Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of ranking on search engines result pages. And where your website ranks can be a huge driver for organic traffic to your website. For that reason, we’re bringing you some very helpful SEO tips for a business website.
But getting started on SEO can be overwhelming. Where should founders begin?
SEO Tips for Small Business Owners
In a recent newsletter, we asked small business owners to share their SEO tips for drawing in more customers to their websites. Here’s their advice, plus some of our own:
1. Learn the Basics of SEO
First, it’s good to get a handle on the basic principles of SEO to ensure you can prioritize the unique needs for your small business and lead your team efficiently in any online marketing efforts.
After reading through this article, two further resources we recommend to better understand SEO as it relates to small businesses are:
- Hello Alice’s “Get Serious About Seo” Guide
- Our blog roundup of 8 SEO courses geared towards small businesses
These courses will teach you more about how SEO works, tools you can leverage to improve your SEO, and how to track your progress.
2. Optimize Your Website Speed & Performance
A great place to start with optimizing your business website for search engines is to make sure your website is fast and functions well.
Ultimately, search engines want to recommend websites with a good user-experience. For that reason, they look closely at the speed of page loads. A slow web page speed will mean search engines are less likely to recommend it to search users. Similarly, be sure to maintain your business website to avoid having broken links.
As this owner attests, increasing site speed is a simple way to boost conversation rates:
“The No. 1 thing that I did for SEO optimization was to get my site loading speeds down to the three-second mark. I did this using HubSpot’s free website grader. It showed me my current load time and areas to get it down. It took some work on my part, but I was able to get the speed down to 2.9 seconds by working with my e-commerce platform; in this case, it is BigCommerce. Once I did this, I have been able to get a much higher conversion rate month-on-month.”
— Chris Willis, Director of Sales & Marketing at C & S Supply
Similarly, this owner recommends optimizing every website feature, including image size and mobile design:
“We would recommend the user ensures they have a mobile and desktop friendly site, website architecture (‘design’) with great flow, fast speed, meta descriptions for all images, and title tags, so their page ranks better for SEO.”
— Raven Harris, founder of The Startups Specialists
Finally, consider whether your website is mobile friendly as another performance boost.
3. Set Up a Google My Business Profile
Another quick win for SEO is to claim your Google My Business Profile. This profile is what shows up on the right-hand side of Google searches for businesses. While Google automatically populates it with the relevant information it can find on your website, by claiming the profile and optimizing it you can further increase your customer leads.
Examples of ways to optimize your Google My Business profile include:
- ensuring your hours are up to date
- encouraging customers to leave reviews
- adding links to all of your social profiles
- answering popular questions about your business
This founder told us that setting up a profile with Google My Business increased their website ranking:
“After attending a small business webinar on marketing and business startups, I followed through with setting up a profile for my business site on Google My Business. I update it regularly and recently linked it with my online store so that my products are automatically updated on my Google profile. My SEO descriptors help my business ‘pop up’ easily on Google internet searches.”
— LaVonne Wallace, owner of Joeny Shop
4. Identify the Right Keywords for Your Small Business
The art of using keywords is less complicated than it sounds. Basically, you just want to make sure you’re using language that your customers are looking for online. Although it can be tempting to phrase things in witty, branded language, consider balancing your copy with tangible phrases customers will be searching for online.
For example, if someone only refers to their dining establishment exclusively as an “eatery” but customers are more likely to search for a “restaurant” in their area, it may be less likely to surface in searches.
“I think all business owners really need to understand the language that their ideal clients are looking for their products and services by. They need to know what their target keywords are. This is very important. In addition, it is important for companies to use those target keywords in their website content and blog!”
— Zhe Scott, owner of The SEO Queen
Luckily, there are plenty of tools to help you compare and contrast search phrases to find what keywords have the most searches:
“In terms of tools, Google Trends, SEMrush, and the WordPress Yoast plugin are pretty good. Honestly, the main thing we used to do is besides writing about problems we were seeing was to go to Google in incognito mode and start typing in terms before homing in on the exact SEO phrase to use. Google will usually display the most frequently searched phrases in that way as well!”
— Erica Ho, founder of Map Happy
Find the keywords that most accurately describe your business and products or services with the highest search volume. Further, you can audit which keywords are currently bringing you traffic using Google Search Console. https://search.google.com/search-console/about
5. Implement SEO Keywords to Your Website Copy
Once you’ve identified the keywords, it’s time to implement them to your website copy!
Chris Willis says that using keywords in his website copy helped noticeably increase his company’s SEO ranking:
“The second thing that I have done, and it seems to be working, is to focus on my top 30 selling items, discover keywords that directly relate to them, and build that into meaningful copy in their individual product descriptions. This way, when people are searching for these products, I’ve got a higher organic search ranking by answering their questions. But what are their questions? I use another free tool, answerthepublic.com, to come up with keywords and relevant questions.”
— Chris Willis, Director of Sales & Marketing at C & S Supply
Beyond general site copy, writing original content on your website such as blog posts is probably the best way to create lasting SEO traction:
“I know it sounds cliche, but I think the focus is really creating great, evergreen content. Our blog focuses on solving travel pain points, and we always took the approach of solving problems we were encountering ourselves. Google really, really rewards original, quality content, and the more in-depth you can go, the better. Generally, if it looks like something that could have been written by anyone else on the internet, that’s probably not a great piece. Really focus on serving the reader. SEO is not Instagram or Facebook, and it’s definitely not instant gratification. Sometimes it takes us several months to rank for a piece, however the flip side of that is posts tend to generate more traffic over time.”
— Erica Ho, founder of Map Happy
But remember, you’ll get more results for your effort if you stick to topics and language your customers are searching for so use your keyword research to inform any content creation.
Final Thoughts
We hope you enjoy these SEO tips for a business website!
Ultimately, SEO is designed to helps search users have the best experience possible. Investing in your SEO strategy is just as much an investment in customer satisfaction as it is in growth.
Although it may seem overwhelming, start with one of these tips at a time and then move on to the next. Also, know that changes in organic traffic can take time so don’t get discouraged if you don’t see results overnight. Stick with steady optimizations and you’ll see exponential returns over time.
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