In many business owners’ experience, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a costly and tedious process that may or may not deliver the results they want.
Although SEO can certainly be time consuming, small business owners should know that it can often be a determinant factor in generating organic leads online.
These 5 quick SEO tips can help you or your marketing team make sure you’re getting the most SEO value from your website—and hopefully, they will also help demystify some of the inner workings of online marketing optimization!
1. Conduct a Technical Website Review
It’s amazing how often the littlest things can cause the biggest challenges.
In SEO, many technical pitfalls occur on the website itself. If the minor details aren’t locked down before you begin advertising, it can create havoc for your SEO. In fact, it’s possible that a technical error is preventing your webpages—or worse, your whole site—from appearing in Google Search.
Check out this recent article to learn more about conducting an SEO audit of your website.
2. Upgrade Your Site to the Latest Protocols
The market is constantly demanding a newer, faster internet. As a result, companies like Google hold small businesses to increasingly high standards that can be difficult to meet.
Examples like Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), Schema.org structured data snippets, and Accelerated Mobile Pages can be added to a website but can be difficult to implement. However, we already know that Google has made HTTPS website an SEO ranking factor as early as 2014 and is continuing to prioritize these new technologies.
Consider hiring a web developer (or spend some time looking over these new requirements with your own) to ensure your website is utilizing these technologies and staying ahead of the trends.
3. Check that Blog Content Follows Basic SEO Principles
Although this point might seem overly basic for our more SEO-savvy readers, hear me out.
Most of our clients already produce great content, but their websites don’t follow the basic principles of sound SEO. Some of the most basic concepts of successful blog posting include:
- Including your target keyword in the page slug (URL)
- Making your post length more than 300 words
- Including your target keyword at least 3 times in your blog post
- Including 1 external (outside source) + an internal link
This post by Yoast SEO lists 10 tips for an awesome and SEO-friendly blog post.
4. Research Before Creating Content
As I mentioned earlier, many of our existing clients already have great content. However, one habit that is often missing is writing content not only based on specific keywords, but also on what makes your company unique.
Focusing on content that is unique to your business will help make your organization stand out. This is also considered to be a ranking factor.
This Whiteboard Friday by Rand Fishkin of Moz explains how content needs to be unique in order to stand out to Google.
5. Add Metadata to Your Blog and Pages
When seeking to improve your SEO, it’s worth checking to make sure all your pages have appropriate page titles, meta descriptions, and image alt text.
By defining these for each page and keeping them utilitarian for your readers (while still utilizing effective keywords), you’ll most likely see great improvement in overall performance.
Effort = Results
By focusing on the five areas referenced above, these will allow your business to see quick improvements in SEO performance with relatively small effort.
As with most things, however, the more effort that is made, the better the result will be.
One final suggestion: while these quick SEO tips are great places to start, we always encourage folks to take their time with SEO and not rush the process. Rushing can lead to overlooking useful information and can negatively impact results.
