Small businesses are incredible, but the owners or founders will have a lot to learn pretty quickly. Thanks to the internet, everything you ever need to know is at your fingertips, but it can be overwhelming from time to time.
SEO is one of the fundamentals of success in your small business. Creating an SEO strategy is easier when you have an SEO agency working for you. Building a good strategy is something that you can also work towards.
Keywords
Any good SEO strategy will start with keywords. Getting keywords right is crucial, as that is how your customers will find you and how Google knows what you’re all about.
Think about what you sell and your services, and start researching the keywords for that. Ahrefs is a great place to start for keyword research.
For those who already have a website, you can look at your metrics and understand how people are finding you.
Google’s Keyword Planner can be a very valuable tool.
Blogs
You’re missing out on a huge opportunity if you aren’t creating content about your products and services. Regularly posting advice, information, industry news, and more will mean you are positioning yourself as an expert in the field – not only that, but keywords will naturally fall into the content.
Keyword-focused URLs, META descriptions, and correctly labelling your image are great starting points.
Once you have some content, you can look at things like guest posting, outreach and linking.
Optimisation
Does your website load slowly? If it does, you might find that you lose customers by the boatload. Most often, people will wait for a second or two before leaving, and when they do, they won’t be back. Check Page Speed and work through the tips to help you speed up your website.
Images are one of the biggest culprits for having a slow-loading website.
While optimising, you should look at where your keywords might be missing. URLs, titles, META descriptions, image names, ALT tags and your headers on each post.
This can be a time-consuming process, but it will bring results in the long term.
Local
Never underestimate the powers of Local SEO. Local SEO focuses on a specific location and can increase your visibility. Not to mention that generally, on a local level, you will be competing with fewer businesses. Local SEO is great for leads, in-store traffic, local business and sales. And should be part of your SEO strategy.
Links
Backlinks are links that are from websites that aren’t yours. They can help to boost your page authority and keyword rank. Have backlinks from websites that have similar content, cover similar topics and generally take care in what they offer their readers.
Mobile
More people than ever are accessing websites via their mobile phones – and if your website isn’t mobile optimised, then those people are going to go elsewhere. If you use a theme, they will most likely be mobile-optimised and ready to use – although you might need to make a few adjustments.
Social media can play a huge part in your efforts to get more traffic and sales: 9 Things That Social Media Can Do For Your Business – Marketme.