If you are running a small business, SEO can seem complex. Primarily driven by Google, SEO best practices are always changing, which can make tackling them on your own seem even more difficult. Here are seven easy SEO tips that can have a great impact on your website and which any small business owner can do.
- Create a ‘Google My Business’ account
Google My Business is a free business listing that allows your business to appear in the search engine’s local search results for queries specific to your area of operation. When you create an account for your business, your opening hours, phone number, website and directions are easily accessible to your audience. This will help you to expand your local reach and facilitate better customer interactions.
- Set-up and use Google Analytics
If you want better insights into how visitors use your site, there is no better tool available than Google Analytics. This powerful tool will help you to track bounce rates, the average time spent on pages, identify the main sources of traffic and create customizable reports such as keywords report, which is critical in figuring out how visitors are finding your site. You can even setup tracking if you are running campaigns to determine which ones are resonating the most with your audience. These are only a few of the benefits of Google Analytics.
- Fix broken links & redirects
Link building plays an important role in your business’ SEO. Broken links, not so much. From a practical standpoint, linking out to pages that are not working does not make any sense. Therefore, removing all broken links from your website is a smart thing to do.
- Avoid duplicate content
Duplicate content is common to many websites. Although the intent isn’t normally malicious, many websites are penalized by Google for this, thereby harming their SEO initiatives. If you want your website to perform well in organic search rankings, you must remove all duplicate content from your website. Based on the latest Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines from Google, a web page will receive the lowest rating if most or all of the content is copied. So put a little time and effort into your content, you will be rewarded.
- Create internal links
Creating internal links is another easy way for you to strengthen your SEO strategy. Although they are easy to make, these are often overlooked. Internal links are great for passing authority from one page to another and building an SEO-friendly site architecture. They are also valuable in guiding visitors to high-value pages and helping Google to crawl your site better. If it makes sense, use the key phrase (such as SEO tips) in the anchor text of the link when linking from the high-authority page.
- Add a blog to your website
Adding a blog to your website is an opportunity no small business should pass up. Search engines love websites that are updated regularly. Having a blog is the easiest way for you to achieve this with minimal effort. Your blog will also help you to boost traffic, establish your business as an expert and create better customer relationships.
- Balance content creation with content marketing
If you want to get the most out of your marketing investment, you need to use SEO and content marketing together. Although they are two different processes, each relies on the other for success. SEO is all about content, while content marketing is content. So if you really want to grow your business, the key is to find the right balance between both. This ensures that when your business is found online, visitors and search engines have something meaningful to discover.
Dana Wilson is a freelance writer.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
