For the uninitiated, becoming a master of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) may seem an uphill battle.
Does this sound familiar to you? Do you feel out of your depth in this ever-changing field? Take heart!
There are many great business outcomes you can achieve without any SEO knowledge and without spending too much money on Internet marketing services.
SEO isn’t just for the big guys. You don’t have to be an expert digital marketer to have a constant flow of visitors from Google.
In this post, I will teach you everything you need to know to reach the right people online, even if you’re new to SEO.
Table of contents:
1. Why Do You Need SEO for Your Business?
You might already know that SEO is the process of improving your website and increasing its online visibility. When you optimise your website, search engine crawlers are able to find it and index it more easily.
In an increasingly digital world, the need for ranking on Google has reached an all-time high – especially thanks to Covid-19.
Indeed, the pandemic has brought on unprecedented changes in consumer behaviour. Millions of people who previously shopped in-person shifted to online shopping.
For example, Think with Google has revealed that consumers discovered new brands during the lockdown, and 70% of them made a purchase after watching a video on YouTube.
According to TakeATumble, “9.1 million Australian households shopped online in FY 2021”. The e-commerce sector hit new heights, adding up to 14.6% more households than the previous fiscal year.
Essentially, most people go online to find the products or services they need. And your customers are no different.
When they’re looking for a product or service similar to what your small business sells, they google it.
The greater visibility your website has in search results, the more likely you are to attract prospective customers. Here is where SEO comes into play.
You may have the most beautifully designed website, but you need to develop the right strategy so that your target audience can find it. Otherwise, there’s no use in investing time and money in creating a website that does not rank.
With that being said, let’s take a quick look at the benefits of SEO for small businesses:
- Organic search is the main source of website traffic
- Keep your business competitive
- Build credibility and a more legitimate image for your business
- Acquire more leads and improve conversion rates
- Reduce cost per acquisition
- Improve user experience
- SEO helps you catch consumers in all decision-making stages (including consumers in the discovery phase)
- Build brand identity and brand awareness
- SEO is cost-effective as you can learn and implement many SEO strategies yourself
- Achieve continuous business growth
- SEO success is easy to track and measure, providing you with important data about how your website is performing
So, as cheesy as it sounds, SEO is vital for business success. Without SEO, your website is like a car without gas.
Now that you know the benefits of SEO for your small business let’s see some expert tips and tricks to boost rankings.
2. 5 Top SEO Tips and Tricks for Small Businesses
Improving your local ranking on Google will significantly increase your business’s growth and profitability. So, without further ado, let’s jump right into these SEO tips and tricks for small businesses.
- Find the right keywords
Picking the right keywords is an essential step in successful SEO. Keywords are search terms that consumers use to find the products or services they need.
For example, if you’re selling fitness footwear, are your customers more likely to use a keyword such as “running shoes” or “sports shoes”? Or maybe “workout shoes”? To connect with your target audience, it is essential that you choose the most effective keywords.
Here is how to do keyword research the right way:
- Make a list of relevant topics related to your brand and your buyer personas. If you’re a business like B2B HQ, for example, providing virtual offices in Melbourne, you could have general topic buckets such as “office services”, “mailing address”, “business address”, etc.
- Make a list of seed keywords based on the buckets of subtopics list you have created. For example, suppose you take a topic bucket such as “business address”. In that case, you could brainstorm some seed keywords that prospects are likely to type in related to that topic, such as “how to get a business address”, “business address for sole trader”, etc.
- Use a good keyword research tool, such as Google Keyword Planner or Keyword Tool. These tools will give you additional ideas on related keywords and help you narrow down your keywords list.
One caveat, though: Don’t overstuff your website with keywords. You could be penalised for “keyword stuffing” (using a keyword too many times on a page).
- Create a Google my Business listing
I have already explained how to set up Google My Business and how to optimise your Google My Business Listing for SEO rankings.
Creating a Google My Business listing is one of the most effective ways for small businesses to boost visibility and rank higher in search results.
On your listing, you can answer FAQs and provide relevant information about your business, such as contact information and pictures of your products or services.
I can’t stress enough the importance of claiming a listing on Google My Business. Not only does Google My Business help you improve your online visibility and your site’s ranking, but it can also transfer information about your business to third-party apps and platforms.
