If you are looking to take your small business to the next level and get your site front and center in front of your audience, you need to be using SEO. Although it has been around for quite a while, most of us think of SEO as nice but not necessary, and we couldn’t be more wrong. Put simply, having your site optimized is the #1 way to ensure your site is ranking high on SERP’s, has a strong web presence, and will engage and convert visitors to customers.
To help you out, I have put together the top tips for small business SEO.
Tip #1: Make Your Site User-Friendly
Whether you are using SEO services in London or Silicon Valley, you can be sure that if your site is confusing and hard to navigate you can forget about rankings and customers. SEO ensures your site is faster, well-structured, and filled with highly relevant content. This can seem a little overwhelming, so it helps to just go step-by-step and implement on-page SEO.
On-Page SEO at a glance:
Each page on your site counts. Each element has to be perfectly curated to make sure your website loads fast (under 3 seconds), is readable, and clearly directs your customers to the action you want them to take. By hiring SEO services in London, you should be able to receive an in-depth audit, that highlights what is holding your site back from total optimization. Here are some of the things they will look for or suggest:
Meta descriptions – We are building for people, not just search engines, so make sure your meta descriptions are compelling and excite your visitor to click-through
Title Tags – Start your title with your page’s target keyword
Killer content – Reduce your bounce rates and increase the time your visitors stick around with unique and original content
Tip #2: Build Your Brand
Make sure your site appears on all the top search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Bing should all have your business details. If your site needs to be found internationally make sure it shows up on other search engines, like Yandex.
When building your brand every element of your website should reflect your culture, have clear and understandable goals and speak to your target demographic.
To do this make sure all of these things are checked off:
Google Search Console – if you aren’t indexed you can’t be found
Website crawl– your site ranking depends on its crawl-ability
100% responsive – your site has to look the same and be easily navigated on every mobile or smart device
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool – if your site isn’t friendly look into SEO services in London to get your CSS sorted out
Tip #3: Get Cited
We talked about on-page SEO, but don’t forget about off-page SEO too! That’s why you need to get a citation, it’s a good thing. Citations are basically just mentions of your business online that show your company’s NAP, that is the:
- Business name
- Address
- Phone number
According to Moz, citation signals are one of the top local ranking factors. This is as easy as using Google My Business.
