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“I know my business and I have a website, but I don’t understand SEO.”
Does that sound like you? For many small businesses it’s a big job just to keep up sales, maintain customer satisfaction, and grow year-by-year without having to consider the regular optimization of a website. Particularly for businesses that do not sell online, the small business SEO (search engine optimization) strategy that it pursues is often limited to creating a Facebook page, posting, and hoping that it somehow works. The bad news is that it won’t work. But the good news is that it need not take a long time or a lot of effort to keep your small business website optimized and attract potential customers to your site. Small businesses usually lack something that bigger businesses don’t: a large budget. When money is tight and spending on SEO means cutting back on some other essential area of business, it can be tough to make that call. In fact, a recent survey found that most small business have a ceiling of $500 on their SEO spending and for that amount of money, they are expecting some huge results. Considering that SEO has become almost synonymous with content marketing for most agencies, even that amount of money may not allow a small business website to move up the search rankings with the speed that business is seeking. Luckily, there are SEO tactics that one can employ that won’t cost a cent. Most do not take much time. Others take a little more of an investment in time and effort, but need not involve the spending of hundreds of dollars on improving a search ranking. Here are some tips for your search engine optimization. Be original Anything you put on your website should be your own. Search engines hate duplicate content and will penalize sites that reuse content from other places online. By all means, allow yourself to be inspired by a competitor, or attempt to emulate the success of a bigger business, but ensure that everything you place on your website is created just for you. This also goes for the text that you write for your site. Avoid copying the text on your ‘About Us’ page onto your ‘Contact Us’ page: duplicate content hurts your ranking no matter where it is on your site. Use descriptive titles and headlines Getting the title or headline right for every page on your site is essential. You should consider what your customer is likely to be looking for and what they would expect to find elsewhere. Hence, ‘Contact’ is a better page title candidate than ‘Drop Us A Line’ or ‘Let’s Talk’. Compose effective meta-descriptions Every page of your website should have an associated meta-description. These short, 160-character summaries of the page are presented to people who search for keywords beneath the link that they will click. How do you convince them to click your link? Ensure that you have used the targeted keyword in your meta-description and that it clearly summarizes the content on the page. If your headline or page title is relevant, and your meta-description is effective, there is a far greater chance that a visitor will click though to your site. Use your keywords in the right place Search engines crawl all your content but weight certain areas of your pages more heavily than others when determining relevance to a certain keyword. You should concentrate your efforts on using the targeted keyword in the URL of your page, the title of the page, the meta-description (as described above), in the headings and sub-headings on a page, and in the alt-tags on images. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use the keyword term elsewhere, just that you should always use it in those places. Add your address Most small businesses work locally, and most customers are looking for their locality in search engines using a search that is simply [keyword] [city] or [keyword] [zipcode]. It’s obvious, then, that making sure you identify your location is part of your SEO strategy. Make sure that your address and contact information — including phone number — are prominent on key pages on your site (home, about, contact) but also consider including them in the footer of all of your pages. Add social sharing buttons Improving your on-site SEO can be a lot of work for one person. But what if you could harness the power of others to spread the word about your site and its great content? By encouraging visitors to share your content and making it easy for them to do so, you’ll have a great chance of being found by those who might not otherwise click on your search result entry. With research suggesting that many consumers value the advice and recommendations of friends and family, even over the first rank entry on a Google results page, adding social sharing buttons to your site and encouraging people to click is a great way of improving your online visibility without spending a cent. Create and upload videos Creating videos will cost you time — most of it spent editing rather than filming — but the payoff is worth it. The advantage of video as content is two-fold: first, they keep people on your site longer as they’ll watch a compelling video though to the end; second, by uploading that video to places such as YouTube or Vimeo, you can drive potential customers to your site. You shouldn’t be thinking Hollywood-style productions and the videos should be related to your business. Film how you complete a task from start-to-finish, film yourself offering a tip that will save a customer time and money, or film yourself reviewing one of your new products. Interesting videos that are relevant to your business and relevant to your customers’ needs are sure to help you improve your online positioning. Backup your site Finally, a tip that will only take a few minutes to implement but will save you days or weeks of headaches: You should always ensure that you have backed up your website — every page, every post, every picture –— the whole thing. Search engines regularly crawl your site and, if for some reason it goes down and you don’t notice, it will quickly be deleted from the search engine results that are served. All that work, all that time, and all that effort you put in to improving your SEO will be lost unless you back up regularly. It’s easy to do and most services cost only a couple dollars per month– they’ll even email you if your site goes down so you can be proactive in solving any downtime issues. As the maxim goes, better to be safe than sorry: backup regularly so all your SEO hard work is not wasted.
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 Imagine this: one day you’re on page 1 of Google. The next day you do not appear until page 14. You don’t even know what hit you but it hit you hard. This scenario happens in real life, and in most cases, business owners are left confused and wondering what happened. That’s why a Website Audit Report is a must.
