How small businesses can improve their website’s SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a hot topic in the world of internet marketing, but unless you have the time to learn the complex processes yourself, or you have a marketing budget to outsource your search engine optimisation, you may be thinking that you’ll never be able to rank for competitive terms related to your industry.

How small businesses can improve their website’s SEO

However, there are several ways to improve your rankings on search engines without much time or effort. Here’s how.

  1. Determine your keywords

Before you start your SEO journey, you need to determine the keywords that you’d like to rank for. Make them simple and local – if you run a newsagent in Newcastle, for example, then your keyword could be ‘Newcastle newsagents’. Use tools like WordStream and Ubersuggest to analyse your keywords, and then find out which businesses are ranking for those keywords by carrying out a simple Google search. From there, you’ll know your competitors, and you’ll be able to track their every move to improve your SEO.

  1. Update your copy

As soon as you’ve decided on the keywords you want to rank for, add them to all of the relevant copy on your website. Meta titles, meta descriptions, blog posts and homepage content – anywhere there’s an appropriate opportunity to use your keyword, do so. It isn’t difficult to find opportunities to include keywords – look at each of your pages and do a quick check. From there, you can add in keywords as and when you see fit, or you could even consider rewriting your copy from scratch.

However, do not include keywords for the sake of it – keyword stuffing, as it’s known as, is against Google’s code of practice, and could see your website penalised. Only include keywords naturally and when it is appropriate to do so.

  1. Start blogging

Blogging is one of the simplest, and most effective, search engine optimisation techniques around, so it’s important that you set up a blog on your website and produce content on a regular basis. You can do so by building your website in WordPress, or creating a separate section of your website using a blogging platform.

Regardless of your industry, there are hundreds of subjects that you could blog about, including tutorials, industry news and updates on your business. Remember to include the keywords that you have selected and link to the appropriate pages on your website, and you’ll soon see that you start to rank for terms in your industry.

There are lots of ways to make your content marketing more effective, such as using visual content like infographics, GIFs and videos to add interest.

  1. Add internal links

One of the biggest mistakes small business owners make is with their internal linking structure. From an SEO perspective, you should aim to include as many links to other pages on your website as you can – bake them into sidebars, footer menus and in the copy itself.

  1. Get links

One of the most important factors in a website’s ranking is the number of links it has, so building links from third-party websites is something that you should do. Ask customers to add a link to your website from their own, add your website to directories and consider guest blogging – the art of contributing your expertise to another website is not dead yet.

Wrapping Up

Search engine optimisation can be complex and expensive, but the five tips we have offered in this article will go a long way in helping your small business rank. SEO is all about consistency, so remember to always include the same keywords, continue to build links and keep up with your content marketing strategy – only then will you be able to find success online.

If you do choose to follow the tips that we have offered in this article, share a comment and let us know how you get on. We’d love to hear from you.

Special Thanks to the Author – Max Greene for Writing Awesome tips

Max Greene is the Managing Director of Muffin Marketing, a small business marketing agency offering content marketing, social media management and search engine optimisation.