As a small business, SEO (search engine optimisation) is important if you want to generate traffic and rank well in search engine results pages. But getting started might seem like a daunting prospect. You spend the majority of your time running your company, and SEO is a huge task. Thankfully, we’ve listed some quick ways you quickly improve small business SEO.
Claim Search Listings
The first thing you should do is confirm your listing on Google My Business. It’s a free way to list important information about your business on a platform where people will see it. Make sure to fill out every bit of information, from your address and phone number to photos and website link.
It also gives customers the ability to review your business. You’ll receive an alert each time you get a new review. Good reviews can also encourage any potential customers to pick you over other local businesses.
Another great addition that comes with Google My Business is the question and answer section. This allows you to fill out any common questions you receive, and shows potential customers that you’re knowledgeable about your products and services.
Don’t forget to set up a profile on Yelp and Yell, as these will help with local SEO too.
Mobile Friendly Website
The majority of traffic in the modern age comes from mobile. So as a small business, you need to make sure your site is optimised for all handheld devices.
You may be thinking that that’s either going to cost a lot of money, or take a lot of time. But thankfully there are plenty of cost-effective ‘Responsive Web Design’ templates for WordPress and Shopify. ‘Responsive Web Design’ means these pages will automatically adapt to fit the screen-size of the device they’re been viewed on.
Better website design means a better user experience. Better user experience will mean people will stick around on your website for a longer period of time and find the information they’re looking for.
Keyword Research
The best way you can improve traffic to your pages is to see what people are searching for based around your business. Once you’ve found these search terms, you need to include them on the right pages of your website.
Keyword research can take longer than other sections on this page. Thankfully there are some tools out there to help you find the right ones for you. We use SE Ranking to discover the best keywords for our clients. There are other alternatives, like Moz or Rank Tracker, depending on your budget and needs.
Blog Posts
Writing one or two blog posts a week is a great way to build an audience on your website. You’ll be building a stream of content that is helping you to rank in Google searches. Sticking to one or two a week means it shouldn’t take up too much of your spare time.
These blogs are the best way to get some of your researched keywords around on your website. Write about what your audience is interested in, and link them back to your products or services.
Make sure you don’t force keywords in where they don’t make sense. This is called ‘keyword stuffing’, and is something that the algorithm can pick up on. Your pages will be down-ranked, or at worst, black-listed and not show up at all.
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Title tags are the page titles that show up in SERPs (search engine results pages). These titles should be informative, but no longer than 60 characters. Make sure it’s relevant to the content on the page.
Meta descriptions are the small bit of text below your title tag. These should build on your title tag, and give an indication of what the page is about. You should look to get a few keywords in the description to help boost your SEO.
Potential customers will choose to click on your webpage based on its title and description. It will help them to decide whether or not the information they’re looking for is available on your website. We’ve written a great guide on how to use them correctly here.
Conclusion
We hope you’ve found these quick tips for improving small business SEO very helpful! If you’re looking for more information on SEO for small businesses, have a read of our other articles, like DIY SEO: Optimisation on a Budget and How to Improve Your Local SEO Ranking.
As a marketing agency, our team of experts at Be My Social can help you with all forms of SEO. Get in contact with us today.
