When you create a small business website, one thing that you must take care of is to see that the website is noticed by the prospective customers.
There are so many ways a good online visibility can help your business. This is why, Small business website SEO needs your attention.
Here are the basic tips that can help you self-optimize your website.
SEO optimizing your Small Business Website
While you spend your time, money and efforts in creating a website for your business, you also need to invest the same for the SEO of your business website.
After all, what’s the point of creating a website, if it doesn’t reach the targeted audience.
However, SEO has to be kept in mind right from the conception of your website. Right from the beginning, you need to make choices that can help the user experience and visibility of your website.
For example: Choosing a platform that is SEO friendly, Creating a design that is fast and clean, etc.
Even though there are some advanced methods to optimize your website used by SEO experts, the basic SEO depends on small things.
In this post, we will look into some of these “small” yet useful tips that can help the visibility of your website.
1. Choosing the right platform
It all starts with choosing the right platform and tools to build your website with. For example: You can choose a platform like WordPress to create your website.
Moreover, if you decide to build your website on WordPress, you must go for an SEO friendly WordPress theme like the Consulting theme for your small business website.
2. Making sure the code/scripts are SEO friendly
If you are relying on ready made code and scripts for your website, you must first ensure that they are SEO friendly.
They should not unnecessarily slow down your website or make your web pages hard to process.
3. Mobile Friendliness
The modern trend needs your website to be mobile friendly, so that any visitor, from anywhere in the world, using any device of his choice, can see the same, flawless version of your website.
Your business website should be elegantly responsive and mobile friendly. You cannot afford to lose the customers because your website is not cross browser or mobile device compatible.
4. Interlinking, broken links
If you link your pages well, the visitors will have somewhere to go. Your pages should be logically connected through links on your website.
This will not only increase the session duration but also helps with SEO. Both the nofollow as well as dofollow links have their own advantage. But always remember to add only add meaningful links to your website, that fits naturally into your content.
And when you add links to your content, you must also keep a check on broken links. A tool like broken link checker can help.
5. Speed and image optimization
It is a no debate that a slow speed impacts the user experience, which ultimately results in poor rankings. Especially when it is a business website – you need to make sure the page load times are the minimum.
For slower websites, you can use the tools like Google Page speed Insights to find out the factors that slow down your website and correct them.
One of the the most common reasons for slow web pages is unoptimized images. So you can use one of these image optimizer to optimize the images on your website.
6. Regular Blogging
There are multiple advantages of maintaining blogs on your website. It also helps SEO for small business.
Blogs make your website more interesting. And addition of fresh, relevant content on your website has several other advantages too.
Even though blogs on business website are not compulsory, there are so many reasons why you should consider maintaining a blog on your small business website.
7. Start by investing in paid searches
One of the most important things you should know about SEO is that it won’t bring instant results. There are very rare instances where your website begins ranking instantly.
Generally, it is difficult for a new website to start ranking in the organic search. SEO needs efforts and patience. Meanwhile, you can use a service like Google Adwords to bring traffic to your website.
8. On Page SEO
What you show on your webpage, and how you build it – is totally in your own control. There are different parts of your web pages that you can refine for better visibility and ranks:
Keyword optimization
The key is, to create meaningful content based on the title of the page. You will need to learn basic keyword research to find suitable target keyword and LSI keywords for your website.
Once you find the right keywords, you can optimize the copy of your page around the keyword. While doing so, you should also keep in mind that you don’t stuff keywords, disrupting the natural order of your content.
Image Optimization
If you are using images on your website, you can use a tool like gtmetrix, Google Page speed insights to find out the correct dimension of the image to be used.
You can then manually optimize or use image optimization plugins to do so.
Title
Create a habit of writing titles that are more effective. Example: Instead of a plain title “How to secure your website from DDos attacks?”, the title “5 quick and easy ways to secure your website from DDos attact.:
You should also make sure that the title includes keywords, or atleast an LSI keyword. Also, keep it short yet expressive and persuasive.
Readability
How easy to process your content is, also matters a lot. The readability of your website dictates the user experience. If you create content that is unorganized, hard to process & understand, than your page may have difficulty ranking due to higher bounce rates and exit rates.
A plugin like Yoast SEO can help with the readability of your website.
SEO friendly URLs
Even the URL structure of your website matters. Today, mostly all the platforms you choose allows you to change the permalinks of your pages and post.
Therefore, create meaningful urls instead of urls with post numbers, or date, etc.
Other tips:
Grammar and plagiarism check: Make sure your copy is grammatically correct, check the spellings and make sure than anything you publish is original and useful.
Avoid keyword stuffing: Using the right keywords in your content is good, but don’t overdo it by including the keywords where they don’t naturally fit in.
Content structure: A lot depends on how you present your content. Use proper heading tags, include relevant images, make use of bullet points, paragraphs, and blockquotes, etc. whenever necessary.
9. Backlinks are important
Backlinks are looked upon as recommendations from other websites. When reputable websites recommend one of your web pages, naturally – your page’s value increases.
Therefore, quality backlinks to your website, can help boost your small business SEO efforts.
10. Social media can help, so let it help
Good traffic helps SEO, and SEO helps you get even more traffic.
At the initial stage of your business, social media can help a lot to spread a word regarding your website. The Social media lets you reach large group of people, easily. It can help you promote both: your business as well as your business website.
11. Regular Analysis
Just making your website live is not enough. Once you have made all the different efforts required for a successful small business website, you must keep a track on the reports and analytics.
This is one of the best tools to know about traffic, page performance and other statistics about your website. Google Analytics is free and simple. There are many plugins for WordPress that can help integrate Google Analytics and its report right into your WordPress dashboard. The results can help you a lot with SEO optimizations and making other such decisions about your website.
Other Analytic tools
Today, there are many advanced tools that can help you know more about your website with different reports. Such tools like ahrefs, semrush, etc. helps you find out what works and what doesn’t for your website.
12. Other promotional tips
Promoting your website in different ways can help you popularize your website and make more people aware of your business. You will have to find the promotional tactics that works best for you, because for different business, with different scopes and area of operation, different things work.
However, there are a few basic ways to promote your website, that can help you spread a word about your business:
- Invest in advertising
- Use Google AdWords
- Google Business Listing
Links from related small businesses
Just approach the other related business and ask for partnership or a sponsored advertisement spot on their website. Backlinks from the popular players in your domain can do you great good.
For example: If you own a small wedding dress makers, you might want to advertise with the wedding party organizers to reach the relevant audience.
13. Competitive Analysis
Keep an eye on your competitors, not because of any otherwise reasons – but just because you can learn a lot from them.
Competitive analysis involves studying links, keywords, content, of your competing websites. It helps you know about the latest trends, and even understand what your target audience might like to see, based on common traits of different competitors.
14. Learn the basics of keyword research
Once you get your business website online, you should know about the keywords that matter to you.
There are some things that you should just be aware of. For example: Traffic on your website, and if there’s a significant increase or decrease in it. Or the keywords, it’s volume, and the estimated traffic for that keyword.
You can sure invest in professional SEO at a later stage. But learning the basics of keyword research is must even when you have experts taking care of your small business website’s SEO.
15. Optimizing for local search
The scope of small businesses is limited and therefore optimizing your website for regional search is important too. Here, language translations may help.
We recommend services like Weglot to translate your website into your local language.
Final Words
It’s not at all fair to forget about the search engine optimizations. And the rules keep changing. So make sure you keep your website updated and optimized as per the latest norms. Regular SEO audits are must.
Due to the competition on the internet, properly optimizing your website for SEO is a must. If you don’t optimize your website, you will never gain the deserved traction.
Further reading
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