(ThyBlackMan.com) The online world provides owners of small businesses with a myriad of amazing opportunities to boost sales, brand awareness, and consumer loyalty. While you can spend money on paid advertising and build up your following on social media, the most effective and budget-friendly way to generate more website visitors and revenue is to dedicate your efforts towards improving your SEO. Read on for the basics.
What is SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, refers to the art of tweaking your website and the user experience that it provides based on best practice recommendations as laid out by Google. In doing so, your website will start to appear higher up on various relevant search result pages. The higher up your business appears in these search results, the better the chances of a potential customer clicking on your website link before they click on that of your competitors’.
Here are some tips for instantly enhancing your SEO.
Ensure easy navigation
A logical website structure is a must because it helps to ensure that visitors can find what they are looking for with ease. According to Google, a website visitor should be able to reach every page on your site from at least one static link.
Focus on your homepage and ensure that it links effortlessly to the most important pages, such as your ‘products and services’ page and your ‘contact’ page.
It is also recommended that you include your contact details at the top of every webpage, making it as simple as possible for potential customers to get in touch.
Finally, take the time to inspect your site for any broken links and fix them. Broken links are known to drastically increase bounce rate for obvious reasons.
Perfect your meta data
Meta data is a critical aspect of on-page SEO. Try to include the main keyword for which you want to rank in your URL, as well as the meta title and meta description. Also, remember to adhere to meta data recommended lengths, too. Meta descriptions should not exceed 160 characters and meta titles should be between 50 – 60 characters, including spaces.
Create great content
As already mentioned, providing a wonderful user experience to your website visitors is a key factor when it comes to determining how much Google values your website. As such, it is not surprising to learn that creating and posting great quality content can have a significant influence on your rankings.
Put your effort into creating content for your customers, answering their most frequently asked questions, providing interesting information and ensuring that your content is relevant to your business. If your customers love it, you can be certain that Google will too. If you struggle to create error-free, engaging content, it can help to enlist the services of a content marketing and SEO auditing company, such as clickintelligence.co.uk.
Build backlinks
Backlinks are integral to your off-page SEO efforts. Just be sure to create them organically. In other words, avoid paying for bulk instant backlinks, a common black hat SEO practice that is sure to earn you a Google penalty. Instead, put time into guest posting on reputable sites, asking business partners to mention you on their websites and writing testimonials for other companies.
Best of luck for your small business going forward. There is no doubt that SEO will help to boost your bottom line and your customer base.
If you are a high-volume, fast-growing ecommerce site, you may want to improve your site to better manage the influx of new shoppers. Enterprise ecommerce platforms, like Shopify Plus, make it easy for online vendors to boost their capabilities without breaking the bank. Marketing Your Site Once it’s Up Down the line when your store is up you will need to start marketing your site. When your planning to build links, you will need a good strategy. Using proper SEO white hat tactics is essential. You want to stay away from any black hat tactics as they are just not worth it and you will get penalized. That said to attend to your SEO needs you can use a powerful guest posting option. This is where you write or have written an article to put on another site with the keyword linking back to your site in the article. This is a win win scenario and works very well- if you do it right!
Staff Writer; Carl Jones