SEO is super important, especially for small businesses. Not only does it facilitate your digital presence but also helps you get traction online.
SEO refers to optimizing your website for improved visibility on leading search engines. The goal here is to appear in the top recommendation of respective search engines on the queries readily used by your target audience.
This is easier said than done, especially if you're a small business or just getting started.
Here are 7 actionable SEO tips that may come in handy.
So, without further ado.
Let's get started.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
The first step in creating an efficient SEO strategy is to identify your target audience. You have to dive deep into consumer preferences in your respective niche and explore their buying habits.
The more information you have about your target audience the better. Knowing your target audience will make it easier for you to deploy effective SEO strategies designed to attract relevant traffic. This will help you capture quality leads and fuel your sales funnel.
Insights about your target audience will pave the way for you to facilitate users with tailored experiences and acknowledge high customer retention.
2. Choose the Right Keywords
Once you have identified your target audience, you should choose the keywords that best represent your niche.
Keywords play a massive role in helping you optimize your website as per the SEO best practices. The keywords you target define whether your website attracts a relevant audience or just junk traffic. That's why 71% of marketers consider keyword selection as their top priority for SEO.
Keywords play a major role in helping your climb the search engine rankings. Moreover, they enable your audience to comprehend whether or not you're the right fit for them.
Keywords comprise the phrases or sentences used by your target audience to find suitable products or services via search engines. Search engines then process these queries and show viable recommendations.
Targeting the right keywords will help you appear in the top recommendations by search engines displayed in response to the targeted queries.
3. Produce Relevant Content
Think of this as the third step when creating an SEO strategy from scratch or revising an existing strategy for better results. Once you've identified the right keywords, now is the time for creating content around them.
A business can't survive in the digital realm without content as it helps bring traction to your site. That's why 81% of leaders worldwide consider content as the core of their marketing strategies.
Using relevant content, you can address the queries of your target audience and grow your website organically. This is a handy strategy for small businesses since they don't have the luxury of running paid advertisements due to limited funds.
Furthermore, it's the relevance of your content that helps you meet the search engine guidelines and acknowledge higher rankings. Google, the search engine giant with a 93% of market share in the industry, considers content above all when ranking sites against queries.
4. Link Building
Did you know that 91% of businesses fail to attract organic traffic due to the absence of backlinks?
Quality backlinks don’t just determine the authority of a website in its respective niche but also fuel the search engine rankings of a business.
Backlinks are created when a third-party platform uses your content and mentions your website as a source. The mention is in form of a link that helps the audience navigate the original source of information.
You can also build links for yourself and there are a number of ways to do it. No matter which method you select, your focus should be on maintaining the quality of the links you create.
Businesses often go overboard when creating links for their sites. Link spamming is an ill practice when it comes to SEO. Not only does it portray a negative image of your brand but can also lead to link-based penalties from search engines.
5. Improve Your Website’s Load Time
The load time of your site has a critical impact on your search engine rankings. It's all about facilitating your audience with a seamless user experience and slow websites fail to do so.
Poor load time doesn’t just affect the search engine rankings of your site but also leads to the inability of retaining users. Around 47% of visitors expect a page to load within 2 seconds.
So, it's highly recommended that you improve your website's load time and keep it under 2 seconds for a seamless user experience.
There are many ways to do so, such as image compression, minimal usage of redirects, use of visual content in moderation, enabling browser caching, and removing unnecessary plugins from your site.
6. Remove Zombie Pages
Zombie pages are poorly curated web pages that don't bring any traffic to your site. And keeping them affects your search engine rankings.
When you target a particular keyword, it's not just you who targets the respective query. You have a lot of competition and everyone strives for that top spot in search results. Your content can help you get there.
Since search engines discourage bloated websites with poor-quality content, there's no point in keeping pages that serve no purpose. So, it's highly recommended that you delete the zombie pages as they do more harm than good.
7. Keep Your Content Updated
You create content targeting keywords that best represent your niche. And it's your audience's needs that drive those keywords.
What happens when the preferences of your target audience change?
The change in consumer preferences is reflected in their queries. So, when their needs change so do their phrases to seek desired solutions.
This phenomenon sets new trends in your respective industry and makes your targeted keywords a little less relevant.
So, in order to maintain your current search engine rankings, you need to explore these new keywords and update your content accordingly.
These changes mostly require minimal effort. But even if the trend demands unforgiving changes, do it, the results will make the effort worthwhile.
It’s a Wrap
There you have it. The 7 actionable SEO tips for small businesses to consider. The implications of the recommendations may vary depending on which niche you target or the industry you operate in. So, try the ones that pique your interest and see if they work out for you.