Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website so that it is more visible on search engines such as Google.
By improving the quality and quantity of your website pages, your website will rank higher on Google and this will direct more traffic to your website. More traffic means more customers.
Even small businesses can benefit from SEO. Many of the ways to improve your SEO ranking are free to implement once you know what you are doing and this makes SEO a must for any small business.
In this article, we will look at eight little tweaks that you can implement on the website of your small business to improve your SEO ranking.
1. Find The Best Keywords For Your Business
Whatever your business is selling, you will need to find the right keywords for your business.
These should be directly related to what you are selling and should cover all of the terms that your customers are likely to search for that will lead them to your business.
Make a list of at least 20 keywords that you feel are related to your business. You should then check these keywords on Google Ads to see how frequently these keywords are used in online searches.
When you create pages for your website, make sure that these keywords are included. Try to use a keyword or two in your URL, titles, and metadata.
2. Don’t Use Too Many Keywords
Using keywords in your web pages is integral to getting better results on Google Search. However, you shouldn’t use too many keywords.
Instead of seeing your pages as being good sources of information for users, pages with too many keywords get excluded for being spam and difficult to read.
The keywords should be sprinkled throughout the page but not in a way that makes the text difficult to read. Remember that you're writing the text for humans and then tweaking it for search engines and not the other way around!
3. Build Links
As well as keywords, one of the most important things that search engines look for is the authority of your site. You can build authority by building links.
You need to have other sites link to your website as this tells Google that your site is worth visiting. You should reach out to similar websites to see if you can exchange links so that they will link to your site and in turn, you will link to theirs.
Different links carry different authority, however. If it is only small blogs that are linking to you, this won’t carry as much authority as being linked to by a larger website.
By linking to you, the website gives you some of its authority and power.
4. Use Social Media
So many people use social media and it can be an important tool in improving the visibility of your website and its appearance on search engines.
Social media isn’t just for people to share news and photos about themselves anymore as they also function as little search engines in their own right.
Facebook is especially a great resource for small businesses and many users search for companies and products while using Facebook.
Getting hits from social media will help grow your business and make it more visible to other potential customers.
5. Publish Lots Of High-Quality Content
The aim of search engines is to deliver answers and relative content to customer search queries. If a customer has a question, search engines such as Google want to answer this question within the first two or three results.
The best way to get your website featured in Google search results is by having the answers that customers want. This means that your website needs pages that are relevant and reliable and give easy-to-understand answers.
It’s not enough to add pages to your website and then leave it. You need to consistently add new web pages and keep your content as up-to-date and relevant as you can.
Revisit your existing pages frequently to update them and upload new content whenever possible.
Your content can branch out a little from the services you offer.
For example, if your product is scented candles, you can have pages to explain different scents or to explain which scent is best for different moods.
6. Make A User-Friendly Website
Your website needs to be clean and easy for users to navigate. Use a variety of media on your pages as photos and videos can help make your pages easier to read and more interesting for your readers.
You should also use headers to separate your text and keep paragraphs short and succinct.
The navigation and layout of the site should be simple. Users should be able to easily navigate through your site to make it back to the main page or to find additional information they might need.
It’s also important that your site is fast and loads pages as quickly as possible. If your site is sluggish, users won’t stick around and Google will not recommend your site.
There are several tools you can use to check your site's speed and increase it, and we highly recommend using these.
Finally, your site needs to work as well in mobile browsers as it does on laptops and PCs.
Many people use their smartphones as their primary internet device these days so make sure that your site scales down and looks as good on a phone as possible.
There are some search engines that will even penalize websites if they aren’t accessible on cell phones.
7. Measure Your SEO Results
There are many free tools you can use to assess how your website is performing. This can help you identify which pages are ranking well for SEO and which aren’t.
You can see how long people are spending on your page and who your site is appealing to. Once you know this, you can figure out which pages to work on and what is working for your site.
8. Take A Long-Term Approach To SEO
Improving your site’s SEO ranking on search engines is not something that happens overnight. Even if you implement every tweak listed in this article, you will not see immediate results.
Improvements in SEO can take several weeks, if not months, to be seen in any significant way so be prepared that you’re in for the long haul.
You should also be prepared to constantly change your website. Search engines such as Google are always tweaking the criteria they use for SEO so what works on a website today may not work in six months' time.
You will need to keep on top of developments in SEO and implement them on your website.
Final Thoughts
In this article, we listed seven different tweaks you can make to your website to improve the SEO ranking on your website.
All of these can be implemented with little to no monetary investment but they will take some time and planning.
You should also keep in mind that any changes to your SEO ranking will take time to take effect.