Small Business SEO: Top 10 Ways to Improve Rankings

There are plenty of benefits that can be gained from focusing on your SEO efforts as a small business. In these challenging and competitive times, it’s important that you’re making the most out of your marketing strategy and part of that has to do with your search engine results. There are plenty of ways that you can help improve your rankings as a business. Here are the top ten ways to improve your rankings as a small business when it comes to SEO.

1. What Problems Do You Solve For Your Client

When you’re trying to make your clients understand the importance of search engine optimization, it’s good to lay down all the solutions that can help with any problems that they might be having with their own business at the moment. For example, if they’re finding it hard to drive traffic to their website, then utilizing SEO elements can certainly help with strengthening traffic and helping them reach the individuals that they need to reach. SEO might take some time to pay off, but it’s something you want to drive home to your client that it’s worth the effort and lengths needed to benefit the company. There are so many solutions that using SEO can help when it comes to improving rankings and the overall presence of your clients.

3. Improve Technical SEO Issues

A lot of the customer’s interaction on your website relies on the functionality and ease of use. If you’re not providing a functional website that’s easy to navigate or view, then how can you expect anyone to engage with it. Fixing technical SEO issues can be a great way of making every customer’s experience, a unique one. You want to look at how you can make your website mobile-friendly, as many customers will view websites from their mobile phones, rather than on a desktop computer. Speeding up the website’s loading speed can also be very helpful, and these technical issues that you correct are going to help make the user experience a more positive one in general.

Keeping your users on the website for as long as possible is going to send good signals to Google and will hopefully raise the rank of the website.

3. On-Page Optimization

As much as you might want to focus on the website as a whole, it’s important to pay attention to specific web pages too. On-page optimization is the practice of optimizing individual web pages, and this might be referring to both the content and the HTML coding that has been made for that page in particular. For those who need help when it comes to on-page optimization can start by looking at the content on that particular page. What could be improved? Perhaps the length is too short, and you could add on extra words to help beef up the content, making it more appealing to the search engines? Or maybe it’s to do with the lack of headers that are used and what keywords are missing. The latest practices when it comes to on-page optimization are worth knowing so that you can be sure to keep up to date with what works for optimizing a page and what doesn’t. Each web page is going to need something different to the next after all.

4. Using Google My Business

With small business SEO, you need to take advantage of everything that’s out there and available to leverage in your favor. One of these can be Google My Business, where you can list your business so that it shows up when someone searches for it on Google. A personalized and separate section that usually appears to the right, on the result’s page. This can benefit your SEO because Google will acknowledge that your website is linked to a verified business because you listed it. As a result, potential customers and existing customers can find all the information they need on your company without having to actually head onto your website. From your web URL to the business address and contact number, you can put as much or as little on there as you like.

5. Learn What Your Competitors Are Doing

It’s said that you should always keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. And as much as that can be beneficial, you should also balance how much time you spend looking at them and how much time you spend focused on your own business. Your competitors can teach you a lot without you having to lose anything from it, simply by paying attention. Why not look at what your competitors are doing to pull in costumers or how they’re designing their own web pages. You can watch what works and creatively make it into your own and watch what fails. Ask yourself, why did it fail? Could there be something you can do that’s different and will make it a success?

6. Local Business Citations & Listings

Local business citations and listings are important because they can help strengthen your business presence online and more importantly, to Google. In order to improve your rankings, using citations and listings can help internet users discover you as a local business, which can be majorly beneficial as a small business. Being able to impact local search engine rankings can really help to find all those customers that you want to acquire in the local area. You can also actively manage these citations to ensure data accuracy too. It’s worth expanding your knowledge of citations and listings because you can have ones that actually impact your search engine rankings in a negative way.

7. Get Website Links From Local Businesses, Groups And Events

Local link building can help boost your local search engine rankings, which is important if a lot of your business relies on you working with customers in the near vicinity. However, building those local links be hard to do. There are definitely a few suggestions that are worth mentioning in order to get website links from other local businesses, groups and events. One could be to cause a stir and get yourself in the local online newspaper sites, whether it be good or bad press. Sponsoring local events and groups can be handy to acquire website links and is worth doing if you’re trying to focus your attention on certain demographics or those with particular interests.

You might also want to think about reaching out to local influencers who have a following that is useful to your business, whether they have a local following or followers that would buy your product or service.

8. Get Reviews

Reviews are always good to have for your business because it helps to showcase testimonials and positive experiences from previous customers. You need to earn local and general reviews in the right way. That means you shouldn’t be paying for reviews to be made because that’s likely to get found out and it’ll only end up making you look bad. Encourage reviews from asking for it at the end of someone purchasing a product or service. Whether it’s after they’ve checked out or delivered in the form of an email, a week later. You could generate an email list so that you can get customer reviews that way too. There are plenty of ways that you can go about getting reviews without having to do anything that might hinder your efforts.

9. Create Images And Videos To Publish For Competitive Keywords

Keywords are an important part of SEO because if you’re creating content that with the right words, you’re going to have a better chance at reaching your target audience. With that being said, you need to be creating the visual content to help assign the keywords to it. Having a blog on your website can be helpful because that way, you can attach images to posts and use keywords as part of the ALT text. With videos that you publish on YouTube or elsewhere online, using keywords in the title, description, and tags can all contribute to getting them seen by your audience. Keyword research can be profitable, so understanding how they work is necessary to get the most out of all the visual content you put up on your own website and across any social media channels or external websites.

10. Combine Paid Ads With Organic To Get A Quicker Start

Paid advertising and organic go hand in hand, and they can benefit each other in order to improve your rankings as a small business. Organic marketing is where you are creating your own content and allowing potential leads and customers to discover you through keywords, backlinks and other methods that aren’t from just clicking on an ad for your company. However, paid advertising can be handy to help boost organic traffic too. By combining the two, you’re covering all angles and making sure that you get the most out of every opportunity to source and attract your customers.

Improving your search rankings as a small business is crucial, and so it’s beneficial to focus on SEO as much as you can.

Considering SEO for your small business? Contact WSI Proven Results for a FREE analysis.