SEO Tips for Small Businesses

There are more websites on the Internet today than ever before, and over 600 million social media users as well.  How do you stand out from your competition?  The following are 5 simple SEO tips for small businesses to help you both drive traffic to your site and convert the traffic that visits, giving you the best chance at monetizing your site.

SEO Tips for Small Businesses | Don’t forget about the bots

Many new business owners focus on style over substance when it comes to website design.  But having a beautiful website does you no good if search engines don’t pick it up and no one visits your site.  While you want  a visually appealing site for your potential buyers, don’t forget that search engines need to be able to navigate through your site as well, and these bots don’t care about fancy graphics.  If your site is heavy on Flash, make sure there’s a text based description that lives in the HTML to help clue in the search bots. Consider removing your splash or welcome page, and instead build a homepage with descriptions and pointers to the main content areas of your site.

SEO Tips for Small Businesses | Find your keywords

If you had to find your site with 3 or 4 keywords, what would those keywords be?  Ask your friends and co-workers the same question, and then run the searches yourself, and for each query try to find what position your website has in the results and jot it down. 

If you can find your site within the first 10 pages, then take note of your competition’s sites that come up on the results of the first page for each query.  Are they similar to yours? Local or national? Are they competitive to your business?

According to SearchEngineLand.com, and their SEO tips for small businesses, when picking your top keywords, it’s important to be honest about how competitive certain terms might be.  You must assume that others will try to keep their site listed high in the search results as well.  See if you can break the list into three buckets:

• Lower rank, great term, low competition  – This is the perfect place to start.  Put these terms at the top of your priority list. You should see the best results on this set first.
• Lower rank, great term, high competition – Another great opportunity (as evidenced by your competition), but unless you feel you have to take them on directly, it could be more costly in the long run to start here unless you have a higher performing base of keywords.
• Higher rank, great term – The good news is that you’re already doing awesome here, but you should continue to track performance just in case. You can always come back to this group later if you’re still not satisfied with the results.

By this time, you should have two or three keywords that are at the top of your priority list.  http://searchengineland.com/6-simple-seo-tips-for-small-businesses-72279

SEO Tips for Small Businesses | Homepage text description

The goal of creating your brief homepage text description is to have a couple sentences that naturally describe your business, and naturally try to add in your top three keywords without being too obvious. Continuously test your site to see the success of these keywords by keeping an eye on your site ranking to see if there is movement.  There are many different websites that will do this for you, but I recommend getting a weekly report and making adjustments as needed.

SEO Tips for Small Businesses | Write keyword articles and blogs

If you’re going to tag your homepage with keywords, why not create articles and blogs that have keywords as well?  It is a smart way to show your customers you are an expert in the industry in which you are looking to sell your product or service. Consider that these blogs and articles are ways of you specifically and briefly explaining to a friend or relative in a matter of minutes what you do in that specific area.  For more information on how to write a blog, please click here.

SEO Tips for Small Businesses | Use social media

Once you have created these keyword blog posts and articles, then post them out on the web on your social media sites.  Search engines are now programmed to crawl and track these links back to your site, plus it’s an easy way to get your friends and top customers involved.  In fact, encourage your friends and family to leave comments. All it takes is one comment from a friend, co-worker, or family to get your potential customers to start leaving feedback as well.  When someone responds, remember to interact with them as well.

SEO Tips for Small Businesses | Conclusion

In summary, you will want to create a website that focuses on not only looking appealing to your target audience, but ensuring that it is also optimized for search engine optimization.  Your site will do no one any good if no one can find it.  So research your keywords, tag your home page with these key words, write blogs & articles focused on these keywords, and post on your social networks.  By implementing these SEO tips for small businesses and continuously making adjustments, you should be able to drive and convert site traffic.