How to Improve SEO – Tips for Small Businesses

The small business landscape is incredibly competitive, meaning budding brands must use every resource at their disposal to get ahead. Search engine optimisation has consistently proven to be one of the most effective digital marketing techniques. 

By increasing the visibility of your business amongst your most valued target market, you can boost website traffic, in-store visits and sales across the board. Meanwhile, SEO is also widely regarded as one of the most cost-effective ways to reach consumers and drive interest in your products and services. 

But to experience life-changing results from an SEO campaign, your brand must plan and implement a detailed strategy that uses cutting-edge techniques. Here, we dive into the latest trends in SEO to ensure you understand what changes can drive enormous success for your small business.

Why Does SEO Matter for Small Businesses?

By significantly improving your website’s visibility in search engine results, SEO has the power to deliver a huge number of customers straight to your digital or physical store. 

Naturally, this means you have a far greater chance of generating sales that keep your lights on and help you expand your operations. 

While your rivals are probably sinking time and money into their own SEO efforts, there’s a good chance they’re using outdated SEO techniques or simply doing nothing at all to increase their reach. 

By launching a comprehensive SEO campaign that skyrockets your brand awareness with local consumers, you can ensure you capture their attention when they search online for a product or service you sell.

On-Page Tips to Increase Organic Traffic SEO

Small businesses can benefit from SEO in a myriad of ways. But with so many different on-page and technical changes to know about, it can be hard to know where to put your limited time, money and energy. Consider these tips to increase organic traffic SEO and dominate your sector.

Refresh Your Keyword Research

Keywords are a critical aspect of SEO. By identifying the main terms your target market uses to search for products relevant to your business, you can ensure your website is more appealing to search engine algorithms.

If you’ve already implemented some keywords on your website, you must regularly review and update these to ensure you’re keeping up with changing consumer behaviour. As customers and industries evolve, you need to ensure you’re still targeting the right people. 

For example, you might have started offering new products and services that need fresh keywords to reflect these changes. Meanwhile, you might discover your keywords have lost relevance as customers prefer different terms when they search.

Enhance Blogs and Product Pages

SEO-powered website content is the vehicle that drives you to the top of the search engine results page. By having a high-quality blog, you’re using one of the most effective search engine optimisation methods to capture attention.

While the creation of keyword-driven guides and articles are great for appealing to Google’s algorithm, this content is also perfect for demonstrating your industry knowledge. 

As customers want to buy from a trustworthy business, exploring your products and services in great detail proves that you know what you’re talking about.

However, launching a blog means it must be regularly updated to experience awesome SEO benefits. Plan out a content schedule and create content that resonates with your target market.

Elevate Your URL Structure

Many business owners overlook the importance of a clear URL structure. Rather than the domain for your pages being a jumble of random letters and numbers, taking the time to create a logical structure helps potential customers immediately recognise what a page is about.

As people browse Google and decide which page has the best chance of answering their question or selling the product they need, every razor-sharp search engine optimisation tool can drive more clicks.

As the URL of your page is displayed on Google, a keyword-driven URL that describes the content is bound to enhance your click-through rates. If you’re looking to maximise website traffic, a carefully considered URL structure will help you achieve your goals.

Feature High-Quality Media

In an ideal world, a powerfully written blog post or product description would be enough to convince a potential customer to purchase. 

But as the average person is busier than ever with a lower attention span, enhancing your content with images, custom graphics and video is a great way to increase interest.

As you showcase the benefits of your products and services, while also keeping users on your website for longer, the search engine optimisation benefits from this simple step can be huge. 

With lower bounce rates correlating to higher page rankings, ensuring customers don’t immediately click back upon visiting your website is critical to your SEO success. 

Plus, the addition of descriptive file names, captions and alt-text information can help algorithms understand your images and deliver more engaged consumers.

Advance Your Internal Linking

By developing a robust approach to internal linking, you ensure Google understands the structure of your website. If a page doesn’t have any backlinks or isn’t included within your sitemap, it becomes an orphan page. 

This can be majorly harmful as search engine crawlers can’t index your page, meaning consumers won’t discover it. However, internal linking is also great for helping potential customers navigate your website. 

By linking to relevant product pages, categories or contact information when it makes sense, you can ensure users spend more time on your website and get to know what you do best.

Select a few internal links to add to your content and use this SEO technique to push your website up the search engine rankings.

Include Authoritative Outbound Links

Adding outbound links to your product pages and blog content might seem counter-intuitive as you send potential customers to an external website. However, this search engine optimisation method is great for building your brand’s authority. 

How does that make sense? Business owners who craft a new blog on the latest industry news impacting brands will likely reference other articles and studies to illustrate their points. By adding outbound links that support your ideas, customers will perceive your content as highly informative and trustworthy.

In addition, outbound links can help your business establish productive relationships with other like-minded organisations. By letting someone know you’re linking to their content, they’ll hopefully reciprocate in the future, helping to boost your brand awareness and credibility.

Make Social Sharing Easy

When you browse a news website or industry blog, you’ve probably noticed the addition of buttons that make it easy to share content straight to social media. 

