Search Engine Optimization Tips and Best Practices for Small Businesses: What is Working Today and How

Doing search engine optimization (SEO) correctly can raise the visibility of your website in search engine results, lead to more traffic and ultimately increase sales from your online marketing activities. For those people working in a small business, you may be thinking about getting an SEO program started or want to take it to the next level. It’s a great way to complement your existing email marketing and other outbound marketing activities.

In this blog post, I’ll cover some important strategies at a very high level.

Identifying Target SEO Keywords

Billions of Google searches are being done every day; from the weather to the nearest pizza place to the name of an auto repair shop. Google has all kinds of rich data that you can use to see how people are searching for your product or service. Tapping into this data will empower you to start crafting an SEO plan and take advantage of the “low hanging fruit” keywords that already drive traffic to a website. If you uncover these keywords and use them in your inbound marketing efforts, you have a good chance of generating more hits to your website.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a way of communicating with your customers and prospects in a variety of ways to educate and inform them about trends or topics that are important to them. Creating a blog, updating it on a regular basis and using it in your outbound marketing strategy is one common way to communicate with your customers and prospects. Content marketing is an art and it requires resources, time and money to do it right.

Important Signals in Local SEO

There are things you can do outside of your website to help Google understand who you are and what you do. For example, claiming and completing your Google My Business listing is a great way to directly communicate important information about your business to the search giant. You’ll also want to set up business listings on Bing and Yahoo!

SEO Team

Doing SEO properly requires a strong team made up of an SEO manager, a content creator, a social media expert and a webmaster. You can use in-house resources or outsource the work—it really depends on the amount of time, resources and knowledge that are available. For small businesses, one person may manage the overall process with outsourced resources doing the rest of the work or one person may do it all. Regardless, there are a ton of resources out there that can support you in your SEO and content creation needs.

Off-Page Optimization

Off-page search engine optimization includes adding your business to high-quality online directories and business listings so prospects can find you more easily when they search. Getting good reviews from customers is another good off-page optimization strategy. For example, I was able to help a client get to the #1 spot on Google after he started to accumulate 5-Star reviews from happy customers for his jeep tour business.

Track and Measure

Once you put an SEO plan in place, you want to track and measure your results. As Peter Drucker, a well-known writer and management consultant, put it, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” During the webinar discussion, I’ll share some tools like Google Search Console that will help you collect data to make decisions.

Does Your Website Need SEO?

These are just some of the strategies that I will discuss in more detail during the webinar and I hope that you’ll be able to join us! Also, if you’re not sure if your website is currently optimized for search engines or not, then I invite you to use our complimentary website audit tool. In less than a minute, you’ll get a detailed 8-page report. Just enter the website and one of your target SEO keywords below :

What’s Your SEO Score?

Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase.