Basic SEO Tips For Small Business
SEO is one of the most misunderstood marketing topics by small business owners. It can be very difficult for small business owners to understand what will get them the results they require to get results online. Mik Dunne from digital marketing company ROI Digital Marketing provides some basic SEO tips for small business owners.
Keyword Research and Audiences
One of the most importnant elements of SEO is keyword research and understanding how your target audiences search online for your products and services. Its important to choose the right keywords that your target customers are searching for in order to drive relevant traffic to your side that will generate leads and enquiries. If you choose to optimise your site for the wrong keywords then it doesn't matter how much traffic you get to your from SEO, it just won't convert. To do keyword research you can use a free tool from Google called the Google Keyword Planner, which allows you to find out how many searches a month there are for specific keywords.
Ranking In Local Search
The local search market can be very competitive and it can take time for a site to rank highly in local search. One way to achieve rankings in local search quickly is to set up what is known as a Google My Business profile. This is a free service offered by Google that enables business owners to create local business listings that can appear on Google.
These profiles will appear for local search keywords such as "plumbers London". Once you create your Google My Business profile you will be able to write a full description of what your business does, assign it to the right categories as well as add a link to your site. This will help your site rank for local keyword quite quickly depending on what sector you are in.
Onsite Optimisation Tips
Its important from an SEO perspective that you site is well optimised. This include optimising:
- Page Titles
- Meta Descriptions
- H1s
- Onsite Content
All of these elements play an important role in helping your site to rank higher. As a small business owner or someone who works in marketing, you should understand the basics of how these can be optimised. I suggest that you read the Moz SEO Beginners Guide as this goes into detail on each of the elements that need to optimised in great detail https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo.
Authority Linkbuilding & Promotion
As a small business owner you will want to market your brand online, as you do with all other channels including advertising.
For example if you want rank for a keyword such as "mini digger hire", you will want to secure links from relevant authority construction and building websites and blogs. This will help to boost the authority of your site in the plant hire sector as links from these sites are highly relevant. By securing links from authority relevant domains you are in turn increasing the authority of your site.
Over time as the authority of your site increases, so will the rankings on search engines such as Google and Bing.
Combining these elements over time will help to increase the authority of your brand online which will inturn help to increase rankings over time.