10 Small Business SEO Tips to Blast You to the Top of the Rankings

Looking to take your small business SEO to the next level? Good idea!

If you own or operate a small business and want to maximize your SEO, you’ll need to take a different approach than one would when dealing with national and wide-scale advertising.

As a small business, you may have a limited budget and resources.

But this component can play a huge part when it comes to the amount of business you bring in and how successful your company becomes.

Read on to learn 10 small business SEO tips that can help take you to the top.

Before you do anything, you need to figure out what need your small business is fulfilling for its customers.

Many business owners don’t stop to ask themselves some essential questions before trying to optimize their rankings and increase business through SEO.

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes, asking when and why you would need to use the service your business provides.

How would you go about finding it online? What words would you type into a search engine and what would expect to see from a business you’d consider using?

Would they do a quick search for you on their mobile device or would there be more thought put into their search based off the need?

There’s a difference in the way people search depending on what they’re looking for.

For example, searching for the nearest coffee shop is a much more casual search than looking for say, a new dentist.

Figure out how your customer behaves online and what their search process would look like. This will help you determine how to approach maximizing your SEO.

Before you make changes to your site to optimize your ranking, you need to clean house.

Do a site-wide check to make sure everything is running smoothly. Things may look okay at first glance but once you get into the back end you may find broken links, duplicate information and more.

Clean this up and fix what’s broken before you move forward and make other changes.

Google accounts for more than 92% of search engine use. This means, your site needs to work with Google seamlessly in order to maximize SEO and increase business.

If you have a brick and mortar store or an office that would require customers to visit in person, be sure to set up a Google maps listing. Be sure all the information is accurate and up-to-date.

If you don’t have a physical location, you should make sure all your corporate info and contact numbers are accurate including information about your company, images, and video.

Keeping your Google information current will help the search engine associate certain keywords with your company, thereby increasing your ranking over time.

Offering your customers more information and resources through your blogs is a perfect way to keep them coming back to your site.

We live in a content-driven world so any added value you can bring will draw in more customers and give the search engine more to latch onto. In the creation of that content the more you can engage with your audience the better.

You don’t have to spend hours each week writing blogs. Even just two, 500-word posts per week can make a huge difference. If you’re searching for topics to write about, put yourself back in the customers’ shoes.

Would “how-to” articles be helpful? What about industry updates? Product updates or announcements? What about guest posts or profiling industry professionals in the same field?

All of these tactics can give you interesting topics to write about and increase traffic and ranking.

Linking internally increases your optimization. You don’t want every item on your site to link back to somewhere else on your site. But pick and choose what makes sense.

What do you want people to see? You can’t always link back to your homepage so, select other items or articles on your site that can add value to the current item your customer is reading.

When you work to optimize your SEO, you need to know which keywords people will be searching for so you can use them to your advantage.

Use words that best describe your business and that you believe customers would put into a search engine when looking for the type of service your company provides.

With smaller businesses, it’s best to use long-tail keywords. This means a keyword between 2-4 words in length. This way, you carve out keywords that are perfectly aligned with what your business does.

Your list should have between 20-30 keywords and keyword phrases that you can begin to use to build your ranking.

It’s always good to know what your competitors are up to. What are they doing and how can you do it better?

When you enter your keywords, which businesses come up on that first page of your Google search?

Check out what kind of backlinks they have, how their site is set up and what about those sites is making them rank high.

With any customer service based company, people will often turn to reviews to determine if they should try your product or use your business.

Reviews are essential when it comes to ranking.

Build an area of your site where customers can leave reviews or link directly to review sites like Yelp to encourage customers to discuss their experience.

Figure out where your customer base is living on social media.

Select between 3-4 platforms where their presence is high and use those. You don’t need to stress yourself out by being on every social media platform out there.

Post regularly so you build your audience and engage with other members, leaving them comments and likes so they feel supported and encouraged to return the favor.

Keep your posts dynamic with images, videos, quotes, and other original content.

If you don’t have an in-house social media manager, you can schedule posts via apps like Hootsuite so you don’t have to worry about remembering to do so.

Believe it or not, Google cares about the quality of your website. This means the information you provide on your website, your original content, your internal and external linking should all feel natural and valuable.

Google will compare sites when it comes to ranking and if the quality of one outweighs the other, they will push it to the top.

Don’t put keywords that don’t match what your site is about or engage in other tricks to try to optimize your site.

With the tips above, you can take your small business SEO to the next level.

Rank higher and target more customers with these helpful tricks and remember to be patient. Your SEO won’t change overnight but these steps will plant the seeds to grow your business and increase revenue over time.

Contact us today for more information about building the perfect site for you!