5 Best Small Business SEO Tips For Entrepreneurs

For small businesses, SEO is a vital component of their success. They need customers to find them online and make use of their services and products. Your business may be doing well in retail, but an unproductive online presence will keep potential customers away from you.

SEO is not as expensive as ads or pay-per-click campaigns. So entrepreneurs can see improved brand awareness, brand visibility, traffic, and most important of all, sales. In short, well-done SEO promises a high return on investment.

These are 5 of the best SEO tips which you, as a small business owner, must look into:

1. Optimize On-Page SEO

Keywords should be well-researched. It's not always a great idea to use the most highly searched keywords for a small business because large businesses with a high domain authority will be looking to use them and capitalizing on them. Small businesses should use niche and targeted keywords.

The audience size might be small for starters, but it would be a very specific audience interested in your services and products. A more focused audience has a higher chance of converting into sales. Keywords should also be oriented towards finding gaps in the market. Apart from optimizing keywords, URLs and content should also be optimized.

Content should be made for people first and foremost, and keywords should be customer-oriented. Don't abuse keywords just to rank higher. There are some shady practices, such as keyword stuffing which can harm your growth. Content should include video as well. Video content drives more traffic when videos are engaging and liked by viewers. Google features video snippets in response to searches. Performing SEO for videos on YouTube and social media is also essential.

2. Focus On Local SEO

An excellent way for small businesses to improve their visibility is to get a Google My Business listing. It'll be a free account and will allow your business to appear on local searches specific to your business. Claim your business's physical address on Google Maps and include relevant details such as contact information and photos.

Encourage online reviews by your customers. Reviews not only help with conversions but also generate local visibility.

Many people search for what they want on social media. For example, they'll look up to social media reviews of restaurants to decide the next place they want to eat. Therefore, social media marketing and SEO plays a massive part in the local SEO plan.

3. Earn Backlinks

For small businesses, backlinks are a crucial part of their marketing plan. You can leverage the high domain authority websites by making great content that can cause them to backlink to you. Such activity is possible by creating quality content frequently.

When credible websites see that you're posting valuable information in your content, they may link your content on their website. This will lead people to your website too.

When Google or any other search engine checks that a reliable website backlinks to your website, this increases your domain authority, value, and credibility. Therefore, backlinking not only creates more leads but also improves your ranking.

4. Measure Your Analytics To Remain Competitive

Quantifying and analyzing your performance is massively important in scaling your business. Google Analytics is a great way to start, and it will provide you overview reports to give you an idea of how your website is doing.

The overview report will help you understand your visitor’s' demographics, sources of website traffic, provide the necessary data you need to acquire more customers, and improve your SEO services and business strategies. Not only overviews, but you could also monitor real-time behavior and traffic as well.

Understanding your competitors in your market can help you get the upper hand in the market. With analytics, you could even analyze your competitors' keywords, data, strategy and evaluate their rank.

5. Make Your Website As User-Friendly As Possible

Focusing on technicalities is an effective practice that many tend to ignore. When a user reaches a sluggish website or doesn't load the information quickly, they get annoyed and will most likely search for a different website. This experience results in the loss of potential customers.

By putting yourself in the customer's shoes, you should also check your website yourself by visiting it. Also, check the website on your smartphone to check if it's optimized for mobile. The majority of Google searches happen on mobile. Thus, optimizing your website for mobile is a no-brainer. If you see that your website takes more than a few seconds to load, get your website improved as soon as possible.

The results of SEO will take time. So if you're a small business owner or you've hired an SEO agency, aim high but don't expect results to be as immediate as other paid campaigns such as those inorganic ads. Be patient and consistent in your SEO, and you'll be looking at consistent and stable traffic on your website.

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