6 Affordable And Easy SEO Techniques For Small Businesses
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of strategies and methods that can allow a person or business website to become more searchable on the internet. There are more than 200 million active websites worldwide, with more than 250 thousand being created daily. All of these websites compete for the attention of every internet user in the world.
Without an optimised website, there is only a very small chance of visitors discovering you online. Therefore, to ensure you have a website that can be accessed and then be able to convert these visitors to paying customers, SEO should be one of your primary concerns.
If you’re a small business owner, it’s absolutely possible to get started with affordable and accessible SEO techniques. Read on if you want to learn what these tactics are.
- Optimize your business
Before fully diving into digital SEO, you want to ensure that your internal operations are running to the most optimal level. A business management app like Jobber or whatever fits your industry niche, can enhance your productivity to the point where you can free up time to focus on SEO efforts. You may even find that the money you save on daily efficiencies can be repurposed to hire an SEO specialist or consultant to support you.
- Find common problems in your site
On a base level, search engines rely on being able to crawl your website in order for them to index your pages. If your site is blocked or inaccessible in any way once created it may prevent search engines from being able to understand it. This results in your site being unable to rank well for the terms you are targeting. So, before you start, your first priority is to get your site to a technically healthy level.
Some of the problems you should look out for and fix are the following:
- Broken links
- Duplicate content
- Slow loading speeds
- Produce relevant and high-quality content
While search engine algorithms and SEO tactics continually change and evolve, one thing remains constant: Content is king. Remember that all your SEO efforts are hinged on the quality of content you post on your website. Even if you ‘do SEO’ you may find you aren’t getting the results you had hoped for if your content is minimal, not user-friendly, irrelevant or of low-quality.
Thankfully, producing relevant content isn’t exactly rocket science. For example, in the niche example of a roofing company, let’s say, you can write and post articles about roofing in the blog section of your site. This could be anything from how-to’s to industry trends and updates to the daily challenges faced by your team for example. You can always look to hire a copywriter to help you with this if this is an area you struggle with.
- Getting your business and website listed
One of the most essential aspects of SEO is the use of links. Having links that direct to your website from other web pages can significantly improve your visibility on the web and get you ranked better on search engine results pages (SERPs). This is often referred to as link building.
Having a third party do it for you can be a tad expensive and you can do this yourself without spending too much. One of the ways you can do it is to put your business’ name and website address on business listing sites.
- Encourage your customers to review your business on the web
Aside from link building, frequently mentioning your business name on the web can also help with your SEO efforts. The cheapest way to do this is to encourage or persuade your customers to write positive reviews about your company on business review sites.
Aside from helping you boost your online presence and SEO, these reviews can also convert potential leads into paying customers. Know that 90% of customers may find and read reviews of a company before they do business with it. If they find out that many reviews about you are positive, there’s a high chance you’ll garner more sales.
- Add visual elements to your site
Text content isn’t the only factor that affects SEO. Images and videos can also influence your ranking on the web. After all, search engines don’t just check text alone. They can also perform image searches. Almost 32.7% of all the results returned by a particular search engine are images. So, as much as possible, find ways to include images and videos on your website.
If you have a roofing business, you can post before and after images of the jobs you’ve worked on. Alternatively, you may want to demonstrate how professional you are by showcasing some of your documentation such as branded estimate templates. You can also post time lapse videos of you and your team working on jobs.
While doing this, one thing to consider is file size. Optimise any files before uploading them so they don’t slow down your loading speed, particularly on mobile.
Conclusion
SEO can be affordable and easy-to-do. Anyone can give it a go as long as they understand the basic principles. Make sure you know what you’re doing before you start, and have a purpose in mind so that you conduct your SEO with a considered and strategic approach to yield the best results possible.
References:
- Huss, Nick, Deon, Xian Chua Chan, Miranda Balogh, Jenn, Maureen, Talya Stone, et al. “How Many Websites Are There in the World? (2022).” Siteefy, April 7, 2022. https://siteefy.com/how-many-websites-are-there/
- Leonard, Jay. “The Impact of Online Reviews on Customers’ Buying Decisions [Infographic].” Business 2 Community, July 25, 2015. https://www.business2community.com/infographics/impact-online-reviews-customers-buying-decisions-infographic-01280945
- Moz. “Mozcast – the Google Algorithm Weather Report.” MozCast – The Google Algorithm Weather Report. Accessed August 10, 2022. https://moz.com/mozcast