Tips on SEO for small and medium businesses

SEO is often a term we often hear when it comes to improving our website’s ranking. But some businesses without marketing experience, their own team or agency, don’t really know where to start when it comes to optimising their website for better positioning on search engines.

So here’s our breakdown guide of where to get started and tips on improving your website to get higher volumes of quality visitors to your website.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This means increasing organic traffic and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) – like Google – through actions you implement on your website’s on-page and back end.

If you implement SEO practices properly, your website will gradually appear higher on search engines. Searches for relevant search terms for your business are imperative and drive more traffic to your site. As a result, you’ll get matches that reach the audience that will generate a higher quality lead.

Applying best practices for SEO

It’s important that SEO is implemented correctly, as Google can be quite hot on penalising websites that cut corners. Despite this, it’s fairly simple to apply SEO the right way and organically drive your site’s rankings up, increase traffic and, ultimately, make more sales.

Keyword research

Keywords that are relevant to your business are fundamental in SEO.

Keyword research can really help benefit your SEO activities. It not only helps focus your SEO plans but also ensures that you’re targeting the right search terms.

There are keyword research tools available online, such as Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest and SEMrush to name just a few. They can help you find common search words that are relevant to website pages and your audience. Each page of your site will need a primary keyword, which you can then support with secondary keywords. You’ll then use these keywords as you create or edit your content.

Create unique, engaging content

Unique, well-written content that is keyword-rich can really help improve your SEO. If your content is relevant and useful to your audience, it increases engagement and improves relationships with customers. 

It’s important to be mindful of now overcrowding your keywords, as it can take away from the content itself and can put customers off. It’s also frowned upon by Google – so you’re likely to go down in rankings and lose customers.

Keep content topics a priority, and keywords may come naturally. You can always edit and add them in where appropriate.

Optimising web pages

Optimising your page ensures your primary keyword is featured in the page’s title, meta title, description and images.

When your site is pulled through on SERPs, the page title is displayed, followed by a short description of what the page is about. Doing this well can help a user decide whether the information is right for their search and can lead to higher-quality clicks.

Link building

Link building can seem like a long-winded, difficult task, but there are small steps you can take to improve your SEO without much effort.

There are three types of links that should be present throughout your site:

Internal links: They help a user navigate from one page on your site to another. This allows for further learning or directions to a Call to Action (CTAs).

External links: Take users from your site to another site. This may sound counterintuitive, but these external sites can be partners, social media sites, a sister company or any other site that supports your business and website. As a result, you’re providing relevant information to your customers, which helps with SEO rankings.

Backlinks: These are links from external sites to your site. Backlinks create authority for your site as they act as recommendations. The more backlinks from reputable sources your site have, the stronger it is against other competitor websites.

It can often be time-consuming to generate backlinks, but if your content is relevant to them, and vice versa, it can be a great way to build relationships and improve SEO at the same time. Try to avoid paid ‘spammy’ links as they will harm your site. It’s best to drive backlinks organically by building rapport with other sites.

Core Web Vitals

Web vitals are user experience-based metrics used by search engines to rank your site’s user experience, predominantly related to the speed of your site.

This can include total loading time, the time for the webpage to become interactive for the user, and cumulative layout shift (how stable your page is e.g. elements of your page shifting which can cause a user to experience unexpected interactions to your site.

In simple terms, to ensure your website loads quickly for your visitors, avoid uploading large content such as images and videos by reducing their size. Google Page Speed Insights, is a good indicator of how well your site is performing and can help diagnose any issues.

These changes help to improve the user experience as well as your SEO performance for better conversion rates.

Online presence

SEO doesn’t just have to revolve around your website. It’s also beneficial to have a wider online presence. Adding your business to social media sites can help target new audiences and build engaging relationships by providing useful, interesting content. Not all social media may be relevant for your business, so prioritise the sites where your audience is, and regularly provide informative, entertaining content you know they’ll find useful.

Adding your company to directories and Google My Business also helps to demonstrate you’re a legitimate business. It helps to make sure your address, phone number and company name are all presented the same on each directory for consistency. It’s also worth adding posts and as much information as you can such as images and descriptions.

All of the above provide ways of sharing the content you create, linking to and from your website and interacting with your audience. Plus, have more interaction with customers and generate reviews, all of which add to your SEO.

It’s important to remember that search terms and trends change all the time, so review your website’s SEO regularly to ensure relevancy.

For more tips on SEO and help with your business’s online presence, why not check out Resolver Pro – Four brand new business packages created by the minds at Resolver – giving you access to insights and data tools, such as reviews, CMS and marketing.