You have started your business online and are all geared up for an influx of customers.
You wait a week, a month, and unfortunately a year for that to happen, but it doesn’t happen. So, you think back on the things you might have done wrong but come up with nothing.
Let me tell you one thing; it is not about the things you did wrong; it is about what you didn’t do.
To drive organic traffic to your website, you need to ensure that it ranks high in SERPs. And to make that happen, Small business seo services recommend implementing the right optimization techniques.
What Is SEO?
SEO-short for search engine optimization- is a digital marketing strategy that enhances a site’s visibility and enables it to rank higher in SERPs.
SEO marketers utilize a wide range of tactics to spread your brand’s awareness, optimize your site’s user experience, and augment your customer engagements.
In this blog, we’ll be discussing the checklist followed by small business SEO services to help you grow your business online.
Top Optimization Tips by SEO Services for Small Businesses
Conducting Thorough Research
To have your business experience limitless success, you need to get to the core of your customer’s needs.
Once you have a clear-cut idea of your target market, you can strategize and modify your service accordingly.
For say, you are an eCommerce store offering items that promote aromatic therapy.
Now, conducting research would help you scope out people who would be interested in buying those items. As a result, you can set a tone for your business that would attract the target audience, and resonate with them.
Researching about your business would also let you know what your competitors have been doing so far. With the help of that information, you can gauge if there is something extra you could provide to your customers that your competitor doesn’t.
Building a Network of Quality Links
One of the major factors through which Google determines whether a website is worthy of ranking higher or not is the site’s link juice.
Once you have researched your audience, you move towards attracting them to your website. And that is done when you publish content related to your products and services across a wide range of channels.
While publishing content on third-party sites, you have to make sure that they have higher domain authority (DA). As a result, the links generated from this website increase your chance of online visibility.
The higher the DA of the site you publish your content on, the higher the quality of your backlink profile will be.
Optimizing the Technical Structure of Your Site
Moving on to the technical aspect of SEO, one of the best things you can do for optimal visibility of your website is making sure that it offers a phenomenal user experience.
Your website could have the best visuals, content, and layout, but if it doesn’t load quickly, is not responsive on mobile phones, or has broken links, all your efforts would go down the drain.
Therefore, always keep an eye out for errors in your website, such as those related to its navigation, loading time, link architecture, and sitemap, etc., as the ranking of your site directly depends on them.
All these factors ensure that Google crawlers index your website quickly, and the faster Google crawls a website, the quicker it will rank in SERPs.
Moreover, make sure that your site is free from any 400s, 500s, and 300s errors, and that none of the pages of your site redirect to these error pages.
Otherwise, Google will blacklist your site and move it to the third or fourth page of search engine result pages which will drastically affect your reach.
Integrate Google My Business
Top Small business SEO services always focus on local business listings as they greatly impact customer engagements.
More often than not, whenever people are looking for services or products online, they search “XYZ item near me” or “XYZ item in the US.”
If you have Google My Business integrated into your site, then the local audience will receive complete information about your small business, including the contact number, website information, a brief description of what you do, and pictures of your products, etc.
The information displayed on the search engine result pages depends upon how much information you add to your business listings.
Faster Loading Speed
Keep yourself in your customer’s shoes and think that if a website took more than 3 seconds to load, would you wait for it or move on to another website?
Most users leave the website in this scenario.
This is why it is important to optimize your site to load quickly.
Some of the factors that affect the speed of a webpage are:
- Long scripts that run continuously in the background
- Large images
- Too much content than your site can handle
- Unresolved Web-Host issues.
- Redirecting HTTP issues
Utilize Schema Markups
Schema markup is the vocabulary of HTML tags that enable search engines to display snippets of information about your business. Different types of schema markups are:
- Product snippets that provide every detail about the product, from its price, availability, and product ID, to its description and images.
- Review snippets that let a user know about the quality of the product. These snippets have the author’s name on them so that a user can verify the validity of the review.
- Product availability schema that tells the user about a product’s name, price, image, and other relevant information.
- Video schema that shows age restrictions, language, and the type of content present in the video.
- Price schema that informs the user of the exact price or the price range of a product.
Produce Content That Serves the Search Intent
Having the ability to resonate with your customers will give your business a competitive edge.
Once you have conducted research on your audience and mapped out topics that they find insightful, only then will you be able to produce unique and compelling content for them.
Content production is an SEO strategy for small businesses that helps your brand spread its awareness, increase its online visibility, and reach a broader range of customers.
Most SEO marketers would resort to using duplicate content or have a tool generate content with keywords stuffed in it.
Not only is this practice unethical and impractical, but it also hinders you from learning more about your audience.
However, if there are two pages on your site sharing the same content (product pages of the same category maybe?), then add canonical tags on it as they tell Google to index only the master page and leave the rest.
This will also save you from getting flagged from Google and getting blacklisted.
Put on Customer Testimonials on Your Site
One of the things that helps a customer in trusting a brand is watching other people give it good reviews.
Let’s take an example from our daily lives.
When we want to try out a new restaurant, we go online and look for what other people have to say about it. Then gauging from their reviews, we decide whether we want to give the restaurant a shot or not.
So, it’s always good to have customer testimonials displayed on your website as it ensures customer engagements.
