SEO Tips For Savvy Small Business Owners

Business owners should be aware of the importance of search engine ranking to their online presence prospects. Billions of searches are done every day on sites like Google, and the search engine performance of a small business’ website can be used to draw clients, consumers, and collaborators in. The practices now known collectively as Search Engine Optimization first emerged in around 1997 – the same time as sites like Google started to dominate the web. Legend has it that the manager of the band Jefferson Starship was annoyed that his charges were not the first thing that popped up when you searched their name – began altering their website to make it rank higher and thus founded the commercial practice of Search Engine Optimization. Since the 1990s, SEO has evolved and diversified massively.

SEO is constantly changing in line with the changing nature of search engine algorithms. Search engines are constantly changing their ranking algorithms – implementing more intelligent machine learning technology in order to create relevant and contextual search results for service users. Learning about SEO is an essential step for any small business owner that is keen on making a mark online. Here are a few key SEO tips for small business owners.

Research Your Keywords

Keyword inclusion is at the heart of all Search Engine Optimization. Keywords are the words typed into a search engine by a service user. The aim of keyword research is to discover the kinds of words that your target audience will use so that you can make sure those words are included in your web copy, backlink articles, and image metadata. Keyword research is essentially market research. Careful analysis of available search data as well as more qualitative data collection about consumer preferences should yield some pretty accurate hints at what potentially powerful keywords might be.

Design For Mobile Compatibility

Modern search engine algorithms quite rightly take mobile compatibility into account when producing rankings. Over half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, according to figures collated by Statista. Don’t trust a web designer if they primarily work on creating the best desktop experience while ignoring mobile user experience. Web designers that also specialize in Search Engine Optimization, like Cocoon FX Media SEO agency Birmingham typically treat mobile experience just as venerably as the desktop experience.

Mobile compatibility usually entails a simplification of overall web design so that user experience can be roughly even across devices. Your site needs to be scalable so that it is just as smooth to look at on a small screen as it is on a large one.

Don’t Forget Metadata

Image and video metadata are hidden SEO gems. While metadata is almost never read by site users, it is taken into account by search engine ranking algorithms. Make sure to include relevant keywords, dates, and locations in the metadata of any image that you upload to your website. Editing metadata is not particularly hard, and it can boost your search engine performance.

Context And Quality

Most small business owners know that content inclusion is one of the key aspects of SEO – it has been for a while. What people are not as aware of is the role that context and quality have on a website’s performance. Modern search engine algorithms use machine learning to assess the grammatical contextual quality of writing in order to ‘figure out’ whether the text is meaningful and useful or just ‘filler’ designed to trick algorithms. Google, for instance, uses similar technology to analyze website content as it does to create meaningful translations in the latest iteration of Google Translate. Ensure that all of the text written on your website is fresh, contextual, and genuinely helpful to your target audience. Refresh your content regularly – search engine algorithms do not favor stagnant pages.

Build Links

Search engine algorithms favor sites that are linked to a large network around the internet. The algorithm ‘reads’ these networks as an authority and ranks sites accordingly. Link building is a time-honored tradition in SEO. It involves the creation of content around the web that links back to the client site. If you do not have the budget to hire a link-building agency, you should ask all your affiliates to link back to your website on their own pages. You should also encourage customers to link back to you when they leave a review or post a blog about your products. The quality of links that lead back to your site do matter. Although obscure blog posts will hold some sway, a link back to your site from a chamber of commerce or professional reviewer’s site will be worth a great deal more to you. This is one compelling reason to always seek expert reviews – even if you know that only a few people might read them.