The top five SEO tips for small businesses

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising your website to improve its search engine rankings. This includes a range of strategies and tasks, and when the process is completed effectively it will boost your rankings for important keywords, and consequently help generate website traffic for your website.

The following five SEO tips are imperative for every small-business owner, and have helped us generate incredible results.

1. Complete the technical website foundation

Each website has a range of technical elements which impact search engine rankings. It is vital to ensure the technical foundation of your website is completed properly as this will subsequently impacts your website rankings. These technical elements include site speed, security, redirects, the XML sitemap, robots.txt tags and more. Search engines use are all things when they select your rankings.

2. Optimise your website to rank for relevant high search volume keywords

It is important in SEO to target your pages towards relevant, high search volume keywords with buyer/action intent, as this will help generate qualified traffic to your website.

One of the best ways to show up on page one for these keywords is to include the keyword in each page’s URL, H1 and H2 headers, title tags, meta descriptions and image alt tags. It is also valuable to complete HTML sitemaps and internal linking from the home page to pages with less traffic. This will help pass domain value from the home page to the less credible pages so that they rank higher.

3. Monitor your website through Google Search Console and Google Analytics

In SEO, Google Search Console and Google Analytics are must-haves. Set up your website in Google Analytics and Google Search Console because this software will help you monitor index issues, see what keywords your website is ranking for, see what pages are receiving the most traffic, understand the demographic of users and more.

These insights will help you better understand your visitors and your website’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

4. Provide a regular supply of valuable content

Give your visitors a steady flow of relevant and interesting content in the form of blogs, articles and videos. This is important as search engines rank websites higher if they have new, relevant content for users to engage with.

To increase the power of your blogs and content, ensure that you have social sharing links so that your visitors can easily share your content to their social media accounts. Also don’t forget to optimise your blog content with a target keyword as this will further emphasise the relevancy of the content to the chosen search term, maximising your chances of ranking first.

5. Boost domain authority with secure backlinks

Build relationships with established industry professionals and high authority websites. This increases your chances of securing to your website a backlink which is a link from a website back to yours. Every site has a “domain authority”, which is the score given from Google to your website out of 100 based on how much it trusts the site, with 100 being an extremely credible site. The higher a site’s domain authority, generally the easier it will be for that site to get first place rankings.

There are a range of other tasks that can be completed to boost website rankings, but these tips are an important start which we have used to help our clients eclipse website industry standards.

Shuey Shujab, Managing Director, Whitehat Agency