What’s the secret to increasing traffic and profits for your small business? Search engine optimization! But how do you keep up with the constantly changing SEO landscape as a busy business owner? A proactive SEO strategy is critical for small businesses to compete with larger rivals. In the SEO world, things are constantly changing. It would be best to do something new to ensure that your website stays top of search engine rankings. From 2020 and beyond, it’s essential to focus on your small business SEO strategy, as this is where most of your customers will find you. To be specific, in the case of home service industries, many experts can offer SEO technology for home services like the Scorpion. Implementing SEO can help you grow an audience, build your brand awareness, and generate leads. You have an option of seeking a Halifax based SEO company to help you rank on Google.
Check out these six expert tips for small business SEO strategy in 2022;
- Create an SEO Strategy
The importance of an SEO strategy is because search engines have the power to connect you with a large number of potential customers who are actively looking for your products and services online. We don’t just work on optimizing the design and content of your website but also focus on promoting your website through social media, blogs, press releases, and creating backlinks.
When creating an SEO strategy, there are some key elements that you should consider:
- Audience: Who is your target audience? Tailor your keywords and content to suit their needs.
- Competitors: Research what your competitors are doing and use this information to build on their strategies and avoid mistakes.
- Current website performance: Is your website currently performing well in organic search? If not, where can you improve?
- Keywords: What keywords are relevant for your business? Use these keywords to craft content that will rank high in the SERPs.
- Resources: What resources do you have available (time, money, team size) that will help you create a successful campaign
- Timeframe: When do you want to see results? Create a timeline that allows enough time to see results but doesn’t leave you waiting too long!
- Do Your Keyword Research
The next step is to find keywords that will help you optimize your content for the search engines and attract visitors to your website. Some of the most effective ways of finding relevant keywords include:
- Assessing your competitors – You can learn a lot by looking at what your competitors are doing and how they rank for specific keywords. Please list your top competitors, see what keywords they rank for, and do better than them.
- Using tools – Many keyword tools can help you analyze search volume, identify trends, and find new opportunities. The most common ones include Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, Keyword Tool, Moz Keyword Explorer, etc.
- Use Synonyms & Related Keywords
In addition to doing keyword research, you also need to use synonyms and related keywords throughout your content. It will help you get more traffic from Google and other search engines because it will show them that you are covering an entire topic in-depth (instead of only targeting one keyword).
- Use Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are more specific than typical ones, so they tend to have fewer searches, but their intent is much clearer. For example, if you run a flower shop, you may use “flowers” as one of your primary keywords. However, that term also attracts lots of traffic for all sorts of other things related to flowers (and not related at all), like “flower arrangements” and “types of flowers.” Long-tail keywords tend to be more specific and convert better because they are more targeted. For example, “Buy red roses in New York City” is a long-tail keyword with high purchase intent and less competition.
- Optimize Website Pages with Title Tags & Meta Description
Optimizing your title tags and meta descriptions is a great way to help people better understand your site. Both elements should be:
- Relevant to the page’s content.
- Include the keywords that you want to rank for
- Unique for each page.
- Use an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO to make optimizing these elements easier. More on how to use Yoast SEO below!
- Use internal linking and create an XML Sitemap & Robots.txt file.
If you want Google to rank your site higher, then use internal linking properly on your website. When possible, try to link to relevant content from other pages on your site related to the topic at hand. It helps users find more information about a particular topic and makes it easier for search engine crawlers to navigate and index your websites’ pages. Internal links provide more authority from one page of a website to another through PageRank sculpting or page sculpting.
Don’t forget to add an XML sitemap and robots.txt file to your website. It will make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site. It is recommended that you create or generate both of these files yourself to submit them to Google Search Console. In addition, use the robots.txt file to block pages or directories that you don’t want Google to crawl or index. For example, if you have a guide on your site where you store personal information, you can block it in the robots.txt file so that search engines cannot index it.
SEO offers many benefits, including:
- Improving your brand awareness
- Bringing more traffic to your website
- Increasing sales
- Boosting customer engagement
If you’re not using SEO, you’re missing out on potential customers and opportunities for growth. It takes a few changes to start a small business SEO strategy. SEO is the core of your digital marketing plan. As a small business owner, you need to know the essential SEO tips and tricks to get the best results. The experts share their experience on what you have to do to stay ahead of the competition. Search Engine Optimization is vital for companies big and small. It can be easy to think of SEO as something that only large companies need. Still, search engine optimization is essential to small businesses as large enterprises.