If you’ve launched your website but haven’t yet been able to upload plenty of content, or implement other Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies, this six-step guide for better rankings for small businesses will help you.
Step 1: Capitalize on Local SEO
If you’re a localized business, SEO is much easier than it would be if you were trying to target a broad audience because it is easier for your customers or clients to review your website when searching for a business local to them. To capitalize on local SEO, you should follow these five simple steps:
- Claim your ‘Google My Business’ listing.
- Add imagery of your business premises or facilities, staff, product and services, and clients to your website so that people are attracted to your business.
- Optimize your website by including a dedicated contact page with your business address (including a separate address and maps for each location), your local contact number, and click-links so that people can call through to your business efficiently.
- Claim other relevant business profiles such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Facebook, to allow people to find your website through various avenues.
- Collect client testimonials and upload these to your website. Reviews are particularly crucial for localized businesses, and if you can obtain some client or customer reviews (ideally in video format), you’ll get better rankings in no time.
Step 2: Focus on Videos
People can gain and retain a lot more information watching videos than they would by reading a blog post. And unlike Facebook, YouTube is growing in popularity when it comes to social media. To get better rankings as a small business, be sure to capitalize on YouTube as a means to generate traffic to your website.
Step 3: Make Quality Content
Having quality content on your website is an essential factor in getting better rankings for small businesses. To gain quality content on your website, consider hiring a good writer via online job boards.
Your website needs to have quality content, but it also needs to rank well. To rank well on Google, you will need to conduct Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) research to see what types of content and keywords rank well. Then produce blog outlines setting out your content and keywords plan to provide to your content writer.
Step 4: Choose Your Keywords Wisely
Go after the keywords that the big brands don’t use, which usually means using “long-tail terms” (i.e., queries with 3-5 words) rather than single-worded head terms.
If your content is talking about the benefits of your high-fiber health-food product, you would be better off using the long-tail term “what foods are high in fiber” than merely “food.” More people will be searching for “food,” and therefore, that head term won’t translate into traffic to your website.
Step 5: Target Topics Instead of Queries
By targeting topics instead of queries for your website content, you can improve your rankings. Create content clusters, which will involve having pillar pages for competitive head terms, and then producing articles based on long-tail variations of those head terms. Then, interlink the articles to mutually reinforce each other, which will help to rank all of your content.
Step 6: Focus on Creating in-Depth, Authoritative Content
Despite producing one-eighth as much new content as large websites, small businesses’ websites are starting to rank higher in SERPs due to Google’s diversity update of 2019, which prohibits domains from ranking for over two spots for anyone given keyword. Smaller sites making long-form content, therefore, have a better shot of ranking with the more prominent websites, even though less content is being produced.
Through implementing some or all of the steps in this 6-step guide for better rankings for small businesses, you can expect to see an increase in your website ranking, despite not having the high domain authority of big brand’s websites.
