience for people and search engines. It might not be as bad, but you still need to change or fix the link quickly.
4. keyword research
Each page on your site should target a main keyword. A keyword is a search term that people use when they search for something on Google. It can be something short like “running shoes” or something more complicated like “how to optimize my small business website for SEO”.
To find good keywords, there are a few methods you can use:
- Focus on the names of the key products and services your business sells
- Use one of the many keyword finder tools
- Analyze your competitors’ keywords.
5. Find and fix any broken pages and links
Link building and promotion is the last big step in SEO. It helps to drive more traffic to your website, and also signal to Google that you are an authoritative source in your niche. Here are the steps you need to take to optimize your link building:
6. get links from relavent website
Backlinks are one of the biggest rank factors that search engines use. If your website is linked to from several other websites, it’s a sign that people trust your business and the information on your site. However, Google has worked hard to avoid treating all backlinks the same.
If you want to rank well, you need to have links from a large quantity and quality of relevant links. If you sell running shoes, having a link from a cupcake recipe blog isn’t going to matter.
