Top SEO Tips for Small Businesses

Top SEO Tips for Small Businesses

If you are a small business looking to be found on search engines, you can create a checklist to make sure everything is perfect for your next website article. This SEO checklist won’t protect you from crashing and burning, but it’ll help ensure that you have the best chance to rank high in Google.

Top SEO Tips for Small Businesses

Here are the top SEO tips for small businesses:

1. Choose a good keyword

Say your business provides drain repair services like Draintony, you’ll want to find out what people are actually searching for. Your first step should be choosing a good keyword you want to show up for.

Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that will help you choose a good keyword by showing an estimate for any search phrase. You might need to set up an AdWords account to gain access to Keyword Planner. For example, when you type in drain repair in Keyword Planner, you’ll notice that “drain repair” receives 210 monthly searches in Toronto.

Click here to read more about the tools Google has available to help your small business.

2. Research your competition

So now that you have a keyword you want to try and rank for, you’ll want to go undercover and research your competition. Start by going on “private browsing” mode on your web browser and head to Google.com. Going on private browsing mode won’t allow Google to use your past search history to influence what you see on the search results page. Ignore any ad results at the top and look at the content on page one of Google. The results on the first page are your competition.

3. Write the best content

You have your keyword, you research your competition, now it’s time to write the best content. Whether you’re creating a web page, blog post, landing page, or an e-commerce store page, it needs to be better than your competition.

4. Put the keyword in your page title

Finished writing the best content possible? You sure it’s going to be better than your competition? Your next step is to put the keyword you’ve chosen on your page title. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the exact phrase, but it can be if you like. You want to make the title interesting enough so people will actually want to click on it. Think of a title that will make people say “Now that is something I would want to read!”

5. Put the keyword in your header

You need to organize your webpage because it’s helpful in showing Google exactly what your blog post is about. Organize your web page by having a large title at the top, followed by several sub-headers through the page. It’s important to use the exact keyword phrase at least once in your sub-headers.

6. Put the keyword in the name and alt-tag of your image

Use images to cement the idea to Google about your post’s topic. There are two ways to do this: the image name and the image alt tag.

Change the name of the image on your computer before uploading it. Re-name the file to something like “drain repair 1.jpg” instead of a generic file name like “12345.jpg.” Then, upload it to your website.

After you upload the image to your website, change the alt tag to a text that will describe the photo just in case the photo can’t load for some reason on a web browser.

Related Article: 3 ways to Boost SEO On Your WordPress Site

7. Use the keyword in the URL and in the post

Another way to help Google determine what your post is about is the URL. You want Google to choose your website when it’s deciding whether or not to show a certain page. For example, which of the following URLs do you think Google will like better?

• www.draintony.com/12345
www.draintony.com/drain-repair

8. Insert internal links

You should always internally link other pages on your website, especially the ones with your best SEO content.

9. Get external links

External links are from websites other than your own. Google relies on external links to determine how good a post is. Therefore, you‘re going to have to do some link building, which means reaching out to other websites other to ask for links.

Hopefully, these top SEO tips can help your small business when it comes to creating your next website article. If you have any questions, feel free to drop a comment below!

Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/274809

About Retailors Group

The team at Retailors Group has over 15 years of retail sales and field marketing experience. Retailors Group takes the time to understand your brand and align your core values into a tailor-made solution that builds a long-lasting relationship with your consumers.

We offer services in Experiential Field Marketing, On-site Sales Assist, Retail Management, and Digital Marketing.


Small Business on Google

How to Rank a Small Business on Google

If you are a small business looking to be found on search engines, then optimizing your site and brand online is crucial.

Before we get started, I just wanted to make a couple of points clear. First, there is no quick way to get ranked on search engines. Doing SEO takes time, dedication, and consistency. Second, always keep in mind that the goal of a search engine is to show the most relevant results and to deliver the best user experience to a searchers query.

It is important that we start with those two points as I will reference both of these throughout the article.

So, if you are reading this article, it means you want to be found by consumers when they search for a product or service that you offer. For small businesses, your goal should be to found on the “local 3 pack” and search engine results.

Local 3 pack

Local 3 pack refers to the maps that show up typically after paid ads and just before search results. Google usually shows the top 3 local businesses that they deem the most relevant based on what someone searched for. Efforts to optimize your online presence and show up on local map results are often referred to as local SEO.

