Five SEO Tips for Small Businesses

Your strength is running your business, so it’s completely understandable that you may not be an SEO expert. We’ve gathered a handful of great SEO starter tips to get you and your business off the ground and onto Google!

1. Create a company blog

Not many people returning to your site? You need to change that. You can start by creating a company blog. As long as your blog posts aren’t crammed full of keywords and are offering the customer a fantastic source of relevant information, you’re good to go. Creating quality content for your customers not only benefits your SEO, but it also helps reignite that bond between customer and client.

Extra tip: set up industry relevant Google Alerts. This way you don’t have to continuously trawl the internet looking for content ideas, they come right to your inbox daily!

2. Get social

Setting up social media profiles across the main platforms is free of charge and in 2013, Twitter claimed to have over 15 million users on their network – you shouldn’t need anymore persuasion than that! Social media allows you to interact with your target market instantly. Whether your business is B2B or B2C, your audience is out there waiting to be connected with.

Extra tip: ensure your profile names are as easy as possible for your customers to remember (and consistent across all platforms), you don’t want to lose interaction because of something so simple!

3. De-clutter those URLs

If your URL reads like this: http://ift.tt/1DRj8H2 you may as well start crossing your fingers in the hope for organic traffic. If your company appears in a customer’s search results and your URL is not clearly depicting your page content, there is a chance they won’t click on it. Clearly title everything on your website, from page titles and URLs to article titles and tweets, you need to optimise everything to make the most of every Google appearance.

Extra tip: when creating concise and interesting article titles, it is important to get your whole team involved. What might sound like a great title to you, might not be great to the majority!

4. Check out the competition

Search the keywords you so desperately desire to rank for; who is currently on the first page of search results? Once you have obtained this information, research what offline and online tactics they employ in order to outrank them.

Extra tip: it is important to keep on top of industry changes, and keeping an eye on your competitors is a great way of achieving this. Moulding your competitors’ tactics to suit your own business is a good way to build and innovate your marketing strategies.

5. Analyse your analytics

If you haven’t already, set up a Google Analytics account for your website. With the basic version still free of charge, it’s a fantastic tool to help you analyse your website traffic. For a basic version, it goes into remarkable depth, including bounce rate percentages, top landing and exit pages, social traffic, referrals and a lot more.

Extra tip: keep a spreadsheet that’s updated on a monthly basis by a team member, this will help you compare month on month differences in traffic. If your traffic continues to increase, this can help boost staff morale – everyone likes to hear they’re doing a good job!

If you have found these tips useful, you will want to read these 100 SEO Tips which focus on all modern day SEO techniques instead of all the old outdated spammy link building techniques that are floating around the web.

Five SEO Tips for Small Businesses