What is a website audit? A website audit allows you to get a professional review and analysis of your website, including its content and inbound links. This covers Web Design and Web Structure Analysis, Page and Link Errors, Page Title and Meta Description Issues, Backlinks Analysis, URL Architecting, Duplicate Content Analysis, Comprehensive Target Keyword Analysis, and much more! I recommend this service before you start any optimization campaign for your website. When you want to invest in an online marketing campaign, particularly SEO, it is important to have a deep analysis of your website. Why Do You Need a Website Audit Report? Your website is the core of your online marketing strategy. SEO, PPC, social media optimization — all these direct traffic back to your site. A faulty website can flush all your efforts down the drain. An audit followed by an appropriate action, on the other hand, prevents that from happening. An audit is needed to find faults in your site so they can be corrected. An audit is also the first step in recovering from Google updates. With the search engine rolling out between 500 and 600 algorithm changes every year, it’s crucial to get a “checkup” for your website annually. Google Algorithm Updates In addition to being better prepared to run an SEO campaign, getting a website audit will also protect your website from Google’s algorithm changes. Google is continuously tweaking their algorithms to provide users with search engine results of ever improving quality and relevance. Online Reputation Management Almost everyone is Googling themselves these days because they know that they are also being Googled. So do you Google yourself and don’t like what you see? Well, what you see is what your prospects and customers see. You may have the patience not to act on negative comments about you or your business but your prospects and customers may not be as forgiving. Fact: 80 percent of people surveyed had changed a purchase decision due to a bad review they saw online. And with competition tighter than ever, businesses are seeing that Online Reputation Management is now a necessity. What is Online Reputation Management? Your online reputation is important. With the huge and ever-growing population searching online to evaluate businesses, bad comments and reviews about your business can gravely affect your target market’s purchasing decision. This is why it is critical to monitor your online reputation and take a plan of action to counter any negative material and proactively act to produce positive material about you, your brand, your business, and your products/services. Why Monitor Your Online Reputation According to studies, 78 percent of Internet users conduct product research online and 80 percent of potential buyers changed their purchase decision after seeing a negative review online. Your business can be at the mercy of online commentaries – or you can use these to your advantage! Online reputation management allows you to respond to negative comments the moment they appear on the Internet. Proactive ORM also allows you to optimize positive reviews about your business so that favorable reviews dominate search results, pushing down negative ones in the process. Also, 44 percent of online adults have searched for information about someone whose services or advice they seek in a professional capacity, like a doctor, lawyer, or plumber. You can use ORM to give these searchers a great “first impression” online. Get an online Reputation Management consultation now to protect your business and to NOT allow detractors to slow you down! Organic SEO (search engine optimization) is the phrase used to describe processes to obtain a natural placement on organic search engine results pages.
Increasing your rankings on the organic side of search engine results requires planning, creativity and above all patience. Three to six months is definitely not an exaggeration in the amount of time it may take for the internet to recognize you… But it is worth it. I do not know how many times I have been approached by someone who makes a change to their website and then is frustrated when they don’t jump up in the rankings the next day. Changes, especially subtle ones on infrequently crawled sites, can take many weeks to start showing up in the search engines. Myth #1: PPC (pay-per-click) ads will help/hurt rankings. This one is funny to me because about half the people who think that running Google AdWords will affect their organic rankings believe that they will bring them down; the other half believe they will bring them up. That alone should tell you that neither is true! Website Content: Original and informative content is one of the best things you can do to improve your organic search engine rankings. Believe me when I say quality is definitely better than quantity in this case. Generally your website is going to be an extension of your business or personal life, in either case you should have plenty of unique information to write about. Take the time to write informative articles and try to keep your site fresh with new articles as often as possible. It not only lets the search engines know they need to be visiting your site more often, but it also gives your readers a reason to come back. If you write a good article, chances are people are going to link to it as a resource for others. A great byproduct of a good article is back links. Back Links: In search engine optimization (SEO) terminology a backlink is a hyperlink that links from a web page, back to your own web page or website. Also called an Inbound Link (IBL) these links are important in determining the popularity (or importance) of your website. Some search engines, including Google, will consider websites with more backlinks more relevant in search results pages. Every time an outside source links to a page on your website, this is considered a back link. If you are looking to improve your organic search rankings, take a look at your current back links and the back links of others and see where you can improve. Yahoo! and Google provide tools for checking your back links; in addition many websites offer these services for free. I suggest using a third party if you are new to back link research; it will help you minimize mistakes. Back links help search engines determine what your content is about. Think of back links as votes for your content. When a site links to you, it is saying to the search engines (as well as to its readers) that your page has relevant information on it. When a text link is created, the text inside the link is first looked at for determining what your content is about. Additionally the surrounding text is considered in categorizing your page. It is important to have links from sites that are on topic for what your site and/or article is about. Organization & Navigation: Keep your site clean. If your visitors are having trouble finding pages and content, so will the search engines. Use menus and links that are concise and to the point, and keep all of your navigation where the user can quickly find it. It may not be necessary to directly link to every page from every other page and often times this can be confusing to both your visitor and the search engines. If the user can quickly narrow down what they are looking for they will be much happier and much more likely to link to your site. The search engines are the same way, if your links are specific and fewer they will be given more weight than a large number of general links Keywords: Define a keyword list. It’s unreasonable to assume that you will pull top rank in Google for every keyword relating to your industry. Your goal should be to pull top rank on the most desired keywords. This is an exercise that will take the effort of both marketing and management. Think about how people would search for your products and services, make a list of these keywords, and check the traffic for each term with a tool like Google’s Keyword Planner. Naturally you will want to rank for the keywords with the most traffic, so put them in the order you want – most relevant first. If you have 10 pages relating to the same set of keywords, Google will have a hard time determining which page is relevant. Instead, merge your content into a single cornerstone page. With one authoritative cornerstone page on a specific topic, there is no SEO confusion, and you should rank higher. Optimize your page titles: The <title> HTML tag defines a web page’s title and is meant to be a concise description of that page’s content. It is the first line of hyperlinked text Google displays in their organic search results, and it is what appears in the top frame of most web browsers for that page and in tabs. Google considers this to be the second-most important on-page SEO element AFTER OVERALL CONTENT (overall page content is still the first). When you write your page titles, keep them less than 70 characters, since any text beyond that will be cut off when listed in Google’s organic results. You should include your important keywords in the title, preferably in the beginning. It is also a good idea to include your company name as well towards the end. |
Boost Your BusinessMaria NovakI have over 35 years' experience in Marketing Small Businesses. Categories
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