Google continues to be the dominant search engine online leaving BING and others at the back of the pack. Every business wants to be at the top of the search engine rankings for the keywords their clients and prospects use to find services, however there is only one top spot with everyone gunning for it.
What can your business do to get yourself closer to the top of the search rankings?
The biggest tip we can offer you is to stop paying for link building campaigns and start focusing on how your website is structured and how your website is optimized for on-site SEO. Most small businesses do a poor job with on-site SEO but continue to pay large sums of money to SEO companies to build links to their website.
For small businesses onsite SEO is more of a time investment and a discipline activity. We have put together four basic activities that must be done at least twice a month on your business website.
Identify Demand – What is the market demanding from your business? What are your clients asking from you and do you have this information on your website? This means using industry keywords and performing your own keyword research to see how your clients and prospects search amongst the various categories.
One tool you can use is the Google Adwords Research Tool to help identify what people are searching for and the level of competition online for a particular keyword or keyword set. Ideally, you want keyword sets with low competition and high number of searches.
Compelling Content – Content is king online today. Many business owners are knowledgeable about what they sell or the services they provide. However, many businesses lack the time and knowledge to keep their website up to date leaving their website underperforming in the search results. Business can leverage blogs, video, case studies, testimonials, and technical documents amongst others to attract visitors through search.
What do you do when you get them to your site? You need to keep them engaged. Content needs to be compelling. Use some of the following tactics to create audience engagement:
- Humor
- Controversy
- Current events/news
- Politics
- How To or Instruction
- Technical explanations
- Scare tactics
One last type is to leverage the authorship code and schema.org attributions for any special features such as video.
Track and Promote – Onsite SEO needs to be measured like all marketing activities. You must track all content on your website regularly. Promoting your website through social media services and your newsletter may not help with SEO but will attract more readers and viewers of your material. New content has a tendency to rank high fast, especially if it is something on the bleeding edge. Keep an eye on your rankings over the upcoming weeks and tweak if required.
Tune Content – As a business owner you must continue to tweak and tune your content regularly. Review the keywords on your site to ensure they are still relevant and update content when required. Stale content can result in very low SEO rankings. Updated content brings the search engine spiders back frequently to see what else is new on your site.
Don’t be like most small business owners who launch their website and then forget about it. Continue to work at tweaking your site and making changes when the market requires or when content reaches its past due date.
