26 May 11 SEO Tips for Small Businesses
The following 11 SEO tips for small businesses are guaranteed to place your website above the competition.
1. Use your keyword within the URL
Using a URL that includes your keyword can improve your websites search visibility. A well-structured SEO friendly URL looks cleaner, more professional, improves user experience, its easier to share across social media, and is better optimized for search engines.
For example, the URL of this blog post is my target keyword for this page, 11 SEO Tips for Small Businesses – https://www.lukebrokaw.com/11-seo-tips-for-small-businesses/.
You’ll want to identify your most important target keyword and create the URL from it.
2. Include the keyword in the first paragraph
The primary keyword has to be present in the first paragraph of the content to get the benefits of good on-page SEO.
Your readers should be able to figure out what the main focus of the post is by reading the first paragraph. Capturing the readers attention is top priority. Including the keyword in the first paragraph not only captures your readers attention but it lets Google and other search engines know what your post is about.
3. Image optimization
Making sure all images on your website are optimized will benefit your websites SEO. You can start by including the keyword of the post or page in the alt tag of the image. Alternative text provides an opportunity to boost your content in regards to user experience and search optimization.
Reducing the size of your images is another optimization technique. By scaling down large image files, you can increase page speed, which is crucial for mobile viewing.
Using unique images that are page relevant and using high quality images are a sure way to help with SEO as well.
4. Use unique page titles
It is important for SEO to have unique page titles for each page on a website. The page title that you use should include your target keyword. For example, the target keyword for this page is “11 SEO Tips for Small Businesses”. If you take a look at the page title of this blog post you’ll see that it starts with “11 SEO Tips for Small Businesses”.
Feel free to use additional related keywords in your page title but make sure that you start with the keyword and remember that it is best practice to keep your page title under 60 characters.
Unique page titles are meant to be unique for each web page. This means that you shouldn’t use the same page titles for several different pages throughout your website.
5. Use long tail keywords
Long tail keywords are search phrases that generally consist of three or more words, are highly relevant to your specific topic, have a low competition level, and have comparatively low search volume.
For example, long tail keywords for a web designer would be:
Local web designer
Web designer for small businesses
The best web designer in San Diego
Cheap website designer
Freelance web designer
6. Don’t stuff the keywords
It’s important to include your targeted keyword on your web page but avoid keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing refers to the manipulation of a sites ranking in search results by using needless keywords. Listing several cities and states on a web page to target those specific locations is a prime example of keyword stuffing.
Include your keywords in the following ways:
- The page title
- Header tags– H1, H2, H3, or H4
- Use in the first paragraph
- Use in the URL
- Use 3-5 times within the body of your page content
- alt tags of images
- Use related words and synonyms
7. Make your content shareable
Over 70% of the U.S. population uses social media so make sharing easy for people. If your content is easy to share then more people will share it. Sharing your content across numerous social networks can be great for business.
8. Internal Linking
Internal linking involves linking one page to another page on the same domain. The target keywords should be used in your internal links.
9. Use closely related words and synonyms
Using closely related words and synonyms for your keywords can mean less competition. For example, if you are a website designer you should focus on using other keywords rather than just using “website designer”.
For a website designer you should use closely related keywords (while keeping your geo-target area in mind) such as:
Web designer in San Diego
San Diego website designer
Website designer in San Diego
Freelance website designer
Freelance web designer in San Diego
Freelance web designer
10. Remove everything that slows down your website
Page load times are more important than they used to be. Since dial up internet is obsolete websites are capable of loading much faster. Page load times have a huge impact on consumers. On average, most consumers expect a web page to load within a couple seconds. This means that if your website loads slow you are at risk of losing website visitors and ultimately sales. Google is now using page loading speed as a ranking factor so get rid of any non-essentials that can slow down your website such as music players, large images, flash graphics, and unnecessary plugins.
11. Remain patient
Obtaining organic SEO results isn’t easy so don’t expect results within the first couple weeks. The internet is a busy place these days and competition is much higher than it used to be. It is best to plan a strategy and be patient.
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