SEO is an essential part of online traffic for most small businesses. In fact, in 2022, 97% of users searched online for a local business. So if your business isn’t SEO optimised, it is very likely that you are losing out on new customers.
Thankfully it is fairly easy to improve your online SEO; you just need to make a few simple changes to your website.
Here are six SEO tips for small businesses.
1. SEO Tips For Small Businesses: Identify Your Target Keywords
One of the first things you should do is identify the target keywords for your website. These are both words and phrases that people search to find your website. Some keywords might be obvious; for instance, if you have a jewellery shop in Sheffield, some keywords might be ‘homemade jewellery Sheffield’, ‘jewellery in Sheffield’ and ‘bracelet Sheffield’.
You can also use a free online keyword tool to generate more keywords you might not have considered. Ideally we suggest creating a list of at least 50 useable keywords, and then inserting them into every page on your website.
2. Run An SEO Site Audit
It could also be beneficial to run an SEO site audit to look for issues or errors. This is a simple and effective way to improve the SEO on your website, but lots of small business owners don’t do it because they don’t know how to. However you can simply hire a virtual assistant to do this for you, and then you can use the audit report to improve your website. This won’t take long at all, and it can significantly improve your site SEO!
If you want to improve the SEO on your website but you’re not sure where to start, don’t worry. We’d love to help! We have a team of trained SEO professionals who can help you improve your SEO, and you don’t need to do a thing. Get in touch to find out how we can help – and then relax and put your feet up as you SEO ranking goes up!
3. Look At Your Page Load Time
One of the main factors that can affect your website is page load time. If a page takes more than a few seconds to load, it will negatively affect the user experience – so users are more likely to leave your website to go to a competitor’s. There are lots of free tools that allow you to check your page load time, so take a look to find out more about your load time. If the result is positive you don’t need to do anything, but if it is negative it could be beneficial to ask your web designer to make some improvements.
4. Encourage Reviews
Online reviews can significantly improve your search ranking (and therefore your SEO). You can increase reviews by setting up an automatic email to customers after they have made a purchase encouraging them to leave a review. It can also be useful to leave a review box on your homepage for returning customers.
5. Try To Get More External Links
External links (other websites linking to your website) will also help to boost your SEO. You can boost external links by creating interesting, valuable content that other websites and users want to link to. This could be a backlink in a blog post someone else writes, or it could be a user sharing some of your content on their own social media pages.
If you want to boost external links to your site, we suggest creating informative blog posts, newsworthy blog posts and how-to content that is actually useful to your target audience.
6. Make Video Content
Finally you can improve your website SEO by creating video content. Video content is currently the fastest growing online content, so it tends to get a lot of views and engagement. The idea of creating original video content can be nerve-wracking, but in reality it is very simple; you just need a good idea and a smartphone!
If you’re stuck for ideas, we suggest;
- A short video that explains what your business does.
- A video of your latest product releases.
- A how-to video that is useful and informative.
- Life hacks that relate to your business.
- Introductions to members of your business.
