SEO Strategies for Small Business Owners
You’ve done your keyword research, set up Google Analytics, and published thoughtful content with your target audience in mind, and now you’re ready to reap the results of your hard work. Only—your website traffic isn’t pulling in what you’d hoped it would.
While you should keep in mind that a big boost in organic rankings doesn’t happen overnight, there are a few proven SEO strategies that you can employ to draw more visitors to your site.
Optimize Local SEO
Your best bet as a small business owner is to optimize your SEO for your local area. Your town—and potentially the few towns around it—will be the source of your primary customer base, so you want to make sure that your listing on Google can be easily found by searchers. The best way to do this is to have Google My Business.
Every business should have Google My Business. It allows you to show searchers in one succinct place information about your business—such as your hours, contact information, reviews, location and directions, info on your most recent sales, and more. Google My Business is an important resource for those in your area who are searching for the products and services you provide—and, if optimized correctly, a terrific way to lead those searchers straight to your site.
Spend some time working with and crafting your Google My Business listing so that it has the potential to fully reach your target audience. If you’d like some assistance doing so, contact our team today and we’d be happy to help!
Focus on Getting Reviews
Getting reviews is a stand-by for small businesses for a reason: reviews are a classic way to increase your website traffic and your credibility, and—ultimately—your SEO rankings. Encourage customers to leave a review on your site or on Facebook and make the pages that they can leave a review stand out on your site. Incentivize the act of leaving a review even more by hosting periodic giveaways or shoutouts for those who submit reviews. However, keep in mind that providing a stellar product or service is often enough for customers to leave you great feedback!
Bonus: if you’re looking for an even bigger boost, you can request links from business partners to include within the content on your site. By linking to another relevant business or service in your area, your audience will have additional resources at their fingertips (which is a great thing, as these resources are provided by you). If your business partners link to your content or pages on their site, their audience will be able to find and access your site, which is a great, organic way to boost your traffic.
Optimize Your Page Titles and Metadata
Your titles, subtitles, and metadata can work for you or against you in terms of drawing more traffic to your site. Are your headings descriptive, eye-catching, interesting, and informative? Are they long enough to convey what they need to, but not so long that they run more than one line? Do you have one main title and a few smaller subtitles on each page?
As for your metadata, make sure that each description includes the main keyword of each page and is comprised of a complete sentence or two. Make the meta-title or SEO title the same as the title of the page and include your targeted keywords in the meta-keyword section. These seemingly small practices are actually major ways to ensure that searchers on Google can easily find and access your content.
Target Long-Tail Keywords
If your keyword research strategy focused on targeting short-tail keywords instead of long-tail ones, you’ll want to switch up that practice now. Research has shown that targeting long-tail keywords is better for small businesses, as the competition is lower, and the conversion rates are higher. Long-tail keywords are phrases that contain more than three words and are highly targeted toward your ideal audience.
Think about it: if you’re a furniture store in Avon, IN (just outside of Indianapolis), you’ll be more likely to draw in the right traffic if you target keywords like “furniture store Avon IN” you use keywords such as “furniture store Indianapolis” or “furniture Indianapolis.”
Make Sure All Pages Are Optimized
The small details matter when maximizing your SEO rankings and increasing your website traffic, so make sure that no page on your site goes neglected. Check pages regularly to see that all links are working, the layouts are user-friendly, the images are still loading and that their ALT tags are correct, and that the content is error-free. If there are any pages that are specifically drawing in lower traffic, see what you can do to tweak the content to make it more inviting or interesting to viewers (this can be done by adding in more photos or a video, editing the titles and subtitles for clarity or excitement, or even adjusting the topic of the content to something more relevant).
And while you’re at it, make sure that you don’t miss this step: optimizing your pages for mobile. With more and more people using their mobile phones to access websites, it’s in your best interest to make sure that your site can be easily searched for and navigated by mobile users. Check and make sure that the load time is low and that each page’s layout is responsive.
By employing these best practices, your site traffic (and not to mention your SEO rankings!) is bound to increase. If you’d like to take a deeper dive into the intricacies of SEO, reach out to one of our expert SEO strategists today!
About the Writer:
Kayla Maneen is an SEO strategist and a continual purveyor of the written word. When she isn’t building custom landing pages or researching and writing about new digital marketing techniques, she is busy posting to her personal blog, exploring the wilderness, or trying to brew the perfect cup of Irish tea.