Brilliant SEO Strategies for Small Business Owners.

If you are satisfied being a neighbourhood business, then you might not need marketing. But once you decide that you want to go beyond your immediate environment, then marketing is essential. However, we cannot deny that marketing is expensive, especially considering the stiff competition for customers.

And you are not just competing with other small businesses like yourself, you are also competing against conglomerates with a large marketing budget. This is why small business owners are advised to take advantage of online marketing, but especially SEO as it is probably the cheapest form of marketing for small businesses. 

However, as expected, you should know that the fact that it comes cheap doesn’t mean it is easy. If you don’t know the brilliant SEO strategies to employ, you might not get much out of the goldmine that is SEO. On the other hand, getting your SEO right will increase your brand visibility and profit. So, let’s started.

Carry Out Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the most important parts of SEO. This is because before you start on-page SEO, you need to research the right keyword to use. Remember that you need potential customers who are looking for businesses like yours. So, you want to help them find you. How do you do that? You use keyword research to find relevant search queries. 

You can use keyword research tools to find what people interested in your kind of business are searching for. Other ways to do keyword research is by checking what your competitors are writing on, what your customers are likely to be interested in and what your customers are asking you. For instance, if you sell wristwatches and your customers constantly ask you if you think they should buy smartwatches or traditional watches, you can write on the pros and cons of smart and traditional watches like SellOff.ng did. 

So, basically, your job is to find what people looking for your kind of business are interested in and giving them answers to their queries or solutions to their problems. 

Leverage Local SEO

Google algorithm focus searches locally and they might as well because even though the world has gone global, most people will still interact more with businesses closer to them before considering one far from them. What is the implication of this for you? It simply means you should prioritise local SEO to show Google you have an existing business in your locality. That way, Google can suggest your business to people in your town/city/state/country. You can get listed through Google My Business; read more on setting up Google My Business if you have not done so. Apart from optimising locally for Google, you should also take advantage of other local listing or classified ads platforms like Jiji.ng, Tripadvisor, SellOff.ng, Finelib to increase your visibility. 

Not to Forget Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of optimising the technical aspect of your website so search engines can effectively and correctly crawl, index and render your site. If your website does not meet the technical requirements, your great content can only do so much to help your ranking. While you will need to employ/hire a web developer for some of the technical aspects like structured data, optimising page speed, you can handle other aspects on your own. They include;

• Creating and submitting a sitemap. You can use the different plugins available to create a sitemap.
• Fix your broken links
• Take out pages that are not performing
• Optimise your images by adding the appropriate alt text.

On-Page SEO Is Important

On-page SEO is probably the most popular aspect of SEO that most people know about. It has to do with optimising your content to ensure they are picked up by search engines as relevant content for their searchers. 

Keyword in Content

Make sure that your keyword appears the required number of times in your content. But remember to make it as natural as possible. Don’t be one of those people that fill up their content with the keyword, without considering whether it makes sense or not. Even though you are trying to rank, you are still writing for people; put them in mind when creating your content. This is because the search engines will always still go where the readers/users go.

Image Alt-Text

Like I already mentioned, your images should contain an alt text and the alt text is usually the keyword or your SEO title (containing the keyword).

Inbound and Outbound Links

Link your content to other contents in your website (inbound) and from another website (outbound). However, be sure that both links are related to your content. 

Meta Tags

Meta Tags tell the search engines and readers what a certain webpage is all about. They are not typically part of the content and do not appear on the website. The two more popular meta tags include:

• Meta Title: This can be different from the actual headline or search engines will pick the headline automatically as the meta title. It should be around 60 characters and should contain your keyword.
• Meta Description: As the name implies, the meta description describes in summary what the page is about. It informs both search engines and searchers what your content is about. It is limited to 160 characters and the best practice is to keep it within the limit.

You can read more on Meta Tags here. 

