It is important for any website to have good, quality SEO that will support you In the long run and generate organic traffic, so why would it be any different for small businesses? In order for small businesses to have the greatest Success online, it is important they maintain good SEO.

Businesses Need The Best SEO Strategies

Small business SEO operates by a different set of rules, one in which businesses see great difficulty getting established early and in time. On top of building a local brand, they have to build their online presence and this takes time.  The best SEO strategy for small businesses is to start early, add fresh quality content, and have good SEO. Good SEO can be reached by optimizing the three types of SEO discussed below.

Is SEO Important For Small Businesses

SEO organic search is a huge fundamental for a websites performance and plays a huge rule in ultimately getting users to complete a conversion or engagement. 

When discussing SEO we are talking about your website’s ranking on Google, a top search engine on the market. by establishing and building good SEO early you can set yourself up and your company up by leveraging this free marketing tool.

SEO Ranking Factors To Consider

Many New businesses most likely won’t show up on Google within the first 6 months unless given the exception that the brand or product name is unique enough to not be highly ranked for.

if your small business is competing for a specific keyword or has a common the name then it is harder to build traffic and harder to rank for those keywords and so it takes a longer time to rank. This is why I see how is very important to small businesses and why small businesses need the best strategies.

You can increase your ranking with good quality content that is well aged like a fine wine and not left in the dark but maintained, meaning keeping the content consistent.  By consistently producing content you will continue to drive traffic and Google will take notice and give you greater Authority for this. Google gives a better rank if you keep your content updated, simply refresh your pages from time to time.

How Do Businesses Use SEO

SEO is free marketing tool that can be leveraged if understood and utilized correctly. SEO is relatively cheap, its virtually free but does require some work. SEO supports your bottom-line over time with good SEO implementation supporting you for years with positive sustained growth.

Why there is no easy way to calculate the ROI of SEO like paid per clicks, but you can still measure it with tools like Google analytics  to track your organic traffic. It is still worth understanding and measuring your actions to view the change on performance and traffic. 

building a brand and building good SEO go hand-in-hand when it comes to operating a brick and mortar store and online business.  SEO promotes your brand by helping Drive traffic to your website. Good SEO is essential for good traffic.

SEO helps connect businesses with consumers to answer questions, whether it’s finding a product or finding information about a product or topic. By answering these questions you too can rank #1.

What Types of SEO are there?

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is the content on your website and is the biggest impact to SEO.

The general saying in online marketing is that  “content is king.” The focus of On-Page SEO is on improving SEO specific to each page.

This SEO includes:

  • Keyword Research: Finding the best keywords or topic to include in the content of a page
  • Keyword Optimization: Using the keywords in combination to reach your target from your research.
  • Content Creation: Publishing high quality content that is relevant and answers a question.

It is not as important today it was in the past to conduct heavy keyword research and keyword optimization because Google has leaned away from that In the previous algorithm changes. 

Google is focusing more on delivering high quality content to its users and you should too! 

Technical SEO

All the items on your website that is not the content.

This includes strategies to improve site’s backend and data flow. Technical SEO makes it easy for search engines to crawl and understand a websites content based on readability and estimated user experience. This is the first step to good SEO and getting ranked by google. 

Some examples of Technical SEO that can be improved:

  • Site speed
  • Mobile-friendliness
  • Indexing
  • Crawlability
  • Site architecture
  • Structured data
  • Security 

Easy way to review the technical SEO of your website is to view its results on GTMetrix.Com or at Pingdom.Com. Enter your website to receive a free report on the multiple elements that would be included in your text technical analysis.  Triton through this overtime however you don’t need a perfect score. This will give you a good idea of your technical SEO so you can improve.

Mobile-friendliness and site speed have a heavy impact on your rank in this Factor! Google is really looking for mobile first websites and how quickly they can deliver its content, hitting top marks in these categories will surely give you a big boost to your SEO ranking.

Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO is the authority your website has built on the web and it values your influence, relationships, and activity with other websites and users on the web.

Its main goal is to build your website’s reputation and authority. This tells search engines whether or not a website is an ideal search result based on its reputation, reliability, and Trust. Using these values when determining if you should link to another site or not will help you get the best SEO building links.

Off page SEO is related to establishing Domain authority and Page authority through backlinking.  specifically acquiring a large amount of high quality, relevant backlinks from other websites that point to your website. These websites should also have a good reputation and be a trusted source. once that website links to your website and adds value and establishes a relationship built on trust, google will see this and give you a better ranking. Google can also tell when your link building is artificial or purchased and if caught your website may never rank for google again. It is best to avoid get SEO quick schemes and follow best practices for building strong SEO growth over time.

Examples of Off-page SEO:

  • Affiliate Linking
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Social Booking
  • Link Building
  • Guest Blogging

You can see an example of a few websites that add authority for local business marketing here: Hubspot.com

SEO Is Always Changing

SEO is not a short-term solution it is a long-term strategy with noticeable impact in the first year. It takes time to build good SEO because it is based on quality and consistency as set by the search engines guidelines, in all cases we refer to googles guidelines. You must stay up to date with current SEO guidlines and continually try to exceed the requirements. You can view a regularly updated list by Moz.com by clicking here.