Chances are, as a business owner with a digital presence or a marketing professional, you’ve heard about SEO. SEO is the practice of driving traffic to a website via search engines through rankings. Essentially, it connects interested customers to your product. Sounds fantastic? Well it is.
Implementing SEO requires proper strategy and effective execution and with the ever-changing Google algorithm, staying ahead of the curve is important to navigate the highly competitive landscape of website rankings and traffic. Stay up-to-date on the latest changes with our SEO guide for small business.
SEO Basics
Before leaping to action, the first step for SEO is fleshing out the objectives you hope to achieve using this practice. A few common objectives when using SEO is to build organic traffic, reduce bounce rate or traffic conversion. Once your goals are determined, you’ll be able to narrow down what tools and methods you should apply to help your business achieve its goals.
One of the basics of SEO is keywords. There are a plethora of tools - Spyfu, Google Trends and SEMRush, to name a few - that can help your business determine which keywords work best for your site.
However, using keywords isn't the most noteworthy factor for SEO proficiency as it was a couple of years ago. While keywords are still very relevant, using specific long-tail keywords rather than cramming in every broad keyword that is associated with your company proves to be more valuable.
On-page optimization is another critical component to a successful SEO plan. Tactics like optimizing titles, formatting headings and content and internal and external linking makes your page easily readable to search engines. This allows them to scan and index your page using keywords to sort its content to accurately populate SERPs.
We’ve brushed up on a couple of SEO best practices. Now what’s next?
Optimize For Voice Search
In 2020, 50% of all searches were conducted by voice. As the popularity of voice activated products continue to grow - we’re looking at you Alexa - the demand for optimizing your business for voice is pivotal to boost rank in a competitive environment. Thankfully, voice search isn’t too different from the search we’ve come to recognize today. A key difference is format query. Voice search tends to be poised as questions and in full sentences while text search is usually short phrases. A user may type “red shoes”, but when using voice search, ask “Where do I buy red shoes to wear to a summer wedding.” This is one example of why long-tail keywords will be more successful in ranking your content. Local intent also plays an important role in voice search, which leads to our next point.
Local SEO
46% of all searches in Google have “local intent” and this trend will continue to grow as mobile device use does. With local SEO, get started by creating a Google Business Account. This allows you to manage your Google listing and optimize it to rank higher on Google maps. Here, you should update the latest information about your business, including the address, phone number, hours of operation, accepted tender, brand logo, sales or promo and any other information pertinent to your business.
SEO can appear to be daunting to small business owners or startups with limited manpower but the reaped benefits from understanding and implementing correctly are profound. Not quite sure where to begin? Let us know how we can help and sign up for our FREE consultation to help us set your business on a great path for 2021