20 Small Business SEO Tips for Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners
Getting your small business or startup in the public limelight would have been considered an arduous challenge a decade ago. Today’s entrepreneurs have the advantageous possibility of advertising their business on search engines—and it’s called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO is a crucial element of any digital marketing for any small business striving to succeed. Most people hop on Google whenever they’re searching for a service or product. If your website is ranking on the first pages for these targeted search terms, then your chances of improving web traffic, enhancing customer interaction and securing a conversion increases tremendously.
In today’s post, we’re going to be talking about Small Business SEO tips that collectively play a pivotal role in bringing about these conversion. As one of the leading Small Business SEO agency in the United States, we have put together 20 tips that you must incorporate in your SEO campaign.
1. Make sure your web copies are written for humans
Search engines are much smarter than you think. They can tell apart an organic sentence, link, and paragraph from forced ones. Don’t make the mistake of stuffing keywords on your website or keep talking about the same topics. It’s never worked before, and it won’t work for you any time soon.
2. Narrow down your keyword list to use for your entire website
There’s no SEO without keywords. However, you don’t guarantee any visibility for search terms if you’ve got pretty much every keyword stuffed into the mix. The aim is to develop ownership for a particular set of keywords, so if anyone looks it up, you’re the first result they get.
3. Use Keyword Rich URLs for Landing Pages
If you want to know how to make domain names that are rich in the right keywords you can simply Google the results for your choice of keywords. For example, if your business sells men’s shoes then your folder and domain pages should clearly mention these two terms something like this: http://www.yourdomainname.com/mens-shoes/mens-shoes-foldername.html.
4. Don’t Go Overboard with Keyword Density
As a rule of thumb, the total number of keywords and related phrases that you have on your page should be somewhere between 3 and 6 percent of the total written content and links on a page. This rule goes beyond your homepage. Indeed, from an SEO point of view, it makes up nearly half of your search criterion but it’s important to have the rest of your pages contribute to the rankings too. For this, you’ll need to ensure that there’s a certain theme that’s being followed across all pages because the more of them are ranked, the greater are your website’s chances of climbing up the SEO ranks.
5. Titles are Entitled To Be Different For Each Page
Switch up your keyword phrases and mix up their combinations in a way that the first few words in your title are SEO-friendly. Also, try to keep all phrases under 70 characters.
6. Insert a Unique Meta Description For Each Page
Any time you look up a phrase on a search engine you’ll notice a small piece of text accompanying every title. That’s a Meta description. It’s like a summary of your webpage but it’s also a very convincing call to action. For example:“Buy stylish shoes for men today! We offer free shipping for all locally made shoes. For more information give us a call at 123 45.”
Try to keep the Meta description under 150 characters.
7. Don’t Forget to Style Your Keywords
Keyword styles can really change the game. You need the search engines to pick up your keywords as organically as possible. For this purpose, using bold or italic fonts and header tags are crucial. If you’re not sure how to go about this one, try some Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to match the layout and format with that of your website.
8. Add ALT Tags Your Images
Whenever you’re naming your images, remember to insert your keywords and related phrases into the Alt tags as well. The contextual reference provided by Alt tags can really help pull your pages up the rankings.
9. Smart inter-linking is Intelligent interlinking
We’ve seen plenty of websites use internal links but very few of them do it right. Any time you have the opportunity to insert keywords to your webpages—do it! Again, specificity in links is important.
10. Create an XML Sitemap
When your internal linking game is weak, it helps to have an XML sitemap that leads Google through all the most important pages on your website. In fact, all search engines love an XML site map.
This brings us to the next point.
11. A Simple, Straightforward robots.txt File Is The Way to Go
These are files that can be considered a web crawler’s best friend. They tell search engines all the important details on what pages are allowed to be shown on their index. Now here’s a neat SEO trick; insert your XML sitemap location onto the robot TXT file so you don’t have to provide details to search engines on all URLs—now they can find it automatically!
12. Your Website Must Have external links
SEO-friendly websites are those that aren’t afraid to link other related websites. The impact is greater when you’re linking to businesses and groups that are local—not just in terms of the city or state but also in terms of being in the same industry. Also, don’t forget to use keywords with all your external links!
13. Update Your Website With New Content Frequently
Of every SEO tip that we’ve mentioned here so far, we have a feeling that you’re probably worried the most about new content. Where do you get all that new information?
Don’t worry, we’ll help you! We’ve produced over 20,000 SEO projects and are still going strong! We can help you churn out relevant content and add new pages to your site so you’re getting recommendations from others in your industry frequently.
14. Make Sure You Are Getting Links from the Right People
You want to get links from all the popular websites in your industry. By popular, we mean the ones that rank on top. Make it a point to check the ranks of your chosen websites and ask them to link to you so you can link back to them. To make this effort more effective, give them a list of keywords that should go into the text. Emailing your peers can seem labor intensive but trust us; links from local industries can help your SEO ranking soar high in no time.
15. Create a Linkable Page
When you want link-backs from visitors to your website, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to do the job. Create a page with your logos and keyword-laden text links and send them to your visitors, customers and subscribers.
16. Broaden your SEO horizons
Don’t just stay cooped up in the corner of the SEO rankings with some trusty keywords and phrases. Make the online community feel your presence. You can do this by writing guest blogs for popular websites and industry leaders. You can also start your own blog and integrate with your website and social media pages. Perhaps, even submit some reviews or answer questions on chat forums and online knowledge communities. However, know when to stop because overdoing it can get you listed as a spammer.
17. Get your website listed on various directories
Online directories have been with us for a long time and because of their high reputation search engines are likely to scan them for updated links. Note that some of these directories will require you to pay a small fee.However, the advantage of hiring a local SEO service firm is that you can get access to directory lists for a fraction of the cost.
18. Cement your online presence with a little creativity
It’s tempting to chain down your content behind subscription fees and other exclusive membership programs but it helps to make a lot of your content available free of cost. Think of it this way, if you’re posting about giveaways, discount codes, contest prizes, tutorials and other freebies people are more likely to link to you and pass on the information. It’s a win-win situation for your small business!
19. Syndicate Your Press Release Documents
Press releases are a great way to boost your outreach and become visible to an audience beyond your target market. Any time you’ve introduced a new service or have created a new product, it’s time to send out a local or national press release.
20. Get listed on Google My Business
Getting listed on Google My Business or Google Places is a heavyweight move in the world of SEO marketing.This should improve your visibility for local searches and your small business should show up in the form of a Google Map too!
Final Word
There is a science to SEO for Small Businesses and it takes times to perfect. Years in fact. At Search Berg, we have the roadmap to put businesses on the road to digital success. This is due to the tried and tested policies we have put in place in our SEO process over the last decade; most of which we have shared in today’s post with our viewers. We hope that you will find these tips and strategies useful.
Get started with SEO today and take the first and decisive step towards digital success with award-winning SEO agency, Search Berg. Do let us know what you think about the post with your comments.
