The increasing trend to research products on Google plays a vital role in making purchasing decisions. Recently, Google searches have increased rapidly as consumers prefer to buy/review products online. According to the research, 75 percent of Internet users never scroll past the 1st page of search results.
This noticeable change in consumer behavior makes search engine optimization, better known as SEO, an integral part of sales and marketing strategy for small businesses to optimize consumers’ search results. A strong SEO strategy helps to reach your target audience, allows potential customers to explore what your website offers, and convinces them into buying your products.
Implementing good SEO practices can also help in improving the user experience (UX) and capability of your website. Consumers trust top search engine results and therefore, optimizing keywords that appear in the top positions of search engines is likely to attract visitors to your website. Once they’re on your website, well-optimized content can guide consumers into conversion and increase sales for your business.
Here are some effective small business SEO strategies you can follow to rank higher on Google and other search engines:
Create SEO-friendly Content
A well-optimized and high-quality content piece can help improve your small business to rank higher in search results. To create SEO-friendly content, it is crucial to assure & write catchy headlines, build chronological structures of your content and use optimal length for paragraphs as well as content overall.
Descriptive and catchy titles can help your audience understand the basis of your content. For example, a small party rental business is planning to create content on how party rental software has helped their business perform efficiently and save time. The title of this content can be “8 effective ways a party rental software can help your business.”
To write catchy and SEO-friendly titles, you need to keep target keywords at the beginning. This way the audience will know about the topic discussed in the blog. Google displays the first 60 characters in search results so make sure your title falls under those 60 characters to grab attention at first instance. You can also use different headline checkers to see your titles’ length, readability, and grammar structure.
Every content follows a solid structure; introduction, main body, and conclusion. A well- structured content makes readability easier for your audience. Dividing your content into these steps organizes your thoughts and helps to stay focused along the main theme of your articles. The opening paragraph can summarize the main points, the main body covering those points in detail and a strong conclusion can serve as a call to action for your readers.
Keyword search
Before content creation, keyword research is the first step to identifying a list of high-volume targeted keywords that are commonly searched by your audience. With detailed keyword research, you can create a good SEO strategy to achieve your ranking goals.
You need to select target keywords based upon your brand, product, or keywords most commonly used by your target audience. It is important to create content that is relevant to your business for long-term SEO ranking. Choosing a unique and specific keyword can help you achieve better results than semantic keywords everyone is writing on.
Once the keyword relevance to business is selected, it is also important to run a competitor keyword analysis. This gives you an understanding of keywords used in the industry and identifies gaps. Keyword gaps can exist because of its high competition to rank; however, you can always look for related keywords that have a medium competition to rank. You can also use keyword research tools like SEMrush, or Google Keyword Planner to narrow down your search in the right direction.
Detailed keyword research is a long process but if done correctly, it can contribute to a long-term SEO strategy for content development.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Optimizing keywords helps to focus on creating useful and informational content that includes keywords in context and at appropriate places. Choosing the primary keyword for your content and placing it where relevant is necessary for SEO ranking. However, it is also important to keep keyword density within 2% to avoid keyword stuffing in your content.
When you use the primary keyword unnecessarily, the user experience is at stake. The audience will be frustrated by multiple unnecessary keyword usage in the article. It will help in improving the bounce rate of your website and divert the audience away from your business.
Simple and Easy-to-read URLs
Unique Resource Locators (URLs) are links between your content and user. It’s an address consisting of protocol, domain name, and path. Simply put, the protocol is http:// or https://, the domain is where the website is located and the path is the exact location of the article/page. So why need well-structured URLs?
A logical and well-structured URL will help users to easily browse the website and improve user experience. SEO-friendly URLs are simple, easy to read, and include relevant keywords for your audience to click your link when searching for relevant results. For example, if your audience is searching for small rental businesses then a URL like: https://blog.ezrentout.com/small-rental-business/ has a higher chance of being clicked.
SEO-friendly URLs help Google to measure the contents of your website and its relevance to search queries. A simple and easy-to-read URL will help search engines to index your website for relevant keywords. Increasing your page rank is really much possible if you keep your URLs short and simple. The shorter the URLs, the more likely it is to rank them higher.
Optimize on-page SEO
Small businesses primarily focus on on-page SEO for their websites to earn traffic organically. On-page SEO is the easiest and most cost-effective way to optimize your website for SERP ranking.
Focusing on main SEO components is important but a holistic SEO strategy can rank your website higher. The titles of your article can follow AP heading style, Images’ description can include primary keywords and meta descriptions can be written to convey the context in the best possible way. All of these small streamlined efforts can help improve your website’s visibility in search results.
