5 Small Business SEO Strategies That Boost Conversion

Many small businesses have invested their time and effort to build a strong digital presence through an attractive website to profitably attract new customers. Once this is built, prudent business owners deploy key small business SEO strategies to increase website traffic.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Google and Bing help potential customers find products and services that match their interests. They have algorithms that efficiently analyze numerous sites and determine their ranking for any specific keyword. Now, you may have the most beautiful site, but if you may have the opportunity to grow your business further by improving your ranking in the search engines.

In turn, we strive to increase the relevancy and credibility of specific pages to users’ search terms when conducting SEO. Each keyword should be evaluated closely so that the priorities of increasing website traffic and driving overall business growth are balanced.

A search engine user is most likely to click the top listing within the first page. A higher ranking in results in exponentially incremental website traffic, which leads to increased sales revenue when the proper keyword strategy is deployed. There is a 59.59% probability the first result is clicked, while there is a 15.82% probability the second result is clicked. This kind of traffic is also called organic traffic – the traffic you get without spending a dime on advertisements. Therefore, having an SEO-optimized website is the best return on your investment in the long run!

Below, we list 5 best small business SEO strategies that will help boost business growth. While it is possible to spend a lot of time getting the ideal ranking of search engines over time, investing an hour a day in SEO or hiring a qualified digital marketing agency like Prime Marketing Experts can begin to attract more traffic.

Clearly Define Your Business Locations

If you have ever searched for a business in Google or Bing, you will notice that the platform often recognizes where we are geographically searching.

Here are three easy ways to tell search engines where your business is located and which areas do you serve:

• Create a Google Business Profile

Creating a Google Business profile to register the location of your business and show the areas you serve. It allows you to post business hours, special promotions, and contact information. It allows users to leave reviews on Google and consolidates reviews from other sites like Facebook and Yelp. If you claim your business, you can respond to user reviews.

Whenever someone searches for your business name on Google, it will display your profile on the right side and will feature key information such as your website information and directions, which acts as a guide to your storefront whenever they look for your services within their proximity.

If I am a service business that serves customers at their locations, how do I manage the profile? Google will allow you to hide your business address from its users and specify a service area.

• Post Your Business Address On Your Website

We recently researched nearly 100 small business websites. A majority have not inserted their address or the areas they serve on their website. As Google’s bots read pages on your website, the location on a website helps your website in ranking for search queries specific to those locations.

For example, look at the web page below:

Even if you do not want to give your address, you should state where your business geographically services. It will help Google evaluate the relevance of your business for a user looking for similar services in that region.

• List Your Business in Local Directories

Similar to how we listed businesses on the Yellow Pages 15 years ago to help people in a local area to find businesses, we need to do the same within business directories to improve local SEO levels.

List and claim your business on Yelp, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Facebook, LinkedIn, Local.com, Manta.com, Yellowpages.com, and others. The list is huge and is still growing at a tremendous pace.

On a locally relevant search, the local search pack will display with a map and the top 3 results will be from a local directory and will receive 92% of the organic traffic. Most directories allow you to list your business for free and charge only for promoting the listing on top.

Learn more about the most popular Local Business Directories.

Most local business directories permit users to leave reviews even when you have not registered yourself. However, you will not be able to respond to any of them unless you claim your business on these sites. Claiming simply means authenticating yourself as a rightful owner of the business, and provides authority to post information or respond to users’ comments, questions, and reviews.

Enhance Your Content Marketing SEO Strategies By Posting Quality, Fresh Content with Relevant Keywords

Many small businesses create a website with shallow content that does not focus on important keywords that their target market often searches. Search engines read your website pages to index words that frequently appear on specific pages.

If you are selling plus size dresses, but your web pages do not use the word “plus size dress”, the page will likely not be within the rankings for these terms.

Most businesses do not have much time to write detailed content, and not everybody is a good writer. Therefore, it can be a good idea to seek help from writers from reputable marketing agencies like Prime Marketing Experts in order to post fresh content that will support your business growth. You may link to other websites and blog articles to further the benefit. Search engines love websites that regularly post fresh content. Henceforth, keep refreshing content with new information, blog articles, new products, etc. on an ongoing basis.

