Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of making your website attractive to search engines so that it appears closer to the top of search engine results. This is desirable because the closer your website appears to the top of the results, the more traffic your website is likely to attract. The more traffic, the more sales, and the better your business grows.
Google is by far the biggest search engine and its rules around ranking sites and the order in which their results are returned are notoriously opaque. To make matters worse, SEO agencies tend to throw around terms like “SSL certificates”, “long-tail keywords” and other SEO-specific terminology. This means that, to the uninitiated, SEO can seem to be a strange alchemy.
To make things better in search engine, there are some simple steps that small business owners can take to improve their SEO and power up their business growth.
Boost Your Business with these steps
1. Get the basics right
Any SEO strategy needs to begin with a definition of the keywords and topics you want to target. Simply, this means choosing the search terms for which you want your website to appear in the results.
Start by defining the main topics you think your customers will search for when seeking the type of products or services you offer. You can then use Google’s Adwords tools to see the search volumes and competition for each of your target search terms.
These tools will also help you to identify long-tail keywords which you can target. This is often a good strategy since fewer websites will be optimising their SEO to rank for these longer search queries.
2. Build pages for each topic
Once you know the search terms (keywords and long-tail keywords) that you need to target, you can begin to create pages on your website that are written specifically around those terms. When done properly, these pages will appear to the top of the results for any searches that use those terms.
The tactic of creating pages that specifically answer the questions that people ask when searching for your product or service is a highly successful one. SEO guru Marcus Sheridan who turned around the fortunes of his family’s pool business using exactly this strategy. He emphasises the importance of website optimisation for any small business, arguing: “In today’s information age of Marketing and Web 2.0, a company’s website is the key to their entire business.”
His book They Ask, You Answer explains how to identify the questions your customers and potential customers need answering in order to make purchase decisions and how to create content that ranks highly when people type these questions into search engines.
It’s worth noting that the value of producing this type of content is growing in importance as part of an overall SEO strategy given the growth of voice search. Voice search tends to be question oriented. If you think about the way you use Alexa or Siri yourself, you can see why.
3. Get the technical stuff right
Technical SEO is based on the good housekeeping rules your website developer should follow. It is as least as important as your content and social media strategies. Google will rank your pages based on your website architecture, how each webpage is technically created and the coding.
This is worth investing in getting right for another important reason too: Akamai has found that 40% of people will abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to fully load.
While much of this rests in the hands of your website developer, there are technical best practices you should follow yourself to aid technical SEO. For your customers’ security, invest in an SSL certificate for your site; this is increasingly becoming the norm when browsing. Compress all media before putting it on your website. Use your target keywords in your page titles, metatags, and media labels – a tool like Yoast can help here.
4. Set up a blog and blog regularly
Creating a blog is another great way to develop page authority. Your blogs should feature the keywords you are targeting and link back to the relevant topic pages on your own website.
Blogging regularly is shown to have a serious impact on SEO.
Tech Client has found that there is a 434% higher chance of higher ranking on search engines if you enable a blog in your website. Moreover, the blog should be updated regularly with interesting niche. An updated blog can easily connect with the readers.
5. Develop a link-building plan
Another key metric Google uses to measure page authority is the number of links pointing to that page and how trustworthy those links are.
This means that link building must be an important part of any SEO strategy. Reach out to partners, customers, and influencers to link and ask them to your website pages from their own websites and social media accounts.
One of the best tools available for link building analysis is the Link Explorer from Moz. This link building tools allows link metrics task for any website, which includes domain and page authority. You can then use this information to build out from your current position.
It’s worth noting that not all links are created equal. Links from high domain authority sites are worth more in terms of SEO than links from other low-ranking sites. This means that if you have Universities or highly regarded institutions amongst your customer base, you should work hard on securing links from their websites to your own.
6. Be active on social media
Your social media accounts offer further important ways to boost links back to your website.
They are also worth investing in on their own terms. There are around 90% of businesses believe that social media has changed their business approach and increased exposure. While 75% believe that they had more traffic once they approached social media as per Vendasta, 2017.
To be successful on social media, you will need to concentrate on creating sharable content. The interaction between your blog content and your social media posting should become a perfect circle; each boosting and benefiting the other.
7. Pay attention to security to build confidence
To make it easy for your customers to access your site, you should invest in an SSL Certificate. When you have an SSL certificate, the browser will have HTTPS in the URL.
The HTTPS URL format that an SSL Certificate offers you builds trust in your website. Without it, you may lose traffic and will almost certainly experience a higher number of abandoned baskets and lost sales.
Google Developers has emphasised that HTTPS protects the integrity of your website, protects the privacy and security of your users, and is the future of the web. This compels web masters to buy SSL certificate another important part of improving your SEO.
8. Stay abreast of the latest SEO trends
Improving SEO isn’t a one-time effort. The major search engines are continually reviewing their own SEO practices, plus your competitors are constantly evolving their own SEO efforts. This means the SEO goal posts are continually moving – the recent emphasis on SSL certificates is one case in point.
Sign up to newsletters like Moz, HubSpot, Neil Patel and other industry leaders to keep abreast of the latest SEO news and adapt your SEO efforts accordingly.
As Kelly Shelton wrote in Forbes magazine: “To thrive and survive in the business world today, you need SEO. Whether you have a local business with a brick and mortar presence, or you are a niche company with a specialized audience, you will fail without SEO. Without SEO, you have no visibility online, which means when a consumer searches for what you do, they can’t find you and do business with you.”
Finally, we can ascertain that above practices make your website search engine friendly and in the long run, the website can earn handsome gain. However, there are many algorithm updates also affect site’s ranking which need to be considered wisely.
