Today, most companies, regardless of size, have a website. A website is a place where customers and partners can find inspiration, information, and contact details. Most people agree that traffic to the website is a natural foundation for engaging customers and making new contacts. But for those who run a small company without large marketing budgets, where should this traffic come from? With the help of an expert WordPress website developer, you can ensure that your business gets the traffic it needs. Taking the time to ensure your marketing strategy is on point means that you have to hire the right people!
One way is to optimise your SEO. SEO optimisation of your website is about creating content that is optimised to be found by search engines so that you can rank as high as possible. So, it’s important to keep up with the updates as changes are constantly made to algorithms that determine how your content ranks and readjust your SEO strategy accordingly.
Great organic website ranking for relevant keywords doesn’t happen overnight but below we provide a small business SEO checklist that can help you start moving in the right direction and rank well in SERPs.
For those who run a business, the purpose of SEO is to be visible online with the keywords that your potential customers use to find you and what you offer.
The keywords that have the largest volumes tend to have more competition. Focusing on low-competition keywords but with high relevancy is often the best way for anyone who wants to get started with SEO. But depending on your industry and your target audience, you might want to consider focusing on local SEO.
For example, let’s say you are running a restaurant in Orange County. The hospitality industry is highly competitive and your target audience is OC locals. So, prioritising local SEO can be beneficial to your business. If you’re unsure how to go about it, you can always hire the services of an Orange County SEO agency to help you develop a solid SEO strategy.
When conducting keyword research and analysing which keywords are trending, it’s also crucial to know exactly who you are focusing your content on. You must understand the audience you are marketing to, what type of content they are looking for, and what their behaviors and interests are, as this is key for your business and marketing efforts.
First, you’ll need to know their demographics and if you are based in a certain region, you must make it your priority to target an audience in that specific region.
When you build a website, it must be of good technical quality. To be able to be indexed in Google's register of web pages, a good and logical structure is needed. Start with the front page and analyse what the website is like to navigate through.
All pages must be easy to find. It can also be good to look at how competitors have set up their pages and if there's an opportunity to take inspiration. Other technical aspects that are important are that the website is mobile-friendly and responsive and that, for example, there are no broken (404) pages.
So far, Google cannot determine what an image contains, so it’s very important that you also optimise the images that you publish on your site. To do this, name the image file a word that you think best describes it. Then you can also describe the image in the alt attribute with a short sentence of what it represents.
By writing descriptive alt attributes on your images, you send another signal to the search engines. Also, don’t forget to adjust the size of the images you publish, because large images make the page slow, which does not benefit the technical SEO part.
A meta description can be written on more or less all pages of the website. A meta description is a short description that details what the web page is about. The meta description is not visible when you enter the landing page, but it’s usually found directly in Google's search results during a search.
As a result, the meta description should be as concise and as interesting as possible for the visitor to click on your page. It is important to remember that if you don’t write a suitable Metatext for your page, Google itself chooses what should be in the description, which is then visible during a search.
SEO is an area that is constantly evolving but there are certain aspects that small businesses must be aware of if they want to boost their rankings.
Having a user-centric approach, understanding how the search engine works, and adhering to the basic framework and guidelines allows a small business to build a solid foundation that can develop over time. and boost ranking.
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