Your website should not provide any misleading content. Google penalizes websites that use click-and-bait tactics to drive traffic to their websites. Therefore, your strategy needs to ensure pages have content for plus size dresses if the page title tag says “Plus-size dresses”. You should also avoid pop-ups or flash content. While using well-researched keywords is a good practice, overusing specific ones can result in penalties from Google.

Update Metadata On Website

Updating meta content on each webpage tells search engines what the page is all about. Most of this content is not visible to the website visitor but is read by search engine bots. Including optimized keywords in metadata that can boost your page’s rankings because it is easier for them to understand the contents of your website.

Following are the most important metadata attributes from an SEO perspective:

1. Title – This shows on a browser’s title and as the main heading on search engine results.
2. Meta Description – This shows under the title in your search engine results and describes what the page is about.
3. Meta Keywords – These are not visible to users but define what the webpage is about. Google says it ignores meta keywords, but SEO experts suggest to specify them anyway.
4. H1 – Put the main heading of the page within H1 brackets and limit it to 1 per page.
5. H2 to H6 – These are optional lower level subheadings within the page. If used with relevant keywords, they can help in SEO. We recommend that you use them in this order: H2; H3; H4; H5; H6.

Even if you have created your website using an online platform like Wix, Google Website Builder, or WordPress, etc it is possible to update these attributes for every page. Below, we have provided the links to do so for some of the most popular website development platforms:

Update Metadata and Keywords in WordPress

Update Metadata in Wix

Update Metadata in Bigcommerce

Optimize Technical Performance Of Your Website

After you are done fixing content, meta-data, and local directory issues, you can further the benefit of your SEO strategies by focusing on improving your website’s user experience. Since this is technical, you should engage a website development company like Prime Marketing Experts.

• Site Speed: Google provides the PageSpeed Insights tool that analyzes the performance of each individual webpage. It lists suggestions on how to improve the performance of the site. Apart from Google, many free SEO tools provide similar information, with minor differences in the suggested modifications. Certain enhancements like reducing image sizes, removing certain page redirects, and using text compression techniques can significantly boost a site’s loading experience for the user.
• Mobile Responsiveness: Searchers use a mobile device about 60% of the time. Deploying a site with proper SEO web design is crucial to offer a superior user experience such that a screen resizes properly to a cell phone or tablet screen. Businesses need to ensure that their website adapts to the screen that a site visitor is using. If a user finds it difficult to navigate your website on a mobile phone, chances are he will leave the website and browse elsewhere.
• Image Naming Convention: A search engine bot cannot determine what the image is about, but it reads the name of the image file as well as ALT text for the image. ALT text stands for the alternate text that is displayed to the user who is not able to download images on the webpage. Tell your developer to mention it for all images on the website. Use good quality, high-resolution images to adapt to the most popular screen sizes. If possible, use keywords, captions, and descriptions that relate to the content on the page and the image.
• Use Sitemaps: Sitemaps are files that tell search engine bots which pages of a website to index. It can tell bots when new pages are added or old pages are deleted and make appropriate changes in their indices.
• Good URL structure: If your website URL reads something like this: www.xyz.com/folder1/xWyZsfgh.html, you are wasting an opportunity to tell search engines what the page is about. Employ a good URL naming structure. A URL like www.xyz.com/category/flowers/rose.html is far cleaner and easy to understand both for visitors and search engines.
• Avoid duplicate content: When two similar pages exist, search engines don’t know which one to rank and in turn, may not rank any page higher. You can use canonical tags, which tell search engines how to display a master copy of a page, to avoid this situation.

Create Backlinks

Creating backlinks is a great way to enhance your SEO campaign. There are some very simple ways to start building backlinks which any small business owner can do with little effort:

1. Create a profile for your business on all popular social media platforms and post content on a regular frequency. Include links to website product pages or blogs in these posts.
2. Claim and list your business in local business directories.
3. Write blogs on third party platforms and provide links to your website. You can enlist the help of influencers to promote your services and send users your way.
4. Add website links within the description of your Youtube videos
5. Answer queries on small business networks like alignable.com or quora.com, and add links to your website to be of service if they have further questions.

At Prime Marketing Experts, we are a top SEO agency that helps small businesses get found on all major search engines. If you want to know how we can help grow traffic and conversions on your website, book a Free Strategy Session now.