SEO for Small Businesses

SEO For Small Businesses

3/4/2020

As a small business owner, when you hear SEO, you might silently roll your eyes. The thought of attempting to optimize your website to gain more "organic traffic" can be overwhelming. What does organic traffic mean? Reliablesoft.net defines it as the term used to describe visits to a website coming from a search engine's organic results and not [from] paid ads.

The basics of applying SEO to your website isn't hard, but it is time-consuming. When referring to SEO in this blog post, I won't touch on all the different avenues, but instead, I'll focus on four simple strategies that you can utilize today to increase organic traffic.

Back to the basics. What is SEO, and how can you apply four basic SEO strategies to your website?

SEO Definition

According to Wiki, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which refers to the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.

Basic SEO Strategy #1

If your homepage is filled with only graphics, instead of text, you're not utilizing your homepage to the best of its ability. Images are important, but the text is more important! And you need to fill the text on your website with relevant keywords. If you want to find a list of keywords that Google users are searching for, which can be useful for your homepage as well as your other pages, here are two free SEO keyword search tools: SEMrush and Keywordtool.io.

SEMrush is free (for a limited amount of searches a day). There are other ways of locating keywords, but I'm trying to keep this strategy as simple as possible. When you register for SEMrush, you can copy and paste your competitor's URL and discover the top-ranking keywords of their sites. Knowing this will help you discover which keywords you might want to focus on — including potential topics for blog posts.
Keywordtool.io is another free SEO tool, and it allows you to search for certain keywords and phrases. Once you enter a word or phrase, Keywordtool.io will pull up a list of related keywords that people regularly type into search engines, such as Google. For example, to see what types of topics people search for, regarding SEO, I typed in SEO, and then a list of phrases appeared: SEO definition, SEO strategy, SEO for small businesses, etc.

Once you have a list of keywords that are relative to your business, add these keywords and phrases directly into your text on your website. The more mentions of relevant keywords, the better.

Basic SEO Strategy #2

Add "alt text" to all images on your website. What is alt text? According to MOZ, alt text (alternative text), also known as "alt attributes," "alt descriptions," or technically incorrectly as "alt tags," are used within an HTML code to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page. In layman's terms, it's a specific description added in the metadata of your images, which enables web crawlers (search engines) to read your images. Don't try to stuff these descriptions with keywords. Instead, if an image is of a red rose, write red rose, but if the image is related to a keyword, then include the keyword!

For more insight on how to include the right metadata for your images, visit FATRANK, which suggests wherever possible, make sure images are placed near relevant text and on pages that are relevant to the image subject matter. Only use relevant images to the topic of the page or hummingbird can lower your topical trust score.

Regarding alt text, I use Weebly for my websites, and if you do too, then all you have to do is left-click on an image, scroll to advance, and type the description into the "alt text" section. Other website hosts probably have similar ways of accessing the alt text for an image: Wix, WordPress, or Squarespace.

Basic SEO Strategy #3

Add a description and title in your metadata of each page on your website. The title and description will serve as an organic ad for your business. What does this mean? When someone types a question into Google, and your business pops up with the answer, amid other businesses, the small paragraphs below each business might consist of the description pulled from your metadata.

Keywords don't matter much in the description, or so I thought. Wrong. Keywords matter everywhere. For more on this, visit W3 Lab: Do Meta Tags Really Matter for SEO in 2020 ? For the title and description, be specific about what your business (or that specific page or blog post) offers.

Where can you find the title and description areas? Every host is different. For a step by step guide to add a title and description, here are instructions for Wix, Weebly, WordPress, or Squarespace.

Basic SEO Strategy #4

Make sure your "page speed" is as fast as possible for viewers. MOZ suggests that Google has indicated site speed (and as a result, page speed) is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. As a small business owner, there's only so much you can do to increase your page speed, but that doesn't mean you should throw in the towel.

For a free SEO tool to test the speed and readability of your website, input your URL into Varvy SEO Tool. Once you input your URL, it takes a few seconds for the tool to analyze your website and recommend different ways to improve your speed, such as adding a site map, adding alt text, making sure your website is secure with HTTPS (not HTTP).

*If you want to see what a general site map looks like, you can check out mine, or you can search Google for more ideas.

In summary, the four basic SEO strategies are:

Fill the text on your website with relevant keywords.
Add "alt text" to all images on your website.
Add a description and title in your metadata of each page on your website.
Make sure your "page speed" is as fast as possible for viewers.

I hope you found this post helpful and not too confusing. If anything, take SEO one step at a time, or you can hire me to do it all for you. And remember, implementing these four basic strategies will help, but you can always take it further. Unfortunately, as a small business owner, you may not have the funds or workforce to implement every SEO strategy like larger companies, but that doesn't mean you can't utilize the tools readily available at your disposal.

If you found this post helpful, please consider sharing it. And if you need editorial or SEO help, contact me at [email protected].

Author

Dawn Husted progressed into offering her editing services to clients in 2016, eventually opening Yaupon Berry Press LLC. She's constantly learning new ways of helping clients stay relevant in today’s market, whether by using an SEO strategy targeting high-trafficked keywords or simply editing their content. Dawn lives in central Texas with her husband, two energetic kids and an adorable golden retriever.

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