As a small business owner finding time to worry about SEO can be really difficult. Many SEO companies may also lead to believe that doing anything yourself is completely out of the question and the only way forward is to sign up with an agency. Whilst there is some truth that larger complex sites may require an expert to be optimised properly, most small business sites really don’t require a lot of on-site attention to check off 90% of the important SEO factors.
So without further ado, here are a few quick wins that you can easily do yourself to dramatically improve the SEO on your site.
Choose Your Keywords Carefully
The first thing you should ensure is that you have decided on which keywords are most important for your business and set your expectations realistically. This means not trying to go after the big, generic terms and focusing down to more specific or local variations. For example, if you’re a plumber in a town called Bath then don’t try to optimise for the keyword “plumbing” instead go for something like “plumbing in Bath”. Use Google’s Keyword tool on exact mode to get an idea of the type of search volume you can expect.
Even just a few hundred searches can bring in a decent amount of business. It might seem counter-intuitive to go for the lower volume keywords but in reality you will never rank for the massive keywords so it’s better to have a few targeted searches than nothing at all.
Target Pages with Keywords
Now you have decided on your keywords, it’s time to reflect them on your site. Don’t be tempted to stuff them all on every page, instead work out a way of distributing them across all the pages on your site with the most important keyword on the homepage as this is generally the strongest page.
You should ensure you have included the keyword in the Title of the page your working on as this is the most important factor for on-page SEO. After that, try including them in H1 tags and naturally in the copy on your site. At all times ensure the page is human readable first, too much over-optimisation could flag your site as spam.
Start a Blog and Connect with Other Bloggers
You don’t have to blog about your day to day work and company updates, the idea of a blog is to publish interesting content that may be of interest to your target customers. Just search “will it blend” on YouTube for a great example of how a company in a boring industry developed an awesome content strategy. Another good strategy is how-to and informational type posts. Helping people out and teaching them something is always a win.
Take a look at what your competitors and industry relations are up to and whilst doing it jot down any similar blogs you find. You can contact them when your blog is up and running and ask if you can do a few blog posts on their site. This will usually secure you a few all important links.
Get Your Social On
Social Media and its influence on search is the hot topic of 2012. Its clear Google is going to start utilizing its own social network to help improve search and if you’re missing from this then you might be in trouble. Check that you’re signed up to Google+ as well as the giants, Twitter and Facebook. Try and share some interesting content every now and again to attract followers and build your brand.
Remember, social media is not all about publishing your company updates. This rarely works as a strategy and will quickly devoid your account of followers.
Hopefully you’ve found these few tips helpful, thanks for reading and happy SEOing!
About the Author: This was a blog post by James who works for SEO masters and frequently blogs about SEO.