DIY SEO Tips for Small Business Owners
DIY SEO Tips for Small Business Owners
Are you a small business owner? Then it’s essential that your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – including local search – is up-to-scratch.
From increasing your online visibility to attracting more customers, having good SEO is extremely important.
And while you might think of SEO as complex, there are a number of simple SEO strategies you can implement yourself.
Below, we bring you the most practical DIY SEO tips for small businesses, to help you improve your website’s ranking on Google and other search engine results pages – without the need for a large budget or technical expertise.
1. Know your audience
First things first, you absolutely need to know your audience. Who are they? What are they searching for? By knowing their interests, needs and online behaviour, this will help you create content that resonates with them.
This in turn will drive more traffic to your website. Which is super important, because SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic to your site than organic social media.
How to achieve this:
Create customer personas
Outline the demographics of your ideal customers:
· Age
· Gender
· Income level
· Location
· Education
· Family status
· Interests
Outline the psychographics of your ideal customers:
· Passions
· Interests
· Pain points
· Challenges
· Motivations
· Values communication preferences
Outline the behaviour of your ideal customers:
· Which of your products or services are they interested in?
· How did they come across your solution?
· What mode of payment do they use to purchase your products or services?
2. Optimise your website for mobile
With more than seven billion people using smartphones to browse the internet, it’s vital that you have a mobile-friendly website. You may also be aware of Google’s mobile-first indexing migration, which starts today!
This means that your site absolutely needs to prioritise mobile-first indexing. Otherwise, it risks not being indexed.
How to achieve this:
Responsive design: Make sure your website uses a responsive design that automatically adjusts to fit any device and screen size.
Test mobile friendliness: Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. This enables you to check how easily visitors can use your page on a mobile device.
3. Use relevant, targeted keywords
It’s essential that you incorporate relevant, targeted keywords into your website’s content and metadata. This helps search engines understand what your site is about and rank it for those terms.
However, avoid stuffing keywords and keyword phrases into your copy. This is an outdated SEO method that will ultimately harm your rankings.
How to incorporate keywords:
Perform keyword research:
Tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic can help you find relevant keywords that your audience is searching for.
Once you identify the most relevant keywords to your business that have good search volumes, you can begin to embed them naturally and meaningfully into your content.
In addition to your main content, your keywords should also be incorporated in your:
· Titles
· Headings
· Meta descriptions
Also, use long-tail keywords (phrases of three or more words) to target more specific searches and attract highly interested visitors.
4. Create high-quality content
In the world of SEO, content remains king. When you create high-quality, relevant and engaging content, this can help you to attract visitors, earn backlinks and improve your local search engine rankings. You’ll also be capitalising on the fact that 58% of businesses don’t optimise for local search.
How to achieve this:
Blog regularly: Write blog posts about topics that are relevant to your industry and audience. Make sure your content is interesting, useful to your audience and easy to read.
Answer commonly-asked questions: Create content that answers those common questions your current and potential customers have. This can help you rank for voice searches and featured snippets.
Use multimedia: Incorporate images, videos and infographics to make your content more engaging and shareable.
5. Optimise on-Page SEO
Want to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic to your website? Then you need to optimise individual pages of your website.
Optimising on-page SEO is the process of carrying out a number of straightforward steps.
Here’s what you need to do:
Create title tags and meta descriptions for all pages: Write compelling and descriptive title tags and meta descriptions for each page. Where possible, include your primary keywords here.
Insert headers and subheaders: Use headers (H1, H2, H3) to structure your content in a visually-appealing way. You can also embed your keywords here where relevant.
Use internal links: Link to other relevant pages on your site. This improves navigation and helps search engines understand your website’s structure.
Optimise images: For every image you upload to your site, ensure it has appropriate file names and alt tags. This helps search engines to understand the content of your images.
6. Improve your website’s speed
What happens when your site loads slowly? You frustrate your visitors and negatively impact your rankings.
On the other hand, when your site loads quickly, this ensures an elevated user experience. Not only that, but this is favoured by search engines.
How to improve your site’s speed:
Optimise images: Compress images to reduce their file size – without sacrificing on quality.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN can distribute your content across multiple servers. This reduces load times.
Minimise HTTP requests: To do this, reduce the number of elements on your page. For example, minimise scripts, images and CSS files, to prevent slow loading times.
Leverage browser caching: Enable browser caching to store some of your site’s resources in visitors’ browsers. This ensures faster loading on subsequent visits.
7. Build high-quality link building
Link building, also known as backlinking, is when you link from other websites to yours. They are critical in SEO. High-quality backlinks can significantly improve your site’s authority and ranking.
How to get backlinks:
Guest blogging: Request collaborations with other reputable blogs in your industry. Write a guest post (or more) and include a link back to your website.
Local directories: List your business in local online directories. Some of the best options include Google Business Profiles, Yelp and local chamber of commerce websites.
Create shareable content: Produce valuable and shareable content that others will want to link to. This includes infographics, guides and research reports.
8. Make use of social media
Social media signals don’t directly impact SEO. However, social media can drive organic traffic to your website, which helps your content get discovered by a wider audience.
How to successfully use social media:
Share your content: Regularly post your website content on your social media channels.
Engage with your audience: Make sure you have an active presence on social media. Respond to as many comments and messages as you can, and engage with your followers to build a community around your brand.
Encourage sharing: Make it easy for visitors to share your content by adding social sharing buttons to your website and blog posts.
9. Monitor your SEO performance
SEO isn’t a one-off thing; you need to make sure you regularly track your SEO performance. This helps you to understand what’s working and what needs improvement.
How to achieve this:
Google Analytics: Use Google Analytics to monitor your website traffic, user behaviour and conversion rates.
Google Search Console: This tool helps you track your site’s search performance, fix issues and understand how Google views your site.
SEO Tools: Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs and Moz can provide detailed insights into your SEO performance. They also offer recommendations for improvement.
Is your small business implementing these SEO techniques?
Improving your small business’s SEO and local SEO needn’t be overwhelming or expensive. With a little time and effort, the above measures can be implemented and carried out on a regular basis.
Remember, SEO is an ongoing process, so keep researching, learning, experimenting and refining your SEO strategies to stay ahead of the competition.
Ready to accelerate your SEO success? Contact the EWM team today.