5 SEO Strategies Small Business Owners Can't Afford to Ignore

Investing in organic SEO is an important strategy to build a successful small business both online and offline. A solid SEO strategy will help you occupy new corners of your market and build awareness around your product, service or brand. However, dominating SEO is by no means an easy and it requires a lot of patience and commitment. If you're a small business owner, you're likely already a busy individual. And who has the time to spend optimizing a website – especially if your DIY job results in poor performance? 

The good news is, there are a few simple SEO tactics you can implement to improve your organic search presence and grow your brand online. So, let's take a look at some of these easy-to-do SEO strategies that you can do as an SBO.

1. Create Quality Content to Increase Search Traffic

The quality of the content you create impacts the search ranks of your website in a huge way. Most importantly, the relevancy of your site's content in relation to your target audience, or potential customers. Your goal with content marketing as a small business owner should be to create genuinely useful content, with the aim of building a valuable relationship with prospective customers.

In order to provide content that is relevant to your users, it is imperative for you to have deeper insights about their interests and what they consider valuable. You should regularly monitor and audit your website to keep track of the patterns of usage. Below are some questions you should ask yourself to help you find key data to improve the user experience and your SEO efforts overall.

• What number of users visit your site?
• What source of your website traffic (organic, social, direct, etc.) leads to the most conversions?
• Which form of digital content is generating most traffic – blogs, landing pages, videos?
• Which categories and web pages are the most popular?
• How many site visitors converted into business leads or actual customers?

If you're looking to learn more about creating killer content as an SBO, read: "Small Business Owners Marketing Guide: How to Take Advantage of Content"

2. Boost Your Online Exposure with Local Citations & Directories

A citation is an online listing for your company, with information such as website URL, phone number, physical location, and ratings or reviews. Local citations are a major ranking factor for small businesses – since many of these sites, like Yelp of Yellow Pages are highly trusted by Google, your company page will likely rank towards the top of search engine results (sometimes even above your own website!) You should look to expand the online reference to your business by seeking inclusion in various online directories.

It is important to make sure all the information for your business – including brand logos, office locations, phone numbers, addresses, links to your website and service hours – is consistent across all listings. This helps to minimize confusion in search engines, making it easy for your website to appear for relevant search queries.

3. Focus on Long Tail Queries to Drive Qualified Users

Until recently, we used to believe that the use of a specific number of keywords in a 500-word blog post was all that was required to drive search traffic.

Unfortunately, keyword targeting has transformed in the past few years. Today's search algorithms give more credibility to sites that target keywords with more than two words in the query, otherwise known as long-tail keywords. These types of keywords more clearly state user intent, and while they may have fewer searches overall, they're less competitive to target and much more conversion-friendly. As a small business entrepreneur, you should focus on long-tail queries to attract traffic organic within your niche, especially since competing with a larger company for short-tail keyword rankings is difficult without the necessary resources.

Be sure to check out our guide on YouTube keyword research for tips on finding the best keyword opportunities.

4. Optimize Your Metadata with Actionable Keywords

Metadata refers to specific "behind-the-scenes" information about a website. Search bots crawl things such as ALT text, meta descriptions and heading tags so Google can return appropriate search results to their users. By optimizing these metadata with keywords, you'll improve the ranking of your web pages in the search results. If you're searching for more information about improving the technical aspects of your website, read: "Don’t Fear Technical SEO – Embrace It, With These 4 Tactics Anyone Can Do"

This can be easily achieved by researching actionable key phrases and inserting them into various places throughout your website. Here’s what you should do:

• Find the most searched queries and optimize your images, headers and meta descriptions with those actionable key phrases.
• Avoid stuffing your metadata with too many keywords.
• Keep descriptions simple and descriptive.
• Come up with relevant and persuasive meta tag and meta description.

Check out our post on the best free SEO plugins for WordPress. They'll make optimizing your metadata easy.

5. Build Mobile Friendly Landing Pages for Mobile Search Users

With over four billion mobile phone users worldwide, marketers cannot afford to ignore the impact of mobile web use. More people will use smartphones to browse landing pages and conduct online research than desktop computers and laptops. It is therefore important to build mobile-friendly landing pages for your website to welcome users on smartphones, phablets and tablets. A mobile-friendly landing page should be simple in design and laser-focused on actionable content. After all, mobile users have less space to consume information, making that screen real estate all the more valuable – present only the most crucial information that makes the user want to take action, like clicking a button, downloading an ebook or submitting a contact form, among other things.

There you have it. These five SEO tips for small business are vital for your success – implement them today and watch your website traffic grow!