SEO For Small Businesses

On-Page SEO

Write Great Content

Content is King (there you go, we managed to squeeze it in). Great content gets traffic, encourages engagement and gets shared (boosting backlinks in the process). The traditional SEO way of writing content has been to write an article and cram it full of keywords. The way to create great content is to write for the reader first, solving their problems in the process. Your keywords play a part, but by writing for the reader you create a much more engaging piece of content. This encourages sharing and interaction, without sounding like a bot wrote your article.

Some of Our Content Basics

• Ensure all pages have at least 2-300 words.

• Use one H1 title per page to describe what the page is about.

• Use subheading tags such as H2/H3 etc to create a structure to your content.

• Don’t Keyword cram – it will make your content flow unnaturally.

• Ensure your spelling and grammar are correct – apps such as Grammarly and Hemingway can make sure your content flows well and has correct use of grammar & word choice.

Use Hero Content

Hero content is well thought out and researched content that offers a great deal of value. This might be something like the “The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing 2021” if you are a marketing agency, or a “Comprehensive Guide to Cheesemaking” if you sell cheesemaking equipment. This content offers significant insight to a reader and can be gated, requiring email signup to access.

This content on its own allows you to get a commitment from the reader by requiring email signup. However, the real benefit of it is the offshoot content it allows you to build. Having this content means you can support it with blog articles, webinars, video content and social posts. These all benefit your brand from an SEO and engagement perspective.

For example “The Minas Tirith Cheese Maker Warehouse” could create a “Comprehensive Guide to Cheesemaking in Middle Earth”. They could support this with a weekly blog article on different types of cheese-making techniques. They could also run a monthly YouTube video making a different cheese. These pieces of content would start to rank for different keywords, increasing website traffic. They could be used to drive email signups, allowing “The Minas Tirith Cheese Maker Warehouse” to target customers with cheesemaking equipment offers through email marketing.

Off-Page SEO

Link Building

Link building is an important part of SEO. One of Google’s main signals in its algorithm is inbound links to your website. It sees these links as a sign of validation that the content you are producing is of value to others. This has over the year led to a lot of underhand (blackhat) techniques.

In the mid-2000s link building was somewhat of a dark art and led to a lot of links being built on dodgy websites. Something that a lot of website owners have come to regret when Google has implemented one of its infamous updates over the years. Irrelevant artificial links (I recently looked at someone’s backlink profile for them and found backlinks from Autocar and Dungeons and Dragons forums for their women’s clothing brand) are now likely to do more harm than good. Businesses offering XX amount of links should be given a wide berth.

Despite link building’s murky past, there is still considerable value to having a link building strategy. Here are a few of our tips to building powerful inbound links to your website /content;

• Ask brands/suppliers you’re affiliated with for a link back – If you sell multiple brands on your website it is a great way is to ask the brands to link back as an approved seller.

• Guest Blog – Approach content creators in your field and ask if you can write a guest article or be interviewed on their site/podcast.

• Something big going on in your business? – Send a press release out to relevant media, you might get an article and valuable link back to your site.

Local SEO

Use Citations

Citations are a powerful SEO technique for small and local business. They come in the form of online directories that people use to find businesses. This is something you may have used yourself without realising when you’ve searched for a coffee shop in Google maps when visiting a town or city. Some popular directories include;

• Google My Business

• Bing Maps

• Yelp

• Facebook

• Yell.com

Why Are Citations Important?

Citations tell search engines that you exist as a business. They are therefore considered an important factor when ranking for location-based searches. You also have the benefit that these sites tend to have high ranking factors themselves. This means a search for your business type, in your town, in a search engine has a good chance of returning your business page on your chosen directories.

How To Use Citations

When registering for citations in directories, it’s important to fully complete your listings to get the most out of them. To maximise the benefits you should;

• Complete a full description

• Upload your logo and associated business images

• Add your correct business categories and services

• Add business opening times

• Add website link

• Ensure address consistency across all directories

• Encourage customers to leave reviews

For More Information on how we can help improve your SEO check out our SEO Services

Want to Increase Your Web Traffic? Get In Touch