Search engine results on the other hand give searchers a set of links to web pages that Google deems the most relevant to the user’s query. These can be links to company websites or articles posted on blogs. It can even lead to directory listings or even job postings. Once again, Google will deliver the results based on what they feel the user’s intention was when they made their query.

Now that we know what we are trying to accomplish, let’s get to it!

Here are some steps on how to rank a small business on Google:

1) Assess your Current Digital Marketing Presence

Before you start making all of these efforts to rank on Google, you should really take a step back to assess where you currently stand.

Do you have a website? If no, that would probably be a good place to start. We wrote a previous article on how to establish your online presence.

If you do have a website, you need to make sure that it is mobile friendly and that your speed load times are at a good level.

Google provides tools to check these out. Mobile friendly test here, and load time test here.

Why are these important? As stated at the top, Google wants to deliver a good user experience. Fast load times and being able to access your website on a mobile device both equate to good user experience.

Fixing these two areas can make big improvements in how you rank.

Next up, if you are a local business looking to rank on the local 3 pack, let’s make sure you have your Google My Business (GMB) page created and filled out accurately. Create your GMB Page here.

2) On-Page Optimization

Since Google wants to serve up the most relevant results to a search, let’s make sure first off, we are actually delivering the best and most relevant content.

If some of your content is outdated, now would be a good time to update it. Always layout your content to satisfy questions that your potential customer might be asking about your products, services, and even your company.

If you sell multiple products or have various services, it is always best to have separate pages for each one. If for example, you are a mortgage broker, you’ll want to have a separate page for mortgage renewals and another page for equity lines of credit. The idea is to attempt to rank each service separately and cater to a searchers query appropriately.

Now that you have your website setup up and ready for search engines to find you, it’s time to optimize the page for Google to better understand what is on it.

There are certain on-page components that Google looks at to better understand what is on this page:

  • Slug: This is the URL extension of the page (ie http://yoursite.com/this-is-the-slug)
  • Meta Title: this is what Google shows as the title on their search engine results
  • Meta Description: this is the description under the title that Google shows on their results
  • H1, H2 and other H Titles: These are titles and subtitles found in your content that your visitors will see
  • Alt Image Tags: This is a tag that lets Google know what these images on your page is about
  • Content: pretty straightforward, your content
  • Contact Information using Schema Markup: Schema.org (often called Schema) is a specific vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML to improve the way your page is represented in SERPs. (source: https://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data)

When optimizing your page, you want to make sure there is consistency between your meta title, description, tags, and in your content. Don’t make it spammy!! Find the right balance between designing for your audience and making sure search engines can read it. When stuck, always go with the design for the audience before the search engine.

3) Directory Listing and Social Media Registration

Previously, we stated that you should want to set a goal of ranking in the top three for your business category. We instructed earlier as well to claim or create your Google My Business (GMB) Page, which is what gets listed in the maps for local searches.

Once your GMB page is created and optimized, you want to now be found by both consumers and search engines. In order for Google to confirm who you are, they search the Internet to match up your name, address, and phone number (often referred to as NAP) with as many creditable sources as possible.

rank-small-business-google

A lot of the creditable sources include popular directories like Yelp, Foursquare, Yellow Pages and Better Business Bureau. It is also good to register local business directories. Google also uses social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and so on as credible sources to confirm who you are.

As your customers start giving you reviews on these directories and you are staying active on social media with relevant and sharable content, Google will begin to recognize and understand more about you. The better they understand you, the better your chances are of getting listed on the local 3 pack.

4) Link Building

Imagine telling a room full of people that you are a great basketball player. If nobody knows who you are, likely nobody will take you seriously either. But as soon as one or two other people in the room confirm your claim, the more creditable you become. The more creditable you become, the more Google trusts you, and the more likely you will be chosen by Google to be a relevant source.

That is basically what you want to achieve with link building; you want more people to create links pointing back to your website. When Google crawls the Internet and finds all of these links pointing to you, it is the equivalent to my analogy above of people in a room confirming you are the best basketball player.

Now, if your mom is the one confirming you are the best basketball player, you might not gain too much creditability. If Michael Jordan on the other hand confirms your claim, you can be sure that people, including Google, will listen.

So how do we get authoritative sources to link back to your website? That’s an article on its own, but what you do want to focus on is what you are in control of; creating great and sharable content.

