SEO tips for small business websites: 10 ways to rank higher

We’ll talk about 10 SEO best practices for your small business websites. So it’s easy to fall victim to these fads or trends regarding improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but be mindful of that because while a quick fix can be delicious and appealing, it can hurt your Search Engine Optimization in the end.

Table of Contents

Step 1: Research Your Keywords

It’s the Google keyword planner, remember showing me that I remember it was beneficial, and that’s great because you can find relevant keywords that online visitors enter when searching, so this is an essential thing about long-tailed keywords so that you can get more specific.

Those long-tail keywords are said I do coaching. You don’t want to try to capture the market on coaching because there’s so much competition. It would cost you a fortune to rank there, but say I’m a coach to help. You want to research what keywords make sense. The trends and things like that.

So if we hop over here, we can enter the products or services closely related to what you do. So we can get the results and see what might pop up. So you’re not focusing your attention on just irrelevant things that you’ll never actually make an impact in.

So I did that now. I click to get results. So, it will give you a list of many different keywords you can add to your website. Now you do not want to go overboard and look at every single one here because it might not make sense for your brand or business.

I’d pick the ones that make sense for you and what you want, your target audience to search for, and what you think they’re searching to find you. It shows the average monthly searches for careers to 100,000 competition medium. So, are you looking for the medium at your competition level? Is this a good amount of average monthly searches? Like how would I know that?

So if you’re starting and don’t have much authority yet in the industry, I’d recommend niche down even further. So what type of career coach do? Go a couple of levels deeper? Are you right, or what type of business are you in?

Speaking of yoga, specifically different than other ones. So if you’re in the fitness industry, don’t just try fitness; if you’re in a yoga studio, don’t just go for yoga because there’s too much competition. So, what’s a super unique yoga studio you’ve been to? I got on a curveball for you.

Goat yoga. Have you done goat yoga? I don’t say that I have, but I’m all about it; that’s the one where you’re doing yoga, and there are these little goats all around you, suitable? So that could be your niche goat yoga or outdoor goat yoga and niche down. So if someone’s searching for goat yoga in San Diego, Ocean Beach, or wherever it is, you’ll be found.

Step 2: Content For Your Website

Create great content for your website, and that’s where the keywords come into play. Think about what are those online visitors searching for when looking for a business like mine, and you’ll want to ensure that whatever keywords you use, you do not stuff them in where it doesn’t make sense because not every other sentence should be around goat yoga. Add that into your text.

Please explain what you do, the atmosphere, and things like that, but then stuff goat yoga now and then throughout the website or whatever your keyword is for your business, and I have a great example.

I was checking out their website, and it actually, let’s take a look right now. They do a great job of doing content that would attract the right audience because they’re a unique business; they’re not just a cake company; They’re All-Purpose Cake Co. that specializes in gluten-free check out their cakes here. So you go over to their about our cakes, and you can see here keywords gluten-free, dairy-free, keto, and diabetes-friendly.

So this will help them to be found by that right audience they’re looking for with their unique market of cakes.

Step 3: Website Is Mobile-Friendly

Over half of search results are happening on mobile phones, so you want to make sure it looks good on mobile because if it’s not Google’s, not going to rank your site for people searching on the phone, and an easy way to see.

If your site is mobile-friendly, if you’re in your browser, you can right-click, click choose to Inspect, and then this little down is a toggle device toolbar. So you can see what the website will look like on different devices, whether it’s an iPhone. So if it looks well here, chances are it’s going to look well in the wild on an actual phone.

Step 4: Understand Metadata

If you do a Google search, let’s stick with the cake thing gluten-free, I typed in gluten-free here and the Google search. And what comes up is you have your title line here like easy, gluten-free chocolate cake. And then the description below that and notice? What did I type in Gluten-Free, and it’s in bold?

And that’s why these are coming up first, correct, and that meta title and meta-description is on your website itself kind of on the backend, so most website builders that use out there, whether it’s website builder plus marketing, There’s always a section to adds those there WordPress, install a plugin like Yoast SEO, and you can easily add that.

So they say your title should be anywhere between 50 and 60 characters. You want to make sure you include whatever your primary keyword or keyword phrase is there and then with your description. It should be about 150 to 160 characters; again, put your description in there, and just like we saw with the gluten-free search result, it popped up multiple times.

So if it makes sense for your content again, don’t make it legible for anyone to read; include it there so Google and visitors know exactly what that page is all about.

And that will boost the number of click-throughs that you get.

Step 5: Avoid Duplicate Content

Avoid duplicate content because search engines penalize you if you use a duplicate copy.

Step 6: Show Your Reviews And Testimonials

It’s the word on the street regarding your businesses. Like I land on your website, and from there, I can see what your customers think because you’ve shared, maybe your Yelp reviews or your TripAdvisor reviews or Google reviews. These are your actual customers, your actual clients, basically praising you for being awesome you are, so turn your website into word of mouth.

So have those testimonials there, which will boost your credibility and trust with that potential new customer.

Step 7: Understand Backlinking

Think about how you can get relevant blogs or other sites that you could link to your website, you can think about backlinks like tiny little up-votes for your websites, like Instagram, and you got likes websites; it’s all about the backlinks.

There is a difference between good and bad backlinks. There’s a terrible practice of paying for backlinks where a bot or some other random service will put your website on a bunch of random websites.

It’s not always the best to do because those websites may not be reliable. They may look malicious, and then Google will see those. And those back which were supposed to be up-votes is now down-votes. So if relevant blogs complement your services, go and add some value to their blog posts or whatever they have on there.

And if it makes sense, link to your website or a guest blog or create great content to where they want to link to your website.

And at the end of the day, don’t be afraid to link back off to other people’s websites. You can make those links open a new tab, so your content doesn’t go away, but then you’re giving the brands you know and trust highlight up-votes to create a fantastic community.

Step 8: Don’t Play Tricks

If something seems like 0h, this will be a shortcut.

This is going to help me out; going to cut corners. It’s probably not a good idea. So please do your research to learn about what those shortcuts are and try to avoid doing them.

They’ll hurt you in the end, and you don’t want to fall into those bad practices.

They may have worked at it for a short time, but the long-term game is where it’s at don’t play shortcuts.

Step 9: Measure Your Success

How do you know at the end of the day if all the effort you put into your website, content, and online presence is working?

Google Analytics is the way to measure that success. It’s a free tool. Again most website builders have an easy way to integrate it into WordPress.

Step 10: Submit Your Site Map

Looking for you like a table of contents in a book or I cook a lot like a recipe. Maybe you want to get to a specific Italian recipe in your cookbook. That will help your website when Google or the search engine is indexing.

So that’s something you can relate to when you think about a site map, but the search needs to have this; and once you have your site map created, if you’re using a website builder, they’ll likely do it for you. If using WordPress, use Yoast SEO or some other search engine plugin to create it for you.

You want to tell Google about it. Please don’t wait for them to come to you because they eventually will, but it might take a while, so I highly recommend Google webmaster tools. It’s a free service with Google.

That relates to this blog because you can see the search engine trends. So you can see what people are searching for, how often they see it, and how often they click it with keywords. You can go ahead and say: hey, here’s my website, here’s my site map now crawl; it is the cool thing with Google webmaster tools.

That’s related to your industry, and now if you start seeing keywords that don’t make sense.

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