If you’re a small to medium-sized business, you might feel daunted at the thought of facing down others in your industry in the online space. Small businesses often mean small budgets, and you might feel that you just can’t make a difference with what you have.
The good news is, though, that doing better in online search means improving your SEO, and if you do just a bit of self-educating, you really don’t have to spend a ton on improving your website and online profiles.
Now, it’s true that some businesses like to make sure they’re doing things right by springing for professional SEO consulting, and this is always a good idea. The pros know what they know after long years of studying what Google does and does not prefer to rank.
But if you’re looking to learn some of the basics of SEO on your own as a small or medium business, check out the three tips below.
Work Out Technical SEO Errors
One of the main problems that just about every site in the world has is technical SEO errors. These are problems that neither you nor anyone else can actually see or notice with your own eyes. If you weren’t able to see these issues in SEO tools, you’d almost never know they existed.
We’re talking about issues such as broken pages (404 errors), images missing descriptive alt text, pages without title tags or meta descriptions, duplicate content, and sitemaps not being submitted to Google.
Google sees all of these problems, though, and when it does, it considers your site as being of a low quality, and it won’t show it to users. You can use paid tools such as Semrush to identify these technical SEO problems so you can correct them.
If You’re Local, Focus on Local
Being a small or medium-sized business is one thing. But if you’re also a local business serving a local clientele, you’ve got a whole other aspect of SEO to take care of.
Local SEO involves tasks such as setting up Google My Business and Bing Places profiles. You would also want to create local SEO content on your website that explains the services you provide and where you provide them.
This is the best opportunity to use local-based keywords in content. If you provide janitorial services in Denver, Colorado, you may find that “janitorial company in Denver” is a keyword with enough monthly traffic for you to target on your homepage. So, you would use that phrase in the title tag and the H1 on the page, as well as in the body content itself.
Having positive Google reviews also sends signals to Google that you are a trustworthy local business, and all of these local SEO efforts together should help establish you as a strong local business in the online search arena.
Learn to Use Google Analytics
Finally, once you do have your whole website and online profiles set up, you’ll need a place to analyze the traffic you receive and the behavior of your audience.
Google provides a free tool for doing just this: Google Analytics. Once you install the Analytics code on your website, you’ll be able to chart data such as monthly visitors, landing page traffic, and the channels from which someone arrived on your site (direct, organic, paid social media). Read download free movies
Why is all this important? Because once you know how people are interacting with your site, you can make the appropriate changes to increase your traffic or conversions even more. Or, if a certain page is experiencing poor traffic, you can see this in the data and then go find out why that is.
These are all vital SEO tips to follow if you’re a small business trying to make it online. The professionals are always available to consult, but doing these things will definitely get you started.
