How to kick start your SEO strategy
Get your SEO plan on the right track
When you’re attempting to rank your small business website in search results, it can seem like an impossible task. Follow these 5 tips to start making an impact in the search result pages for your target keywords quickly (and more importantly, cheaply)
1) Set up a Google My Business Page
Google My Business is Google’s newest platform for including business listings in search results. This is the natural successor to Google Local Business and Google Plus for business and allows businesses to create simple, clean profiles that will appear in search results in the form of a snippet. Google My Business (Since it includes address information) will also create a listing on Google Maps. This is essential for attracting relevant local traffic as the search algorithm will serve local searchers the results it deems to be the most relevant.
2) Get some real client reviews
Once you have a Google My Business listing, reviews are one of the key ways to influence Google to show your listing in prominent positions in the search results. Google wants to provide the most relevant results to searchers and if a business listing has multiple positive reviews, it is likely that it will be a relevant listing for people looking for the related product/service.
3) Start a blog
Keeping the content on your website fresh is a vital part of any SEO strategy. Setting up and running a blog is a quick and easy way to ensure you have new content being published regularly. Try to publish 2-3 times per week and aim to produce articles of 500-600 words in length. You should avoid overusing your target keywords and instead focus on producing quality content that readers will actually find useful. This approach will lead to better engagement and therefore stronger long term search rankings for your content.
4) Implement a basic social strategy for SEO
At a basic level, you should utilise social platforms to link to the content you are producing for your blog. This will help not only to build your following and audience but will also mean you are creating regular backlinks from strong domains to your site. This is very important since quality content and backlinks are fundamental concepts of any SEO strategy.
5) Make sure your site code is SEO ready
The quality of your on-site code is another ranking factor that should not be overlooked. Optimising items such as your H1 tags, meta title & description should be done on an ongoing basis. You should also look into things such as source code weight and image file sizes. As your site grows in size this becomes more important since the number of errors picked up by the algorithm can often make or break how well a page/site will rank.
We have learnt from experience that just getting these basics right will get your website moving in the right direction from an SEO perspective, providing a platform to build on for any future strategy.