5 Words Of Advice To Business Owners Curious About SEO | Simplemachine
To market your small business in the current economy, you’ll need all the help you can get. Search engine optimization is an excellent place to begin because the first interaction customers have with e-commerce businesses today is through search engines. Even though as a small business, you don’t have access to the personnel and ad budget that established companies have, none of these factors matter to search engines.
Adopting SEO best practices allow you to level the playing field and boost your ranking on search engine result pages. Google is known to change its algorithms regularly, and with these changes come new rules of ranking. Your goal is to keep up with these changes as well as build and maintain a high-quality website to ensure you are always ranked high by search engines.
1. Content is King
You need to find a way of turning everything in your website into content that appeals to potential customers. Working with a well-reputed SEO and content marketing agency ensures that your website is well-presented. Content has always been king, and search engines prioritize fresh and compelling content.
The most important consideration for every small business owners is regularly updating your website with unique content. Focusing on generating useful content for your site gives search engines more opportunities to rank you high on SERPs (search engine result pages).
Remember, your content can’t simply be a bunch of keywords aimed at getting search engines to rank you high on search engine result pages. Google has been optimized for compelling real-world content. Search engines now use machine learning and intelligence to asses what is real content.
Creating content that genuinely attracts customers will also improve your search engine ranking. Even though this ranking matters, you need to remember that the content you create should be appealing to potential customers as well. Creating content for people will boost your click-through rate and your customer retention rate as well. Search engines only work as the middleman between your business and potential customers.
2. Create a Highly-Responsive Website
This cannot be stressed enough because the minute customers feel like they’re waiting to buy products from you, they’ll hit the back button. You need to create and maintain a highly responsive website that can be accessed from any device — mobile, or otherwise.
More people are using their mobile devices to access the internet, and your website needs to load with the same quality on smartphones as it does on web applications. A mobile-friendly website should be able to show everything one can view on web applications on smaller screens.
Google and other search engines consider mobile-friendliness when ranking sites. This alone speaks into the importance of creating a highly-responsive website. Use the tools provided by Google to determine your website’s level of mobile-friendliness.
Consider gauging Google’s preference for mobile-friendly websites by looking at its website. Work with a professional web hosting service to ensure your website is as mobile-friendly as possible.
Aside from embracing small screens, you also need to work on the speed of your website. Your e-commerce site should load within five seconds to boost your click-through rate and website traffic.
Search engines have introduced speed into the ranking algorithm. A website that loads fast improves the experience of website visitors. If your website’s loading time is wanting, find out what takes it so long to load and fix it.
3. Optimize for Local Search
As a small business owner, what makes your business tick is your local market. Taking advantage of local searches ensures that people searching for local businesses see your business first.
Since world domination isn’t really on your radar at the moment, focus all your efforts toward increasing brand awareness in your local community. Whether it’s at the town, city, state, or county level, the best place to begin is by introducing location pages on your website.
This is especially important if you’re a franchise. When you have multiple business locations, create separate location-specific pages. The unique pages should include;
• Your business name
• Your phone number
• Contact-specific pages, i.e., “Contact Us” and “About Us” pages
For content creation, you need to incorporate local and industrial news into your blog posts. Staying up to date on what’s happening in the community ensures customers visit your website and see the products you offer.
You also need to educate the public about the industry you’re based in. Look for local spins on industry trends and talk about how local events can affect the industry. Google and other search engines reward timely content that informs the public about the latest happenings.
4. Watch Your Competition
No matter how small your business is, you will always have competitors. Due to the dense marketplace, every business owner has a competitive business they have to look out for. Monitoring and understanding how your competition operates allows you to tweak your business model for optimum results.
For instance, look at how competitors are using competitive keywords to rank high on search engine result pages. SEO is not only about improving your website but also about borrowing ideas from your competitors. Work with a professional web and graphic designer to ensure your website is better presented than those of your competitors.
It pays to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. But remember that the aim is not to copy everything that seems to work for them because businesses are never the same. You should instead use this information to future-proof your business to ensure that you’re not displaced by new business in the industry.
Competitor analysis plays an important role in SEO since you need all the tips you can get to develop a successful business model. The only way to gain a competitive advantage is to fully understand what you are up against. All your SEO efforts should be centered around staying ahead of your competitors. This is the only way you can ensure you don’t lose customers to rival businesses.
5. Review Search Engines, Search Consoles
Watching out for additional changes made by search engines based on ranking ensures you update your SEO strategy in a timely manner. You need to act immediately when the changes are rolled out to get a jump on your competition. Adopting early to new ranking algorithms gives you enough time to tweak your SEO strategy.
Rising in the ranking greatly depends on how quick you are to adapt to new changes made by Google and other search engines. What better way to stay on top of things than to review search engines’ search consoles? Review the pages that have gone up or down on Google rankings to figure out what you need to work on.
You also need to review your traffic logs to find any significant changes you need to act on. Working with a well-reputed SEO and content marketing partner such as Simplemachine ensures that you have a team of professionals to help analyze this data.
Small businesses need to take SEO seriously as it is the only tool they can leverage to level the playfield. Improving your SEO makes sure your customers can find your small business on Google and other search engines.
