3 Easy Ways Small Businesses Can Improve Their SEO

According to BrightEdge, an eye-popping 40% of business revenue came from organic search traffic in 2017. Because of stats like this, most business owners understand that by ignoring search engine optimization, your business is leaving a lot of money on the table. Regardless, many business owners still feel overwhelmed about SEO.

The topic can be confusing and filled with jargon. It can be hard to comprehend what is a pretty complex process in the big picture. And if you want to pay someone to do it, you will have to make a serious investment.

Even though a comprehensive view of SEO is indeed complicated, here are three easy ways your small business can improve its SEO.

Find the Best Keywords for Your Biz

The first big step of search engine optimization is identifying which phrases your business should target for each page of your website. I would suggest selecting on 1-2 per page to get started. There are three main variables you want to weigh when selecting your keywords: relevance, volume, and competition.

Gauge Relevance

Since I’m a search engine optimizer in Utah, I might choose something like “Salt Lake City SEO” as my keyword. This phrase is highly relevant to the content on my page, and it’s a phrase that business owners looking for SEO are likely to search. If your phrase has nothing to do with the actual content on the page, or if the intent of searchers using that phrase doesn’t really line up with your content, your rankings and traffic will suffer.

Check Search Volume

Next, we’ll take a look at search volume. There are lots of potential keyword research tools out there from places like Moz and SEMRush, but I’ll focus on a free tool offered by Google, namely Google Keyword Planner. You can use this for free with a Google Ads account. Higher search volumes mean higher traffic potential, so volume will play a big factor in your keyword selection.

Account for Competition

Though you want a decent search volume for your keyword, the highest volume phrases aren’t necessarily best for your small business. High volume, generic, broad phrases will have lots of people competing to optimize for that phrase, which means ranking for it will take a lot more work. It’s often better for small businesses to choose a more narrow phrase with a location, such as my previous example of “Salt Lake City SEO”. Though the search volume is lower than “SEO”, you can be the bigger fish more easily in a smaller pond, and this keyword has the dual benefit of targeting a local SEO phrase.

Apply Your Keyword in the Correct Locations on the Page

There are four places you want to be sure place your targeted phrase: the SEO title, the main header tag (H1), the first paragraph of text, and in the URL.

Adding an SEO Title

I’m going to describe the process for Wordpress users since the platform is so common. First, download, upload, and activate the free plugin Yoast SEO. Then go to the edit mode of the page you’re working on, and scroll down to the Yoast SEO section. Click on “edit snippet” and add in your keyword along with your business name. It should look something like this: “Keyword | Business Name”. This is what searches see as your search result title, so make it look and sound good. Go ahead and add a meta description as well since it will show below your title in the results, then close the snippet editor.

Optimizing H1 Tag

In Wordpress, pages and posts will have a headline text box near the top of the page. Change the headline of your page with the keyword at the front. It’s okay to add articles and prepositions within your phrase to make it read naturally, and you can add text after your phrase as well to make it pop.

Adjust Your URL

In that same page edit mode, look below the headline text area to find the permalink. Edit this to include your keyword with dashes replacing spaces in your phrase. Understand that once you change your URL, Google will see it as an entirely new page. This means that if you’ve built up lots of authority already, you may choose to leave this untouched.

Add Your Keyword to the First Paragraph

This step is pretty self-explanatory. Just make sure you use your keyword phrase in the first paragraph of content. Try to make it fit naturally within the context.

Publish New Content Regularly

Another big factor in Google rankings is how often your site produces new content. For a lot of small businesses, the easiest way to do this is to create a blog section and post 2-4 articles a month. Depending on your business and industry, you may be already creating high-level content. Content can mean videos, articles, new products, press releases, podcasts, and more. Find what fits well with your industry.

This is just a brief overview of one small part of SEO, but if you’re doing these things wrong, you could make a big impact by fixing them.

About the author

Anthony M. Christensen is a writer, digital marketer, contractor at Webaholics, and owner of Astronautical LLC. He earned a BS in English at Utah Valley University. He loves art and wandering the mountains and deserts of his native state, Utah. Connect with him on LInkedIn.

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