Best SEO tips for a small business website has been a marketing topic that really opened up some very interesting doors of conversation for me this year.
Small business owners have heard about search engine optimization (SEO), but many of them simply do not understand what they can do to actually impact the rankings of their websites. As a result, many small business owners disregard the important component completely from their online marketing strategies.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO is simply the process of implementing strategies and techniques to improve the opportunity for your website to appear within the page 1 listings of a search engine results page.
Why is SEO so important?
When users enter a search term in Google, an optimized website has a stronger opportunity to appear on the results page for potential customers to see and click to access your information or solutions to their problems. The better the web pages of your website are optimized, the higher it will rank and appear on the search engine results page. This means more people looking for information and solutions that you provide will more easily find your website. This leads to more website traffic; and hopefully if you have also clearly optimized the conversion of your website’s layout and call-to-actions, you should experience even more qualified sales leads and eventually sales.
Please feel free to review my recent “7 SEO Techniques to Help Customers Find Your Website” article that help explain the various details of the search engine optimization (SEO) process.
Best SEO Tips for a Small Business Website
Looking to 2015, small business owners should keep these key SEO tips and reminders on radar:
- SEO needs to be integrated in all of your digital marketing efforts.
- Your online user experience is important, so do your best to create the best online experience possible for your customers! (i.e. easy website navigation, responsively designed & mobile friendly, remove any 404 Error pages, implement necessary 301 Redirects, etc.)
- Your current customer and vendor relationships can help you earn authoritative inbound links from their relevant websites. Small business owners should regularly assess the low-hanging fruit of your relationships to determine which of your customers and vendors may authentically be able and interested to link to your website, providing a resource to their website users.
- Your local-market business has added SEO potential when you integrate a hyper-local SEO approach with local-market aggregators, such as: Yelp, CitySearch, etc.
a. Confirm name, address & telephone (NAP) accuracy and consistency in all online listings (i.e. Yelp, CitySearch, etc.)
b. Set up your ow Google My Business account.
c. Establish and grow your social media community. Reminder to confirm NAP is accurate & consistent within these channels as well.
d. Encourage your customers to provide reviews within their local-market aggregators of choice (i.e. Yelp, etc) and social media
By taking simple steps, you can quickly outpace most of your local-market competitors. Please let me know if there are any questions that you may have regarding the improvement of your SEO.
image source: “SEO blocks” via Flickr-Paloma Gómez
It’s never to late… I applaud you for launching your blog, Rodney! Excited to read and engage with your posts, incites, discoveries and encouragements.
Thanks so much, Brad!
Excited you’ve stepped out with this new endeavor! I’ll be here, reading along, friend! 🙂
Thanks so much!