Five fundamental SEO activities that will improve the search visibility of, and visitor traffic to, your website.
Discussion around search engine optimisation (SEO) for a small business can often be a very painful topic due to the uncertainties of what it takes to succeed, as well as the fact that there is no guarantee even if you are doing the right thing.
Here are five key activities that you can implement yourself.
These are not only easy to implement but are also fundamental – no matter what industry you are in or the size of your business, they will help to improve your domain authority online and attract significant traffic, leads and sales.
- Create dedicated pages for your services/products
This one may seem like common sense, but it is not that common! Having separate web pages (also called landing pages) for each service indicates to the search engines that you are an expert or an authority on that topic – a 500-page book on ‘How to build a house’ is more authoritative than a 10-page book.
Take a financial planning store. It would have different services such as:
- financial strategy
- self-managed super
- tax planning
Instead of having information all on the one page e.g. www.example.com.au/all-services, take the time to write 500 words on each of the topics and place them on separate pages:
- examplebank.com.au/financial-strategy
- examplebank.com.au/self-managed-super
- examplebank.com.au/tax-planning
With just this change in the structure you are able to markedly improve your search visibility within Google.com.au and other search engines.
- Blog your way to the top
These days, creating fresh content regularly is important to being top of mind for your customers, and also provides fodder for the search engines to continually revisit your website and index your pages (so that they can be ranked).
One of the easiest ways this can be done is via a blog. A blog is a communication channel that often sits within the main business website. We recommend creating content regularly, e.g. twice a week – more if possible.
Content ideas:
company announcements – changes to your organisation or launching new product/service offerings, e.g. ‘Introduction of new banking products by BankAus’
industry updates – changes such as specific regulations, e.g. ‘Financial planning rules being reviewed by APRA in 2015’
evergreen content – usually how-tos and the tutorials, e.g. ‘3 ways to reduce your home loan repayments immediately’
More ideas at http://www.problogger.net/52-types-of-blog-posts-that-are-proven-to-work/.
- Leverage affiliation links
Part of building up your website’s domain authority is the ability to attract links pointing to your site from other websites (also known as back links). An attractive back link for our fictitious financial company www.example.com.au would be a link from afr.com, which is the Financial Review. This site has a strong brand presence and good domain authority, and is relevant.
Where can you find back links with good authority and high relevance to link back to you? The answer is, the businesses you are associated with!
Think of the relationships you already have with different organisations – this is a rich starting resource.
Here’s a list of companies that you can start to approach and get them to link to you.
Sources of affiliation links:
- suppliers
- customers
- charities
- sponsors
- partners
- industry bodies
- government sites
- Link between all digital assets
How many websites do you own? Do you control multiple websites or have an umbrella company website with different websites connected to it?
If you only have one website, then skip this tip. But if you do have more than one, then read on.
Following the principle explained in #3, we recommend utilising the domains that you yourself own, to boost the domain authority of your website. This is especially powerful if your other website is related to the webs you are linking to.
You have 100% control over this, since you control both websites.
- Optimise for local search
A large proportion of small-business owners, operate within a well-defined geographical area.
We all want to be found in the local map listings within Google but have you wondered how to actually go about doing it?
Here are the steps:
- Register for Google My Business Listing – google.com/business.
- Add as many details as you can to you listing, including the keywords that you would like to rank for e.g. ‘financial planning perth’
- Link profile to website and verify profile.
- Add reviews to your listing.
- Link to your ‘contact us’ page from you Google+ listing.
- Build citations and back links to each of the separate landing pages via local directories.
- When building the citations, ensure that you are being consistent with your NAPs (name, address, phone number) and that they match the details on your website.
Examples of local directories include Yellow Pages, True Local and Hotfrog.
This will improve the likelihood of your website appearing for your targeted terms.
Start working on at least one key tip straight away to improve your search visibility, visitor traffic and ultimately leads and sales. Dig marketing may seem complicated but it doesn’t have to be. Good luck!
Cheech, Ignite Solutions
This article first appeared in issue 10 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
