If you run a business or are taking the steps to start one, there’s no doubt you’ve heard tons of buzz around SEO. That’s because, in a world where so much comes down to online marketing, it’s one of the most vital components of running a successful business. Ongoing SEO is essential for building your business and driving traffic to your website to boost visibility and sales. If you’re not quite sure what it’s all about and how it works, or if you’re just looking to improve SEO for your business, we’ve got you covered. Consider this your ultimate SEO strategy checklist: we’ll cover everything from exactly what SEO means and why it’s so important to the best practices and ways to measure your efforts.
Understanding how SEO works
Search engine optimization, known as SEO for short, is all about putting your website as close to the top of the Google search results for a particular keyword or phrase as possible – in other words, you’re optimizing the content on your website through a series of processes so that search engine algorithms are more likely to place it at the top of results. This is different from the alternative, paid advertising, because SEO is a free process that relies on what’s known as “organic” rankings.
SEO works with specific keywords. For example, if you’re a small business that specializes in custom-made rugs, you’ll probably want to be close to the top of search results for “custom-made rugs.” Even in a niche field, there are always other businesses to compete with, and SEO is one of the best ways to ensure your website gains traffic and your small business is visible.
Small business SEO is an essential part of getting your business off the ground, as well as promoting growth; the higher your website’s ranking is, the more visibility and traffic it will get, which then leads to more sales for your business.
It can be difficult to get the hang of small business SEO – especially because search engine algorithms are constantly changing. Staying on top of it and keeping your website’s ranking as high as possible is a continuous process, but there are a few standard practices to keep in mind no matter what.
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Create regularly updated copy
One major tip for staying on top of SEO and keeping your rankings as high as possible is to create regular copy on your website. This is vital because it gives search engines more data to analyze. The more content you have, the more data, and the easier it is for search engines to determine which information will be most helpful for users – and, in turn, how high your content should rank.
If you’re a small business, one of the best things you can do to improve your SEO is to have a blog on your website and create regular blog posts. That’s because, while product pages are helpful and an important part of any business’s website, informational articles are favored by search engines: Approximately 6 in 10 top search results are informative pages rather than products.
Utilizing a blog that’s updated regularly with relevant, informative posts relating to your area of business will make all the difference in your SEO. Of course, blog posts and articles also always leave room for promotion. While they should be primarily informative, which helps them rank higher, links to products throughout and calls to action at the end of a post can help you boost sales as well as drive traffic to other areas of your website, improving your overall SEO even more.
Best practices
So, how can a small business owner start utilizing SEO practices and getting their website noticed? While it can become a complicated process, like we said, there are a few best practices and rules of thumb that will always be helpful.
An essential part of optimizing your content is ensuring you’re using the right SEO keywords. To determine which keywords will be best for your website and posts, you can analyze google trends and review your Google Search Console report to see which terms people are using.
When incorporating these keywords and key phrases into your website, you should ensure they appear in the following:
H1
2-3 H2s
Your introductory paragraph
3-5 times throughout the webpage
Any alternate texts for images
Meta title
Meta description
URL slug
If you’ve got a Wix website, this video discusses the finer points of improving your Wix site’s SEO:
Another great way to boost the rankings of certain pages on your website is to link them internally on other pages. This will signify to search engines that these are the pages that should take priority and rank the highest. For example, linking one of your products in a blog post will boost the ranking of that particular page.
Alternatively, you can also use external links from pages outside of your own website in order to bring in reputable sources.
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Measure results
So, you’re using all the small business SEO best practices: writing blog posts, utilizing keywords, and putting in all the effort you can to optimize your content and improve SEO. How can you check to make sure this is all working?
One of the best ways to measure the results of your SEO efforts is with URL impressions. This refers to the number of times a certain URL appears in a search result viewed by a user, and is therefore a direct output of SEO work; you can see exactly how many times the link to your website was presented to someone searching a particular key phrase.
If you want to get more advanced with your measures, you can check your URL rating and domain rating. A URL Rating, or UR, measures the strength of a particular page’s backlink profile on a scale of 0 to 100. It’s positively correlated with Google rankings, so the higher your UR, the higher your website generally ranks on search engines.
Domain ratings, or DR, are essentially the same idea, but applied to an entire website domain rather than a particular webpage. Both UR and DR are used to assess the popularity of your website or web page, so they’re highly valuable tools to use when measuring the effectiveness of your ongoing SEO.
Tools like Ahrefs are very helpful for assessing your UR, DR, identifying keywords, and more.
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Business Intelligence Can Help With SEO
We get it: SEO can be a difficult process to get the hang of, especially if you’re just getting started with your small business. This SEO strategy checklist is a good place to start, but there’s always more to learn. Luckily, Business Intelligence is here to help.
We’re knowledgeable and experienced at helping users drive traffic and improve the Google Search rankings of their websites on Wix, WordPress, Shopify, and more.
We know SEO like the back of our hands, and we want to use that knowledge to help you. We’ll help your business develop a custom plan by assessing your current performance, researching keywords, installing tracking mechanisms, and even creating content specifically designed to help you rank.
Interested in giving it a go? Contact us today to schedule a free consultation and learn more about how we can help enhance your SEO. We’re looking forward to working with you and watching your business grow.