Tips for Small Business Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Small business’s need to establish trust in the online community. Consumers may not know who you are – you need to ensure you’re ranking well and also offering a trustworthy product from a trustworthy source. This trust can be established through factors including the TLD component of a domain (i.e. “.com.au”) for the website which shows your business is Australian, as well as the inclusion of information such as addresses, phone numbers, and an ABN number.

Trust is just one tiny aspect of the actual user experience. How are you actually going to get the visitors to your site in the first place?

Keyword Research:

Big brands have the luxury of getting traffic from people searching for the brand. Small businesses will often not enjoy the same luxuries, which means highly targeted, relevant keywords are essential.

Some important questions to ask yourself when looking at keywords:

• Are my keywords actually being searched on? – There’s no point optimising your site for “Sydney florist” if more people are searching for “buy flowers in Sydney”.
• What phase of the buying cycle do my keywords target? – If none of your keywords target people in the actual purchasing phase how can you expect keywords to convert?
• Am I capturing people in the discovery, as well as purchasing phase, for that extra brand awareness? Remember that the more often a customer sees your brand, the more authority and trust they will give it.

Perform keyword research to make sure the terms you’re targeting are correct. Narrow these down to around 5 primary keywords at the most for a small site and ensure one primary keyword is targeted per page.

Content is King and So are Links:

Excellent content will help with search engine rankings, and it will help keep customers on your site. Building relevant links to important content will go a long way towards increasing the relevance for both the content and the primary keywords that this content is targeting!

Google Local Business Center:

Enter your business into Google Local Business Center. It’s free and will help people find both your site, and your physical business address!

Some quick tips for Google Local Business Center Rankings:

• Ensure your businesses physical address is on every page throughout the site
• Add your phone number to each page throughout the website
• Fill in your products and services using the keyword research that has been done
• Get customers to review your site! With a good product AND good service this won’t be hard!
• There’s the ability to add photos and videos of your business – use these! Again it’s about making it easy for people to FIND you.
• Get listed on local directories such as TrueLocal and LocalStore. Not only will these help with Google Local Business Listing by adding relevance to your listing, TrueLocal results make up Yahoo Local Business Listings.

Directories are Still Important:

Get listed in core directories such as HotFrog and depending on your industry, Ferret. These directories often rank highly in the search engine results pages, which can deliver referral traffic while you’re working on rankings for your own site.

Google Adwords:

Adwords can help you get traffic and conversions, particularly while you’re building up rankings for your primary keywords. Not sure how to use Adwords or can’t justify the cost? Keep an eye out for the $50 vouchers that Google sometimes gives out. They can help you get your feet wet, and give you an idea of the power of Pay Per Click advertising.

Get Social:

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, plus many more. Some are popular with everyone, others simply appeal to a niche, target audience. Do you have a presence on these, and if not why not?

The joy of small businesses on many social platforms is that you won’t necessarily come under the scrutiny that the big brands do so mistakes, if made, won’t necessarily have as big an impact. Just make sure you offer something of value to your customers. Can’t think of what that might be? Talk to your customers and LISTEN to what they say.

If your content is awesome (and I don’t mean awesome like you sell a nicely coloured red widget, I mean awesome like other people will want to share it), add share buttons to the site. Make that content easy to share. The more people that share it, the more your brand will get out there, and the more people will hopefully buy your product and increase your return on investment (ROI).

Google Analytics:

Google Analytics is one of the most robust free reporting tools out there, and it’s completely free. Get it on the site even if you don’t know how to use it. This transparency over your traffic will give you great insights both now, and later down the track.

Tags: google local business, keyword research, SEO, small business