SEO tips for small businesses

As an independent or small business arguably one of the most important things you have to nail is your SEO strategy.

SEO stands for ‘search engine optimisation’ and is the process used to optimise your platforms technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity.

Basically, if you get your SEO strategy sorted then you have a better chance of reaching the audience you want. Which means more clicks and views on your businesses site that could generate more leads and sales for you.

There are four elements that you need to think about when developing your strategy: technical SEO, your content, on-site SEO and off-site SEO. Having all four will ensure your strategy is as strong as possible.

Content

When it comes to online marketing, if you don’t have content you don’t rank in search engines. That being said, you can’t just write a block of text and expect to rank. It’s all about keywords, structure, links and tags. Those are the four things that’ll identify your work in a search engine.

1. Keywords:

Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is about. If you were to strip your web content right down, what’s left would make up your keywords.

• Structure:

The structure of your site is imperative as it impacts your ranking in a search engine. The best way to structure your website is by using a pyramid. Your homepage is on the top, with all the links to other pages, which link to further pages and so on. This helps identify what’s more important in your websites structure.

• Links:

Using internal links within your content helps identify important pages on your website. For example, if your write an article, be sure to link in another article you’ve written on a similar subject, or another internal page. This helps boost your SEO because a search engine can identify important content.

• Tags:

Tags are a way of defining and differentiating data. There are different types of tags like title tags, header tags and blog post tags, all of which strip down the most important information and help boost your website in a search engine based on tag relevance.

Technical SEO

The best way to explain is that technical SEO ensures that a search engine can read your site properly. Automatic content managers can do this for you by flagging up any issues you might need to address.

This shouldn’t be too much of an issue if you’re using a ‘build your own website’ type of service. If you’re building a site from scratch though, you’ll need to keep these six things in mind:

• Can a search engine explore your site successfully? If not, what’s stopping it?
• Is it clear which pages a search engine should index and return?
• Does your site work well across different devices?
• Does your site lag? This could loss you valuable customers.
• Are you using search engine friendly tech?
• How is your content structured on the site?

On-site SEO optimisation

When you optimise your sites SEO it’s important to consider your customers’ needs. There are lots of ways to optimise your site and content, but if you understand your consumers well, and the structure of your site is good, this should be relatively easy.

It’s all about research. Understanding the language of your target audience is crucial, that’ll help with keywords. Make your page titles snappy, and naturally incorporate keywords where you can.

Ensure you edit your URLs to make them stand out. When writing you meta descriptions make sure that the copy pulls people in to increase interaction. When you write your content focus on making it engaging, whilst naturally placing in your keywords.

All of this will help create a good user experience and elevate your site.

Off-site authority

Authority building is all about the links you use in your content. The more links you have, the better you’ll rank in a search engine for your topic. It can be tricky to get right, but when you start it’s just important to ‘connect what needs to be connected’.

If in doubt don’t bog down your content, only use links that are relevant to your website. Also, make sure you create work designed to have links added too them, that way you’re not scrabbling for connections.

In conclusion, if you manage to get a handle on these elements of SEO you’ll be able to elevate your content and your website, which in turn will boost traffic as you rank higher in a search engine.