3 Great SEO Tips for Small Businesses

By Josh Hunt - Digital Marketing Manager at PerfectWeb

If you’re running a small business and managing a website, you should definitely be taking advantage of search engine optimisation (SEO). Ranking highly on Google is a great way to drive traffic to your website and generate those all important leads and customers.

But how, exactly, do you do that?

This article will give you 3 great tips on how you can get your small business to the top of Google.

1.   Create quality content

The best tip I could ever possibly give you regarding SEO, is that you need to create content for your website that is high quality, easy to digest, and relevant to your target market.

One of the main reasons I say that you need to create good quality content, is because this is exactly what Google, and potential visitors to your website, are looking for.

So many companies get this all wrong and build a website purely as a box-ticking exercise. These days, more and more business is being done online and when somebody is looking for the products and services you offer, they’re far more likely to use the web to find them over any other channel.

Be sure that all content you’re putting on your website is the best it can be. If you do this, you’ll find that people are far more likely to engage with your site and Google will rank you higher in the search results.

2.   Make the most of social media

Social media has become a big part of SEO. To help determine the quality of a web page, Google now looks at all kinds of different things and social media is fast becoming one of the main factors behind how well a web page ranks.

If a web page gets shared on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ by a large number of people, Google sees this as a strong indicator that the page being shared contains some high quality content. This means that the page is then more likely to rank higher in the search engines.

With this in mind, you should try to encourage visitors to your website to share the content with their social networks. There are a number of ways you can do this:

• Put social sharing buttons on your web pages

• Create high quality content that your audience will want to share

• Share your website’s content with your social networks and ask them to do the same

As well as the SEO benefits, when your content is shared on social media you’ll see a natural uplift in traffic because your business will be exposed to a much wider audience through social sharing. This one is a no-brainer so make sure you take advantage of it.

3.   Ensure your website is mobile-friendly

Google, and other search engines of course, want to make sure that they’re providing the best content and the best user experiences possible to people that use their search engine. The web is being accessed and browsed using all kinds of devices these days, mobile phones, tablets, laptops, they’re all devices being used to browse the web. The trouble with this is, a standard website isn’t well built for mobile devices as they have much smaller screen sizes.

Obviously, Google prefer websites that work well on mobile devices and is more likely to give them a boost in the search rankings because they’re likely to provide a better user experience.

If your site mobile-friendly, don’t panic, just make sure that when you have it redesigned in the future that you have it built in a way that it will be accessible and easy to use on mobiles and tablets.

Where to go from here….

If you follow these 3 tips you’ll be well on your way to ranking highly on the search engines and providing a better experience for your users. Remember, if you create great accessible content that people want to share, you’ve won the battle.

If you want more advice about your website and how you can improve SEO then please get in touch by emailing sayhello@perfectweb.co.uk We are a friendly digital agency with lots of smiley helpful people who can answer your questions. Find us at www.perfectweb.co.uk