12 Small Business SEO Tips You Need to Know in 2018 -2019
Leaving the monotonous 9-5 job and starting your own business is undoubtedly a remarkable achievement. But your struggle has not ended yet. Running your own business is a humongous task, and it only gets tougher as you start understanding how things work in a small business. While you may find a number of obstacles along the journey, the toughest one is going to be achieving a better SEO rank for your website.
Whether you offer academic paperhelp or run a diagnostic center, you will have to fight tooth and nail to get your website a significant position in the search engine rankings. If your website is ranked poorly by the search engines like Google, you may not find the desired clientele from the internet even after offering quality services.
Just the way a student requires significant study help from experts, you will also require some sort of assistance to boost the ranking of your websites on the search engine results. If you have a decent idea about how search engine optimization works practically, you may go up to a certain distance. However, if you wish to see your business thrive in the online space, you will need to learn a few SEO hacks from the very beginning.
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Create a diverse strategy for content marketing:
As a website owner, you need to acknowledge the fact that there is no one particular way to boost your website ranking on Google. There are a number of factors that influence the ranking of a certain webpage. So you need to consider all those elements while creating your content strategy.
However, you need to focus on producing original content that is relevant to your audiences. No matter what kind of content (blogs, articles, videos, social media posts or even infographics) you are creating, you need to ensure that every piece of content covers the topics and keywords that are trending during that time.
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Keep posting your content consistently:
It is not going to help you improve your ranking if you post your content once in 3-4 months. Consistency is the key. Take the trending topics, do some basic keyword research on them, and create quality blogs based on these topics. However, you need to ensure that the topic is relevant to your target audience.
When you are delivering quality content consistently, the readers will find more reasons to visit your website, driving more traffic to your business. Also, when the number of visits starts to increase, Google identifies your post as a credible source of information and pushes it higher in the ranking.
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Optimize all the pages:
While posting quality content consistently can improve your ranking, it is also important to ensure all those pages that you are creating for those posts are optimized as per the latest SEO guidelines. As a matter of fact, it is more than just stuffing keywords on the page.
Optimization of a page may include modifications in the titles, meta description and even in the body content. Some SEO experts also suggest that using the local terms in the posts can deliver better results as Google also considers proximity as a crucial factor while ranking the pages.
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Optimize Google My Business:
For small businesses like yours, optimizing your Google My Business listing is a must. It may not be the most popular advice you receive for your website, but it can actually make a great difference. Even if you don’t have advanced knowledge about SEO or web designing, you can still perform the task.
At first, claim and verify your business at https://www.google.com/business. When that’s done, fill as many fields as possible, and upload multiple photos and videos which will eventually enhance your listing. However, you need to make sure you have chosen the right category for your business. This will help your business appear higher in the local search results.
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Focus on getting links from local websites:
Small business owners usually don’t bother about getting links, but this simple trick can boost your rankings significantly. Since you serve a smaller market, you need to build relevance towards your locality. Getting backlinks from local websites can help you do that.
Getting a link back to your website can help you appear higher in the organic search results for specific geo-targeted keywords. As a small business owner, building your local SEO can be more beneficial for you than competing with the big brands in the global market. Get in touch with the local bloggers or other local businesses to see whether you can help each other in some way.
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Identify and fix all the technical SEO issues:
It is important for your small business to work on the local SEO for better rankings on the search engine, but that does not mean you should take the standard SEO guidelines lightly. Before you go all out with your content marketing campaign, try to identify the technical issues that are affecting your SEO and overall ranking.
Some of the most common technical issues revolving SEO include experiencing a slow loading speed on the pages, having duplicate content on the site, broken links, unoptimized pages and more. If your website is facing such issues, you need to fix them immediately or else they will keep affecting your ranking without any warning.
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Add Schema markup:
You may have noticed that Google is offering snippet preview of a particular search result in the search engine results page (SERP) in response to a specific keyword search. While that may play a crucial role in helping a page get more traffic online, adding Schema markup can enhance the snippets in SERPs.
The Schema markup sends signals to search engines about various components of a page. The components include the name of the business, its address, phone number, ratings, business hours, etc. As you can see in this given image, the first two search results for the keyword “hire essay writer online”, both the sites displayed their user rating, which the third one misses.
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Consider creating videos for competitive keywords:
While it is a popular belief that the search engines only scan the words in a particular webpage to rank them, marketers have now realized that content is more just simple words. In fact, the images and videos on the website are now playing a crucial role in helping a page rank higher for a competitive query.
If you cannot figure out how to prepare text content for a competitive keyword, putting up a properly optimized video or an image can help your page get better rankings in the search results. No wonder people are so hung up on putting videos and images on their website now more than ever.
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Combine paid promotion with organic methods:
One of the most depressing facts about the practice of SEO is that you rarely get immediate results for a particular SEO activity. If you are just starting out, not getting results may force you to give up. For such situations, paid search can really boost your morale. Relying solely on the paid promotion, however, may not be ideal for a small business, which is why you need to mix paid with organic methods to sustain in the market.
Even if you are receiving a certain amount of organic traffic, you may need to run a paid search campaign every once in a while to drive more traffic than the usual. It can often help you significantly boost your average traffic. Also, using AdWords and Facebook Ads help engage more audience, which has a positive impact on the rankings.
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Invest in an SEO tool:
As you may have already understood, getting a better SEO ranking is a challenging task to perform. So you need to arm yourself with a few SEO tools that can help you improve your SEO rankings. There are several online tools, which can ease your workload.
Platforms like Moz, BuzzSumo, and HubSpot can help you with your keyword research. There’s Alexa that helps you track the performance of an active page, allowing you to understand what you should do next. Well, most of the big organizations are doing it. It is time for you to incorporate those tools in your SEO activities as well.
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Prioritize user intent:
While keywords get all the attention from most of the content marketers, there is the search intention of the user that is turning out to be equally important for the search engine ranking of a page. In fact, Google is now focusing more on the search intent of the users than the keywords.
To understand the mentality of your customers, you need to create a buyer’s persona, which is basically a representation of your ideal customer. Also, you need to understand the buyer’s journey. It is your responsibility to create content that serves either of the three phases of a buyer’s journey, which are awareness, consideration and decision. Serving the user intent can certainly boost the rank of your page in the SERP.
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Combine influencer and content marketing:
As we have learned already, receiving quality backlinks can significantly boost your SEO rankings. However, not all the small businesses have the bandwidth to utilize the backlinks. In such situations, it is ideal to get the help from influencers. Content marketing has the potential to improve your ranking on its own, but combining it with influencer marketing can increase the chances of attaining that goal.
Influencers have been quite effective in promoting a particular brand over the years. However, now you can leverage their credibility not only to drive more traffic to your website but also to rank higher in the SEO rankings. If you don’t know how to get connected to the influencers, there are tools like Upfluence or Tapinfluence where you can find influencers and involve them in the content creation process.
Being a small business owner, you may not have access to limitless resources, which the giant organizations have. So you need to rely on your content marketing strategy and SEO hacks to improve the ranking of the pages of your website. If you don’t have enough idea about SEO or content marketing, you may face some difficulty getting used to these activities. However, it only takes a few days of practice to get used to these hacks.
Even though these tricks are effective for almost all kinds of small businesses, it is still recommended that you evaluate the application of the aforementioned tricks in relation to your operations before integrating them into your strategies.
Author bio: Gracie Anderson is a professional content marketer who has done her MBA from the University of Singapore. She has joined MyAssignmenthelp.com recently as an essay writer and offers academic guidance to the students on their requests.
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