Know Your Audience
As a small business owner, it is important to know your audience. This will help you drive the traffic you want—and need, to your website. Based on Google’s newest algorithm, keywords don’t really matter—so don’t keyword stuff for SEO purposes. They look at your content. This is why you need to know what your audience is looking for. Check out the current market trends; do your homework.
Be Authentic
Not only do you need to know what your audience is looking for, but you also need to provide them with genuine, authentic content. Provide them with the expert information they want. Your customers will see your level of knowledge and expertise based on the value you provide them on a daily or weekly basis.
Create a Company Blog
Speaking of offering valuable content your customers want, consider establishing a company blog on your website. Adding a blog to your site will help you increase traffic. Make sure the content you post is value-added. This way, people will find you when they are looking for information. The more high-quality content you post on the internet, the more likely it is that new customers will reach out you. There are plenty of cost-effective ways to add a blog to your website. Adding a blog can increase your traffic just because people are always searching for information. Make sure every blog has a call to action, so people know how to do business with you. Always add links to other pages on your site within your posts. This will keep readers (potential customers) on your site longer.
Take a Page From Your Competition
If your business isn’t showing up on Google, take a look at your competition. See what they’re doing that you’re not.
Optimize Your Page Loading Speed
If your pages take too long to load, customers will look elsewhere. Page load speed is extremely important for SEO because Google now looks at this as a ranking factor. If your page is too slow, it will automatically drop in the rankings. For a helpful tip, check out Google’s page speed test to see how fast your site is and opportunities to optimize.
Size (i.e. length) Matters
This is true… you can’t have blog posts or on page content that is thin with content. As a benchmark try to have at least 750 words per blog post. If your website is very visual in nature, still try to incorporate written text. Having quality content with substance, will go a long way for SEO.
Links
With SEO it’s all about content, but there is a little bit of a popularity contest going on. Let me explain. Google is all about answering the users question by showing content that will answer the questions, from reputable sites. If a user types in a question, and Google can see 10 sites that has a sufficient answer for it, the question comes..which one will Google rank first. Google will take into consideration how many links each site has to it, as a credibility signal. The site with most quality links to it, will likely rank higher as it’s proven to provide value on the web, so much that other sites decided to link to it.
Images & Videos
While this is less important as it pertains to the other topics covered, I want to bring this up. It’s important to add images to your site and blog posts, even better – videos. It’s just a good user experience and breaks up lengthy text. Google’s POV is if it’s good for the user, it’s good for them. Cater towards the user and Google will reward your site. Now, if you upload images, make sure that you have alt text listed on the backend. Since the Google algorithm can’t read what’s embedded within an image, you can add in markup behind the image, so the Google crawler can read.
