SEO can feel like a tall task for small businesses. You know about the importance of using the right keywords and you might have a favorite SEO tool to help you make the most of your efforts. Even with this, it can be frustrating when you see you have trouble keeping up with larger, more established competitors.
While you might not be able to put as much time and money into SEO as some of your competitors, there are things you can do to move up the search rankings and attract organic traffic. You just need to deploy a variety of tactics that can position your website for success in the search rankings.
This should be at the top of your list if it has not been done already. More than half of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. What is even more important is that search engines prioritize mobile-friendly websites when users search on their mobile devices. If you want to achieve good search rankings, you can’t forget to optimize your website for mobile.
If you just set up your website with the core pages like a homepage, product pages, and about us and never bother to post anything new, you are not going to achieve good SEO results. Having a regular content schedule can give you opportunities to target more keywords and it can provide visitors with new content to check out. Along with that, it gives the search engines new content to crawl.
Google Search Console is vital for monitoring your search results. It can provide insights into which pages are performing well, the keywords that are relevant to your site and it can also help you identify technical issues that might be hurting your SEO efforts. It is a free service, so there is no reason not to use it.
Setting up your Google My Business profile can be another important step toward helping your search results. It can do a lot to improve your rankings for local search and it can also be great for providing customers with information about your business. Make sure to add all the relevant information and consider adding images to the profile. Along with Google My Business, consider setting your business profile up for Bing Places. Bing doesn’t see as much traffic as Google, but it still has over a billion unique visitors worldwide.
Targeting keywords is good, but you do not want to overdo it. If you focus too much on keywords, the content will not read well for human readers. If you have a long list of keywords you want to target, select a few that can work well together for each piece. If you have a regular content schedule, you can always go back to use others from the list in the future.
PPC marketing can be good for supplementing your SEO efforts. If you have the budget, PPC can help deliver quicker results and it can also be a way to target keywords that might not be performing as well in your SEO efforts. You can also use your PPC campaigns to test keywords to see which ones offer the best conversion rates.
The internal linking on your website is more important than you may think. The way you link to pages on your website and the anchor text you use can have an impact on your search rankings. Internal links can also help search engines understand the structure of your site better. Analyze your content and look for opportunities to use internal links. Think about your keywords and the pages you want to rank the highest for each keyword. You can then use internal links with targeted anchor text to give those pages a boost.
Using the obvious keywords for your business is good, but those keywords usually have tough competition. This is especially true if they are also being targeted by larger, more established businesses. If you want to give your business an edge, look for keywords that are a little less popular. They might not see quite as much search traffic, but they will also offer an easier path to the top spot in the rankings. In many cases, ranking first for a keyword with less traffic will be better than ranking on the second page for a more popular keyword.
The final SEO tip for small businesses is to be patient. Effective SEO takes time. If you put in the effort and stick with it, you will see results.
