4 Ways For Small Businesses To Improve Their SEO

For small businesses, it can seem difficult to know where to get started with SEO, especially with big corporations like Amazon that seem to dominate the search landscape. Thankfully, there’s plenty of areas that you can do today to improve your SEO results, without having to spend a fortune. 

Below, we’ll look at 4 steps you can tackle to improve your website’s SEO performance for 2022. 

SEO Friendly Website

For many small businesses, the website is treated as a ‘one and done’ part of the operation. Over time, websites can quickly become outdated as new practices are introduced and this can negatively impact how high the website can rank on search engines. 

It doesn’t have to be at the cutting edge of website development, but checking over things like making sure it has a mobile friendly design, improving your ‘core web vital’ score or improving the site load speed will all have a positive impact on SEO performance. 

We would recommend doing this step first, as your website is the foundation for all other SEO activity. Without making sure it meets a certain standard, it could be difficult to improve SEO performance with other strategies as they won’t be as effective as they could be.

Read more about this in ‘3 mistakes small businesses make with digital marketing’

Local SEO

Local SEO refers to ranking on search engines for location search terms, like ‘coffee shop Leicester’ or ‘restaurant near me’. It’s one area where small businesses can achieve great results, as national or international businesses will struggle to compete with every region or location across the UK, so having the right set up to target your local area can help you rank highly and acquire new customers. 

So how do you improve your local SEO performance? 

Well, there’s a number of different tactics. Firstly, we would recommend looking at your ‘Google my Business’ page and optimising that for your targeted area. There’s a lot of different areas to explore within this topic, so we’d recommend reading this excellent blog by Yoast on Google my Business for small business SEO for further information.

Secondly, adjusting your website text to include your service areas is a great way to indicate to search engines that you cover that location. Search engines scan the page content so they know what to deliver to users, so adding location to your pages is a great way to increase the likelihood of ranking for a local search. 

Some businesses even adjust their page URL’s, so for example if you offer yoga classes in Leicester and your current website is www.xxxxxx.com/yoga, that adjusts to www.xxxxxxx.com/yoga-in-leicester. Page URL’s are a strong indicator for search engines on the page content, so including the location here is a great way to rank higher for a local search term. 

Just be careful not to overdo it, as too many pages with the same content will flag as spam and could remove you from ranking altogether. We would recommend focusing on one or two key service areas, then using the page content to add smaller locations outside of the key areas. 

How do you know which tactics to use to rank higher in local search? One of the easiest ways is to do the search yourself (in incognito mode) and see what ranks the highest.

Go onto each page result and see if there are any common denominators – for example, if they all have your location area in the page URL’s, then that would be one of the first things to change. 

These are just some quick recommendations, but for a more in depth look at the possibilities with local SEO, this guide to local SEO from Ahrefs covers plenty of the options available to improve traffic in this area.

Want to make sure your local SEO is performing at its best? Why not get in touch for a free consultation to see how we can help improve your rankings. 

Citations

Although citations technically come under the local SEO umbrella, it’s vitally important that your citations are created and up to date. 

So, what are ‘citations’? 

Essentially, citations are online mentions of your business. The key acronym is NAP – name, address, phone number. Any external website that displays your businesses NAP is a citation, so any social media profiles, business listings (Yelp, Thomson Local etc) are included. 

Citations are essential for SEO, as they are a vote of confidence in your business for search engines that you exist and operate. Think of it like word of mouth for the internet – the more websites Google or Bing can see that have your NAP details, the more trustworthy you become in the eyes of search engines and the more confidence they have in recommending your business to someone performing a search. 

A neat (and free!) tool is available from Moz to check your local citations – sign up for as many as are relevant for your business, and make sure any existing citations are up to date. Any inconsistencies in your NAP across citations can be a red flag and actually harm search performance, so it’s vital to check on a regular basis to ensure the information is accurate.  

Start A Blog

One of the best ways to improve SEO performance is to create new content. Search engines love delivering fresh content to users, so starting a blog on your website is the logical step to increase the amount of content, and organic search traffic, to your website. 

Not only that, a blog gives you unique content to share with your social media followers that brings them back to your website. The more people you have on your website, this increases the chance of a conversion or a lead being generated, so not only is it a great brand building exercise, it has an impact on the bottom line of the business too. 

Read how to find the right digital marketing agency in Leicester

One of the most difficult parts of starting a blog is, well, actually starting it. The key with any blog is opting for quality over quantity – a well laid out and thorough ‘guide to yoga poses’ with images/videos will attract and engage many more readers than a few hundred words, plain text paragraph on why yoga is great. 

The very first thing to do is create a list of topics to write about – they want to be closely related to your business, so you attract the right kind of visitors to your site. 

Once you have your topics, start to research what content there is and think about what you or your business offers that isn’t currently available. You can use already existing content as inspiration, as long as you do it better. 

You don’t have to turn into a full time blogger either – 1-2 a month is sufficient for a small business, which should be achievable with some time dedication towards it. 

If writing isn’t for you, then it is possible to outsource – websites like Fiverr or PeoplePerHour offer low cost blog writing services, however we would advise to check the writers carefully as it can be very hit and miss. Like everything, you get what you pay for! 

Conclusion

So there you have it – 4 ways you can improve your SEO performance for 2022 without spending a huge amount of money. If you want some assistance in growing traffic to your website and increasing revenue, why not get in touch with us for a free consultation.