It’s a smart idea to add these to your own website to ensure you benefit from dedicated customers that want others to know about your products and services. 

By boosting your social signals, your brand’s overall SEO performance will benefit. But you want to be careful how you place and organise these buttons. 

While it’s tempting to add several social sharing buttons across each and every page, this can be annoying for consumers as they browse your website. 

Make sure you only use buttons for social media platforms relevant to your target market and ensure they don’t obstruct readers from enjoying your content.

Technical Tips to Increase Organic Traffic SEO

Most people think of on-page SEO techniques when it comes to climbing the search engine results page. But ensuring your technical standards are up to scratch with the latest SEO trends can be just as important. 

Create a Mobile-Responsive Website

Most online shoppers now use their mobile devices to browse the internet and find the products and services they need most. Considering this shift in how consumers interact with brands online, you must develop an easy-to-navigate platform to climb alongside the latest SEO trends.

How do you make this happen? Focus on making the user experience as simple as possible through straightforward fonts and a clear menu. Meanwhile, you’re going to need your pages to load incredibly quickly if you want customers to remain engaged.

Rather than making your customers battle through a poorly optimised mobile website, generate a responsive design and ensure you appeal to cutting-edge SEO techniques.

Optimise Meta Titles and Descriptions

To ensure your product pages and blog content achieve top-notch reach for your business, you always need to include keyword-driven meta titles and descriptions. 

This extra information is used by Google’s algorithms to understand what your content is about, ensuring you gain visibility amongst customers conducting relevant searches.

As meta titles and meta descriptions also appear in the search results, they are great for letting potential customers know what to expect should they visit your website.

Although you only have around 160 characters to convey your message, this can be used to share a compelling description that inspires more people to click on your website.

Reduce Page Load Time

The time it takes for your website to load is essential when looking to reach the first page of results on Google. As this aspect of your SEO is a direct ranking factor, websites that provide users with a slow and tedious experience will struggle to overcome their rivals. 

So how do you improve your page loading times? With millions of websites based on WordPress, removing unnecessary plugins and redundant code from your website can help get things moving much quicker. 

You should also focus your attention on optimising images. This means uploading media in a PNG file format and restricting the dimensions to ensure they are perfectly compressed for users to view online.

Boost Engagement with Google My Business

Optimising your Google My Business (GMB) profile is vital for small businesses looking to attract more customers. This free tool from Google enables brands to take charge of how their operation is represented on services like Google Maps. 

By keeping this profile updated with relevant information, nearby customers have a better experience engaging with your business. This is because you can upload your accurate contact information, including your phone number and operating hours.

Plus, you can upload photos and generate stellar customer reviews that will help you appear in more search results. Keep your GMB profile active to massively improve your search engine optimisation.

Use Google Analytics

Search engine optimisation is wonderfully rewarding when handled correctly. But with some patience required and so many complex metrics to measure, understanding the impact of your efforts isn’t always easy. 

However, Google Analytics makes it simple to track how your website is progressing. By reflecting on this data, you know what changes will help improve your SEO ranking results. So where should you begin? 

The behaviour section helps you assess how traffic navigates your website, including their journey through your pages and what internal searches they conduct.

Bounce rate is another critical factor. If you notice that many website visitors leave your website from the landing page, this might be a sign that your content is failing to hit the ideal pain points.

Hunt Down Duplicate Content

If your business is always adding and removing product pages, it’s not hard to imagine a situation where content accidentally gets duplicated. 

While you might not think this is a big deal, Google’s algorithm doesn’t see things that way. As Google’s site crawler can’t decide which duplicate version is meant to be displayed to users, it usually filters these results from the search engine. 

This means you won’t be able to reach your audience at all with these pages, which has a distinctly negative impact on your SEO results. Luckily, you can use the Google Search Console to check for duplicate content and ensure you rank higher.

Solve Broken Links

In a similar way to duplicate content, it’s easy for broken links to appear on your website when trying to maintain dozens or hundreds of pages. 

This causes problems with search engine optimisation, because your customers are bound to become frustrated if they keep running into dead ends. 

Instead of letting broken links exist on your website, you must take steps to ensure you either remove these links or add the right destination.

By double-checking that links are functioning when you add, remove or shift content, you can reduce the number of broken links that appear on your website.

Chat to the Experts

Search engine optimisation is one of the best tools small businesses have to reach and convert their ideal target markets. But adopting the latest trends in SEO isn’t something that simply happens overnight. 

To ensure your business achieves its ranking goals and establishes its long-term future, you have to plan and implement a comprehensive campaign that approaches SEO from every angle. 

The talented team at First Page Australia knows the perfect tips to increase organic traffic SEO, with our SEO services available in Perth, Adelaide, Ballarat, Canberra and beyond. Speak to our friendly digital marketers and discover why we’re considered one of Australia’s leading SEO agencies.

If you’re looking to attract sales-ready customers immediately, our expert team also leads powerful PPC campaigns. To learn more, check out our blog on Is Google Ads Worth It for Small Businesses?