With 3.5 billion searches every day, it’s no wonder you’re trying to rank high on Google. After all, paid ads are expensive. Not every business has the budget to keep buying traffic.
The problem is that ranking on Google isn’t an easy task, either.
If your website isn’t receiving enough search engine traffic, you can use a few tips to improve your SEO strategy. Keep reading to learn six small business SEO tips that will help.
1. Target the Correct Keywords
It isn’t always enough to create a bunch of blog posts and hope they rank. If you target your content towards topics that get no search volume, you will not get much traffic.
While keywords with higher search volume are more competitive, ranking on the first page will give you much more traffic. Use keyword research tools to find keywords in your industry that get more searches.
Your goal with these is to create content that answers the search query better than every result on the front page. Look at the existing content there to see how they answer the question. Do what they did to rank, but try to do so with better quality.
Once you get your content together for your high-volume keywords, try to find smaller keywords to add to your posts. Adding these long-tail keywords to your posts will help your content rank for more keywords. That is, assuming those keywords are related to the posts you’re adding them to.
2. Get Your Search Intent Right
It isn’t enough to get your content ranking on the front page. Your goal with SEO for small business is to drive sales to your company. If none of that traffic converts, all your work is for nothing.
One of the most important things you can do with your content is to get the search intent right for the content you’re trying to rank for. Search intent falls into four main categories:
- Informational
- Commercial intent
- Transactional
- Navigational
Informational search intent isn’t buying traffic, so you’ll want to add value for these searchers and try to get them on a list to reach back out to. You can sell them at a later date.
Commercial intent and transactional search queries are from searchers in a buying mood. Give these searchers information about a product and make sure they know that your business is the best to buy from.
Navigational queries are ones where people are trying to find the link to a website. For instance, a searcher will type your company’s name in a search engine to try to find your website address.
Cater your content to these search intent, and you’ll have an easier time making the most of your SEO efforts.
3. Increase Your Site Speed
Your SEO content isn’t the only thing Google takes into account when determining rankings anymore. As the year continues, Google will roll out the Core Vitals algorithm update. When this happens, the user experience will play a more critical role in website rankings.
One of the biggest things that affect your website score in Core Vitals is page speed. A slow website is one of the worst things you can have for a site. People expect to see content as soon as possible, so they’ll leave if your site takes too long to load.
Optimize each of your pages to make sure they don’t take more than two seconds to load. If you use image-heavy website layouts, compress your images to reduce their sizes.
Once you reduce your image sizes, implement lazy loading on your website to defer loading website assets until the visitors scroll down on your page. These two things alone do a lot to increase your page speed.
4. Add Internal Links
One of the most important things you can do for SEO is to help Google crawl your website. Google doesn’t look at each page you have in a vacuum. It crawls your whole site to learn what industry your site belongs to.
Adding internal links will help the Google bots find each one of your pages. Not only will it help index your posts, but it will also help build topical relevance for your site.
Building topical authority means Google will value your website higher than one that posts in random industries.
5. Look for Backlinks
On-page SEO work will only get you so far if you’re in a competitive industry. As the competition rises, so does the need to acquire backlinks to show Google that your site is an authority.
A backlink is like a vote for your site. Each vote increases your authority in the eyes of Google. And if a more prominent website gives you a backlink, that provides more authority than a link from a smaller one.
One way to get backlinks is with skyscraper content. A skyscraper page is long-form content meant to be linkable. Once you create your skyscraper page, reach out to other web admins to tell them about it.
If they like your page, they’ll give you a link. Getting enough links like this will improve your chances of ranking higher.
6. Get Help From an Expert
If you’re doing your company’s SEO on your own, you might have trouble getting things right if you aren’t an SEO expert. After all, there’s more to SEO than writing an article and publishing it on your site. That might get you a few visitors, but there are other things you can do to increase your rankings.
That’s why working with someone like a Jacksonville SEO company can be so beneficial. They’ll know other strategies that can help your site rank higher.
Doing this also means you can focus on the parts of your business you’re great at doing. Let an expert handle the SEO work, and you can focus on doing tasks that will help grow your company in other ways.
Never Stop Working on Your SEO Strategy
While SEO fundamentals don’t change much through the years, some of the specifics of how your SEO strategy works will. Ensure you keep up with SEO news and other events, so you’re aware of how the SEO world is changing. If you do, you can keep your first page rankings and keep getting free search engine traffic in the future.
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