Ensure Website User-Friendliness

As a bonus, let me add the importance of making sure your website is friendly to users. You have to make sure that your website is friendly; easy to navigate/operate and loads fast. This is because online users don’t have the patience to wait for a website to load or to figure out how a website works when there are other alternatives. If users keep leaving your website without spending a considerable amount of time there, it sends a wrong message to search engines and this doesn’t help with your SEO. So, make sure your website is user-friendly. 

On-Page SEO Is Important

On-page SEO is probably the most popular aspect of SEO that most people know about. It has to do with optimising your content to ensure they are picked up by search engines as relevant content for their searchers. 

Keyword in Content

Make sure that your keyword appears the required number of times in your content. But remember to make it as natural as possible. Don’t be one of those people that fill up their content with the keyword, without considering whether it makes sense or not. Even though you are trying to rank, you are still writing for people; put them in mind when creating your content. This is because the search engines will always still go where the readers/users go.

Image Alt-Text

Like I already mentioned, your images should contain an alt text and the alt text is usually the keyword or your SEO title (containing the keyword).

Inbound and Outbound Links

Link your content to other contents in your website (inbound) and from another website (outbound). However, be sure that both links are related to your content. 

Meta Tags

Meta Tags tell the search engines and readers what a certain webpage is all about. They are not typically part of the content and do not appear on the website. The two more popular meta tags include:

• Meta Title: This can be different from the actual headline or search engines will pick the headline automatically as the meta title. It should be around 60 characters and should contain your keyword.
• Meta Description: As the name implies, the meta description describes in summary what the page is about. It informs both search engines and searchers what your content is about. It is limited to 160 characters and the best practice is to keep it within the limit.

You can read more on Meta Tags here. 

Ensure Website User-Friendliness

As a bonus, let me add the importance of making sure your website is friendly to users. You have to make sure that your website is friendly; easy to navigate/operate and loads fast. This is because online users don’t have the patience to wait for a website to load or to figure out how a website works when there are other alternatives. If users keep leaving your website without spending a considerable amount of time there, it sends a wrong message to search engines and this doesn’t help with your SEO. So, make sure your website is user-friendly. 

On-Page SEO Is Important

On-page SEO is probably the most popular aspect of SEO that most people know about. It has to do with optimising your content to ensure they are picked up by search engines as relevant content for their searchers. 

Keyword in Content

Make sure that your keyword appears the required number of times in your content. But remember to make it as natural as possible. Don’t be one of those people that fill up their content with the keyword, without considering whether it makes sense or not. Even though you are trying to rank, you are still writing for people; put them in mind when creating your content. This is because the search engines will always still go where the readers/users go.

Image Alt-Text

Like I already mentioned, your images should contain an alt text and the alt text is usually the keyword or your SEO title (containing the keyword).

Inbound and Outbound Links

Link your content to other contents in your website (inbound) and from another website (outbound). However, be sure that both links are related to your content. 

Meta Tags

Meta Tags tell the search engines and readers what a certain webpage is all about. They are not typically part of the content and do not appear on the website. The two more popular meta tags include:

• Meta Title: This can be different from the actual headline or search engines will pick the headline automatically as the meta title. It should be around 60 characters and should contain your keyword.
• Meta Description: As the name implies, the meta description describes in summary what the page is about. It informs both search engines and searchers what your content is about. It is limited to 160 characters and the best practice is to keep it within the limit.

You can read more on Meta Tags here. 

Ensure Website User-Friendliness

As a bonus, let me add the importance of making sure your website is friendly to users. You have to make sure that your website is friendly; easy to navigate/operate and loads fast. This is because online users don’t have the patience to wait for a website to load or to figure out how a website works when there are other alternatives. If users keep leaving your website without spending a considerable amount of time there, it sends a wrong message to search engines and this doesn’t help with your SEO. So, make sure your website is user-friendly. 

And that’s it; what other brilliant SEO strategies would you recommend for small businesses? Let us know in the comment section.