If you’re running a home-based remote startup and haven’t claimed your Google My Business listing yet, all you need to do is get a unique business address. You can use it to start listing your business on search engines and online platforms and immediately boost your SEO.
- Perform a technical SEO audit
The phrase “SEO audit” may sound complicated, but it is actually very easy.
Audits don’t need to be performed only by SEO experts, nor should they be dozens or even hundreds of pages long. But first, let’s see what an SEO audit is.
Put simply, SEO audit is the process of analysing the ability of your website to appear in search engine results pages (SERP). It tells you what issues you need to fix to improve your rankings.
Here are five core tools to use during the audit process:
- Google Analytics: This popular free analytics tool offered by Google helps you track your website traffic. With the help of Google Analytics, you can see the number of your website visitors, where they come from, what type of device they use, and much more.
- Google Search Console: This is another free tool offered by Google that allows you to understand how you are performing on Google. Search Console offers a wide array of reports to help you monitor and troubleshoot your site’s rankings.
- Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI): This free tool helps you analyse the performance of a website page and provides suggestions on how to fix issues.
- SEMrush Site Audit Tool: SEMrush Site Audit is a website crawler that scans your entire website and provides data concerning its health and performance. When you sign-up for SEMrush, you can start out with a 7-day free trial. If you want to use the tool for free when your trial ends, you can downgrade your user account to a free subscription.
- Screaming Frog: This is another website crawler with many functionalities. The tool helps you detect issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and much more. The free version allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs for free.
- Improve your content for SEO
It’s no secret that quality content that goes above and beyond determines your SEO performance and results.
Writing content that converts and improves SEO it’s not rocket science, and you can do it yourself with a little bit of practice.
Typically, SEO content includes product pages, blog posts, articles, guides, infographics, videos, slideshows. Though all of these types of content are important, I encourage you to start focusing on your product pages and video content.
Product pages are the bread and butter of any business’s website. At the same time, video is quickly becoming an essential form of content marketing.
Consumers love watching video content. According to Cisco, “in Australia, total Internet video traffic (business and consumer, combined) will be 79% of all Internet traffic in 2021, up from 72% in 2016.”
That’s why you need to produce more video content to engage your target audience and increase traffic.
Also, make sure you craft enticing headlines for your content that grab your audience’s attention. Then, focus on creating engaging content around the right keywords.
All you need to do is offer your readers a compelling perspective on a topic of their interest, fresh ideas, inspiration, a good laugh, or something that can improve their lives by providing solutions to their problems.
- Use internal links, external links, and backlinks
Internal links, external links, and backlinks are vital for good SEO. But what exactly are these links, and how can you use them effectively?
Let’s start with internal linking. These are links that point from one page of your website to another page of your website. Your readers use them to navigate through your website and find the products, services or content they need.
From an SEO perspective, Google is using these links to find content and rank it in the search results. To learn more on how to use internal linking correctly to map out topic clusters on your website, click here.
Now, let’s focus on external linking. In layman’s terms, external links are links on your website that point to a different website.
Using external links that point to trustworthy, popular websites helps Google understand what your content is about and increases your chances to rank in search results.
Ultimately, make sure you get quality backlinks. These are links from a website to a page on your own website.
Typically, quality backlinks depend on key factors such as relevance and authority. What does this mean in real terms?
If you sell workout shoes and get links from two pages, one about puppy toys and one about how to keep your feet healthy, chances are the last one is more relevant. At the same time, authority backlinks are links from pages that are trusted by search engines.
There are many ways you can get quality backlinks that help you rank higher. For example, you can reach out to bloggers, reporters and influencers in your industry.
Or, you can create “how-to” posts or ultimate guides that cover every angle of a topic. Typically, these posts and guides get the highest number of backlinks.
Conclusion: It’s easy to get a tad frustrated when thinking about SEO, but there’s a lot you can do without any expert skills.
The tips provided in this post show you exactly what you can tackle to improve rankings, even if you’re new to SEO. We can guarantee that you will reap tremendous benefits from great organic rankings!
Did you know that your business contact information has a great impact on your SEO rankings? To rank higher on Google, you need to build online credibility and provide consistent information about your business across all websites. Luckily, you can do that with a virtual office that provides you with a professional business address and landline number (among a myriad of other benefits). If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us. We’d love to hear from you!