Let’s make sure your website has a blog where you can teach and educate people or your product or service. In those blogs, you can create what is called internal links pointing back to relevant areas of your website. Search engines love when they serve up a relevant article that a user reads and continues to click through to links as opposed to hitting the back button on their browser.

In these blogs, give credit where credit is due. If you referenced an idea or took a quote from someone, create a link for them. Good karma will eventually come back your way when others reference your great content.

Share these blogs on social media and make sure your content is search engine friendly. The more people that read your articles, the better chance you get on either converting the user to a customer or getting a backlink to your website.

5) Submit sitemaps to Google and Bing

Both Google and Bing have tools to help them understand more about you. We wrote a guide on Google Search Consoles here. Bing has a similar tool called Bing Webmaster tools.

Basically, these tools allow you to submit a sitemap, which is essentially a list of the pages on your website. You can even speed up the crawling process of your website with these tools.

There are a ton of other resources available on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools which can help optimize your site and give valuable information like search queries, impressions, click-through-rates, and average position on rankings.

6) Analyze and Make Necessary Adjustments

All of these efforts you make to be found by Google can be exhausting. Worst yet, if you are not making progress, it can be frustrating.

It is crucial that you track your progress and make necessary adjustments. Google provides great tools to make sense of your SEO efforts.

Google Search Console, as mentioned above is a great tool to track everything about search results. Google My Business has a dashboard that gives great insights into how users interact with your GMB page. Google also has an extensive analytics tool, appropriately called Google Analytics, that gives a lot of in-depth information on user behavior and demographics of visitors coming to your website.

There are also a ton of SEO analysis tools available to check out. Relevance.com did a good summary here of 5 of those tools.

As you can see, doing SEO yourself can be daunting but it is totally doable. You don’t need to be an expert or have a bachelor’s degree to rank high on search engines. All you need is time, dedication, consistency, and follow these steps.

About Retailors Group

The team at Retailors Group has over 15 years of retail sales and field marketing experience. Retailors Group takes the time to understand your brand and align your core values into a tailor-made solution that builds a long-lasting relationship with your consumers.

We offer services in Experiential Field Marketing, On-site Sales Assist, Retail Management and Digital Marketing.


Quick SEO Guide for Small Businesses

Quick SEO Guide for Small Businesses

If you’re like most small business owners, you’ve tried different methods of traditional marketing. These methods of traditional marketing include print advertisements such as direct mail and newspaper print ads.

Quick SEO Guide for Small Businesses

However, you’ve probably overlooked methods of digital marketing despite its importance because you don’t understand it. It is crucial for small businesses to have a digital marketing strategy as it adds credibility to your business and offers a greater return on investment.

What we will cover today is an SEO guide for small businesses which will hopefully give better clarity on how it can help you.

What is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting traffic from “organic” or “non- paid” search engine results. SEO is required to increase awareness in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing to improve rankings and drive traffic to your website.

Have you ever wondered how websites or local listings are shown and ranked on search engines? Search engines rank websites and local listings according to their relevance to the public. Having good SEO makes it easier for search engines to understand your content for a higher ranking and an improved user experience.

Do I need SEO for my website?

Yes, you need SEO for your website because most Internet users use search engines to look for what you’re offering. Since search engines provide targeted traffic, the words users type into the search box is valuable. If search engines cannot find your site based on the search query, you miss out on opportunities of getting traffic driven to your website.

How can I improve my SEO?

There are three ways you can improve your SEO:

1. Website usability and appearance

Your website should be responsive and organized. This means that it should be easy for users to navigate through your website to achieve their objectives or find the information they need.

2. Using the right keywords

The visibility of your website depends on the right keywords. You should consider how you would search for things online. So, your keywords should be as specific to your business as possible.

3. Creating original and shareable content

It is important to create opportunities for your business. You can do this by sharing your content such as photos, videos, and blog posts on social media, as well as bloggers and influencers. This will help to increase the rank and visibility of your website when users are searching for your business on search engines.

Can I do SEO for myself?

SEO can be difficult enough to make your head spin. However, even understanding the basics can make a big difference. Depending on your time commitment and willingness to learn, you may decide to use this SEO guide and take on SEO yourself or hire an expert to handle it for you.

There are many digital marketing companies like Retailors Group who can help you tailor an online marketing strategy that will increase brand awareness, customer loyalty, and generate more leads for sales.