SEO Basics Small Business Owners Need to Know
The biggest problem that small business owners face when it comes to SEO is the fact that they’re left to handle it on their own. Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be as difficult or troublesome as you might have thought. With the right game-plan and adequate use of SEO tools, you can easily achieve impressive results. In order to help you out with this, here are the top six things that you (as a small business owner) need to know about SEO.
Think like the customer
When looking for a suitable keyword, you need to understand that people have a peculiar way of typing into Google. In order to gain an edge here, you need to start thinking like the customer. What does this mean? Well, first of all, you might not want to use the most grammatical of forms. After all, articles and pronouns are often omitted in search, and the same goes for punctuation. On the other hand, when looking for voice search SEO, people tend to use a more grammatical form. Given the popularity of voice search nowadays, this might be an important thing to keep in mind.
Finding competitive keywords
The next thing you need to do is find a competitive keyword and what this often means is making it unique. So, what is a unique keyword? Well, let’s say that you’re running a real estate agency, the majority of the industry (its least creative fragment) will use keywords such as “homes for sale” or “apartments for sale”. This is why you need to go a bit more specific and create a long-tail keyword. This is what will make it more competitive and reduce the number of your direct competitors. With the help of specialized keyword research tools, you can get the most out of this.
Social media is a steady source of traffic
You need to bear in mind the fact that traffic is an important ranking factor and that one of the best ways to increase it is to promote your business and your content on social media. Now, before we continue on this topic, it’s important that you understand that these backlinks don’t improve your SEO rank in a traditional way. Nonetheless, you still want to abide by some of the rules of sharing. For instance, you need to make sure that your content is quality and organic. Also, check the domain authority of any website that you link to.
Try to emulate the crawler experience
The most important thing you need to know in order to improve your SEO is the fact that you are not optimizing your website just for the human audience but for crawlers, as well. The first thing you need to do is find a specialized tool that will help you find all links on a website. This needs to be done in order to ensure that all the pages are properly indexed. Sometimes, even the most important of pages on your website will be invisible to crawlers due to the error in code. Leading bots or human audience into a dead end is never a good move and from the standpoint of SEO, it can be seen as a proper disaster.
On-site optimization
In order to improve your SEO, you need to optimize the very structure of your website. The first thing you want to do is create an SEO-friendly URL structure. Other than this, you want to pay special attention to tags and headlines of the content displayed on your website. Meta tags are particularly important. Finally, you need to ensure that the navigation of your website is done right.
Even your offline business needs it
One of the most important SEO-related statistics claims that about 78 percent of local mobile searches end up in an offline purchase. Why is this so? Well, because people want to check out your offer and compare it to others before they buy. They might also want to check the physical address of your store online or read some reviews online. This alone is a reason enough why even your offline business may need a strong online presence.
Conclusion
The very last thing that you need to take into consideration is the fact that this is one of those fields where you can achieve a major impact with a minimum investment of time, effort and resources. Therefore, it’s quite dangerous and reckless to let this major opportunity slide. Fortunately, in the age of the information, more and more entrepreneurs are willing to handle tasks such as these on their own.
