The secret to getting more visitors (and customers) on your website is knowing how to attract them. That, my friends, is what Search Engine Optimization — also called SEO — is all about. But don’t despair! You don’t have to be a technological whiz kid to be able to make SEO work for your small business. Here I provide you 8 actionable tips you can put into play right now to start increasing your web numbers.
1. Know Where Your Current Traffic is Coming From
Before you start making changes to your site or marketing strategy, you have to first know how people are finding your site. A quick peek at your Analytics will show you a few important things:
- What keywords people are searching to find you
- What sites they’re clicking from to land on your site
- Which pages on your site they’re visiting the most
This is all useful in moving forward with your SEO strategy.
2. Choose Your Keywords Carefully
Speaking of keywords, it’s important that you identify which ones you want to lead people to you. Likely these will include the products you sell, like “marketing consultation services,” and if you’re a local business, they’ll need to include your city name, like “Boise dog bakery.”
You’ll need to do a bit of keyword research to narrow down your list to the keywords your target audience is actually searching for, then implement them on each page of your website within the copy.
3. Use Those Keywords Naturally
I think we’re well past the days of keyword stuffing, but it bears noting: do not place too many keywords in your copy. You should be able to read your web copy out loud and not have it sound like a robot wrote it. Your visitors will be turned off, and don’t even get me started with how Google will treat you if you do this.
4. Use Titles and Descriptions
If you don’t manage your website or blog, don’t worry about this, but if you do, make sure you’re filling out the titles and descriptions for every page, since that’s what appears in search results. These are what help people make a quick choice on whether your site provides what they’re looking for.
You’ll notice in the screenshot, each title and description includes keywords that I want to be found for, such as “#SmallBizChat” and “entrepreneurs.”
5. Use SEO on Your Blog, Too
Your website isn’t the only place that needs SEO TLC. Your blog is actually even easier to optimize for SEO, because you’re creating a stream of content, each centered around a single concept (keyword city!). Use those keywords, but limit each post to 1-2 to avoid overload.
Remember those titles and descriptions as well. WordPress has some great plugins, like All in One SEO, that make it easy to add this data to each post.
6. Tweak Your Copy
If, in looking at your website analytics, you see that your product page is getting the least traffic on your site, look at what you’ve got going on there. It could be that you have a giant block of unappealing text, or that your offerings aren’t obvious. Rewrite the copy (using those keywords) then measure traffic again. If you managed to bump it up, leave it alone. If not, try something else.
7. Use a Call to Action
This is less an SEO tip than just smart web copy: including a call to action helps your visitors understand exactly what you want them to do, whether that’s subscribe to your list, make a purchase, or call now.
8. Stay Sharp
The world of SEO is rapidly changing, and with every Google algorithm, the rules change slightly. Paying attention to SEO trends will help you stay relevant and on top of search results.
SEO is the most effective online marketing strategies. Help search engine users find more relevant content on your site. Thanks for these SEO tips!
9. Don’t neglect the longtail!
Most people tend to be overly focused on ranking for the big “mamba jamba” keywords. Big volume, big traffic, big money! Right? Well most of the time, it’s actually less money than you think, not to mention the fact that the big keywords are typically extremely difficult to rank for.
Longtail keywords, on the other hand, are (typically) much easier to rank for, and might convert 10x or 100x better than those big keywords you can only dream of ranking for.
Would you rather rank #1 for 10 keywords with 1% conversion and 1000 monthly searches, or #1 for 1 keyword with 0.1% conversion and 10,000 monthly searches? The answer is obvious 🙂
Hi there, since I have been doing my own SEO with selling furniture here on small Slovenian furniture market, I would also like to add something specially to point three about keyword stuffing.
At least for me, it is also working not only to choose keywords wiselly, but also to find out synonims and related words to main keyword. I search for them in Keyword planner from Google. It is by far the easiest way to implement relevant synonims to keyword and when I am preparing a content I am also focused to include synonims into the post.
So, main keyword is presented in my posts at the beggining of post, in one or two subtitles, first paragraph and last paragraph and also on image tags.
Similar words, words matched to main keyword by relevance are also put near to main keyword. When choosing symilar keywords, I search for those with high search volume in Keyword Planner.
Regards and hope it helps, Matija from Slovenia
p.s.:
when creating content, at least on my market, I am targeting now app. 1000 words and above. Every post should also have at least one image.
Realistic images brings me better results then photoshop images.
Wow, thanks for the share! I’m sure others can use your strategy.
-Melinda