Small businesses face much greater competition in the digital world. They must compete online against major corporations and other small businesses in their industry. The only way this is possible is by using smart search engine optimization (SEO). Smart SEO requires small businesses to utilize advanced SEO techniques and technologies to implement a more strategic, automated, and data-driven approach to gaining targeted organic traffic. This article will highlight 6 SEO strategies that will improve your local SEO score and improve the ranking positions of valuable keywords on Google.
Here are the top six ways to utilize smart SEO to gain more relevant traffic and visibility for your small business:
1. Focus on Local SEO (Google My Business)
Many small businesses have physical facilities and target local consumers within their towns and cities. To effectively target local consumers, you must focus on local SEO practices to ensure your business profile and website are visible to them. The best way to do this is through Google My Business.
Google My Business is a free service that enables business owners to create searchable profiles for their businesses on Google. That way, if someone searches for a company like yours in your local town or city, they will be more likely to discover it in the Google search results pages.
When creating your Google My Business profile, try to personalize it with photographs, operational hours, customer reviews, and a description of your products or services. It will even establish a Google Maps location for your business, allowing people to easily find the physical location of your business if they wish to visit in person
2. Identify Long Tail Keywords to Target
Long tail keywords are targeted SEO keyword phrases typically between three and five words long. They are specific keyword phrases for targeting a narrower demographic or more targeted audience. You can expect less competition and higher conversion rates if you choose the right long-tail keywords.
Google Keyword Planner is the best tool for identifying the best long-tail keywords for your business website and profile. All you need to do is type in a simple niche keyword, such as “bakery” or “law firm,” and the tool will present you with a list of relevant long tail keywords that people search in Google frequently.
The search volume statistics are listed alongside the long-tail keywords to help you determine their level of competition and popularity. Select keywords with the least competition and highest popularity when optimizing the SEO keywords for your business website and profile.
3. Create High-Quality and Helpful Content
The Google search engine algorithms are designed to favor websites with high-quality and informative content, such as blog posts, how-to guides, videos, tutorials, case studies, and forums. One of the most effective SEO services in South Africa is to create high-quality content for your business website consistently.
Remember that search engines like Google and Bing will rank websites higher if they have new or updated content. So, make sure you not only create high-quality and helpful content but you also create it consistently to keep your website ranked high in search engines.
4. Optimize Website Performance (Speed, mobile friendly, SSL Certificate)
Your website performance will impact your customer experience and search engine ranking simultaneously. Google algorithms prefer websites that are fast, mobile-friendly, and highly secure. Your business website must satisfy each of these three factors to maintain an optimized performance and higher search engine ranking.
A. Speed
Speed refers to how quickly your website loads in people’s browsers. If your website contains too many large images and video files, they can slow down the website’s speed. Therefore, ensure that you limit the number of videos and compress your image files to maintain the fastest possible download speed. It is also a good idea to minimize the coding, such as CSS and JavaScript, to keep your website simple for browsers to interpret and process.
B. Mobile-Friendly
A mobile-friendly website features a responsive design that allows it to be adjusted to any computer or mobile device’s screen size without distorting its appearance or functionality. That means anyone should be able to view your website perfectly, regardless of whether they are using a tablet, smartphone, desktop computer, or laptop.
C. Security
Google looks for websites with active SSL certificates installed. SSL certificates provide HTTPS encryption of all data and information exchanged over the website’s hosting server. This is particularly important for e-commerce businesses conducting online transactions, as it fosters a higher level of trust with consumers. For SEO purposes, Google ranks a website higher when it has an SSL certificate because it is perceived as more trustworthy.
5. Leverage Social Proof and Backlinks
Social proof is an SEO strategy that utilizes social media engagement, testimonials, customer reviews, and other external factors to build trust and credibility for your business online.
For example, if you acquire mostly positive reviews about your business on Facebook, Google, Pen To Point and Yelp, it will likely motivate more people to purchase products or services from your company. You don’t have much direct control over social proof other than ensuring that your existing customers are satisfied. That way, they will spread positive word-of-mouth about your business to others on social media and other online platforms.
In addition, backlinks are a traditional and still effective SEO strategy where links to your business website are posted on other websites. You can try posting these backlinks yourself on relevant blogs and social media groups, but you may find others posting backlinks to your business as it gains more credibility. You could even hire a social media influencer to post a recommendation about your business to their followers to create more backlinks as well.
6. Monitor Traffic with Google Analytics and Google Search Console
The last thing you need to do is monitor the traffic to your website after implementing all your smart SEO strategies. Utilize Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track all your website traffic and learn more about it. These tools can tell you:
- How people found your business website (e.g., organic Google searches, social media, direct links)
- Which pages they visited the most on your website
- How long people stayed on each page
- The best-performing pages on your website
- Number of form submissions
- Number of sales generated
Based on this information, you can make the proper adjustments to your smart SEO strategies to improve the weaker areas while maintaining the stronger ones.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization is becoming the primary reason for the success of businesses in the modern world. Many companies that fail to implement SEO will miss out on valuable leads and sales. Understanding SEO helps business owners make the right decision when picking an SEO provider. Many SEO providers offer obsolete methods that don’t work and could negatively impact search engine rankings by violating Google’s policies. Websites can receive temporary or permanent bans depending on the violation, so it is always important to understand SEO and assess an SEO company’s reviews and practices.
