Does your current SEO strategy consist of your team optimising your existing content?
Adding internal links throughout the site?
Trying to build shallow relationships for guest posting ops?
Auditing your site’s link profile for the twelfth time this quarter?
Stop it now. It’s a waste of your team’s skills and time, and you can most definitely do better.
To SEO or Not to SEO
It’s tricky, a lot of SMEs are in this very same position. For instance, in 2017 only 17% of small businesses actually invested in real SEO for their business sites, begging the question, what are the other 83% of small businesses doing?
In our experience, they’re either plainly not doing SEO, or they’re doing their version of SEO which is usually a hashed together Google search on the simplest tactics to bring in more site traffic. Obviously this isn’t great, it’s better than absolute nothing, but not ideal.
At its core, search engine optimisation (SEO) is the continued practice of optimising your website to be found at the top of search results pages, and to ensure that your site is functioning effectively for both the search engines and your users. Down to its nature it’s an ever-changing practice, and can’t be done properly by someone who isn’t up to date with the latest algorithm changes, hacks and sector developments.
You’re a small business and time is literally money, so rather than waste time having your team firefight and make the same old checks, if you get them to at least focus on the tasks that will make the biggest difference, your site will be see bigger results in much less time.
With all the big brand names out there dominating the search results, you may be feeling a bit intimidated, which is understandable. Of course a high street shoe retailer isn’t going to compete with Vans, but by addressing some smaller, more local issues with your SEO, you can outrank the big names in your local results, and ensure a much higher and more consistent rate of traffic to your site.
Our resident Google Experts are always on the frontline of SEO, so check out their best SEO tips for small businesses to see impressive leaps in your site traffic!
6 SEO Tips for Small Businesses
Local SEO Optimisation
For sure you can’t compete with the international giants, but you can definitely outrank them in your local search results.
Search engines prioritise users search results based on their proximity, so if you’re the closest organic meat seller in the area to the user, your company will be ranked higher than say, your local Waitrose.
This however, is down to a few requirements:
Google My Business
You need to get your Google My Business page up and running (do it here if you haven’t already!), as this is pivotal to your local search. This free business listing enables your business to show up in searches on Google Maps and in SERPs, as a business, not simply a ranked link. This will include your business name, address & phone number (NAP) and will make your search result far more prominent and likely to receive a click through.
G+ Profile
You should continually update this social business page (your G+ page) with locally focused articles and company updates and events, to ensure that you build brand awareness and reputation in your local area.
Mobile Optimisation
Around 52% of the worlds ecommerce traffic comes from mobile devices, meaning it’s too important a factor in your business strategy to just let slip by the wayside. Mobile is current, it’s evolving and it’s pretty consistent as the leader in device usage over the last few years. Making sure your website is properly responsive, and looks and operates just as well on mobile as it does on desktop is paramount for your user experience.
Users want a seamless experience with your business, and with 40% of online transactions now done via mobile devices, you genuinely can’t afford to miss this step.
Make sure your development and design teams are checking and ensuring your mobile sites functionality regularly to keep on top of any issues.
Site Speed
This is a super important point to make and check off your list, as from July 2018 page speed is now a ranking factor for mobile sites as well! So a slow site won’t just damage your traffic and conversion rates, but will also crush all that work you did moving your search rankings up to page 1.
The slower the loading speed of your desktop & mobile pages, the less traffic you’ll have and the higher the bounce rate you’ll get, which Google will then translate into a lower search page ranking. Frustrating yet entirely necessary to the success of your site and search.
You can check your site speed with Google’s free Pagespeed Insights too, which analyses the speed of your site and offers helpful insights into how you can fix any problems you might have.
Rich Snippets
You see all the extra information under certain search results in Google? The opening times of a shop, any promotions on offer, these snippets are called Rich Snippets. They basically allow you to provide more information to the users in order to get their click through to your site.
The snippet info here for this cake adds information on customer rating, cooking time and nutritional data! Most users would choose this link for this info alone!
This small addition to your search results can make a HUGE impact on your site traffic, especially your local SEO traffic; but immediately showcasing your opening times, promotions, NAP details, local users will be more inclined to use your services than a faceless conglomerate in their nearest shopping mall. Make yourself available!
URLs & Keyword Targeting
Do your URLs make sense? Is your main category page URL a convoluted mess of hyphens and symbols? This may seem unimportant in the scheme of things to you, but for your users, this can be a huge turn-off.
People like to know exactly where they are, and if they’re left confused and all turned around by unintelligible URL structures, they’ll find somewhere else to spend their money.
Not only that, Google will make indexation a nightmare for your site, as without any coherent signifiers, how will the Google bots know how to index your site pages?
Not for nothing, URLs are often kept simple and short for this exact reason, and by making these changes you can expect to see a definite shift in your keyword rankings.
The keyword targeting is all the more important here then, as by making sure that your site pages are targeting the most appropriate and useful terms for your site (the longer the tail the better), your keyword rankings for your site pages will increase steadily. As a general rule of thumb, smaller businesses work better on the long tail keywords; they’re lower competition and have more scope for higher motivated click throughs. Get some thorough keyword research done and use this as your weapon of choice.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
With these 5 steps, you can use your SEO team’s time effectively and more focused on tasks that will get you more results in less time. Firefighting doesn’t work in SEO, you need to make sure you’re taking down your obstacles in a strategic and precise manner.
You don’t need to be a decade-long experienced SEO whizz to see real positive changes on your site, you just need to be able to know which are the smartest moves to make. After all, there are a million and one SEO tactics and hacks out there for experts and beginners to try, but they won’t be successful unless they’re part of a wider, more holistic optimisation plan for your business site.
The best option is to save your time for the bigger fish in your business, and work with people who already know how best to make your site a success, both locally and internationally. Flexible, hacker-minded and expert-insight driven, iNS is the agency that thinks outside of the box to get you the SEO results you want faster not simply with more work, just with smarter work.
So stop wasting your valuable time on SEO, because it will never succeed for you in its current state. Collaborate with our SEO gurus to figure out the shortest road to consistent SEO success, and make a real positive change to your online presence today.
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