SEO can be a cheap and effective way to get traffic to your small business website. Business owners and SEO experts said that a good URL and strong meta descriptions are key. But don’t stuff your content with keywords or copy copy from other websites. This article is part of “Small Business Marketing,” a series that explores the basics of marketing strategy for SBOs to win new customers and grow their business. Loading Loading something.
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As paid ads get more expensive and social media algorithms feel harder than ever to crack, winning at search engine optimization, or SEO, seems like the cheapest and most effective marketing strategy for many disposable small businesses.
“When you start ranking well on the search engine results page, you don’t pay for the traffic that comes your way,” said Neal Taparia, who has relied heavily on SEO to grow his seven-figure gaming company . Unroll the media. “Obviously, you have to work hard and invest to get those quality search rankings, but once you’re there, you’re rewarded with high-quality traffic and very high intent at a low cost of acquisition.”
Taparia started his company in 2020 and said organic search now accounts for 53% of his site’s traffic.
Leg work doesn’t have to be that hard either. Small business owners and SEO experts shared with Insider the strategies that have helped them improve their site’s rankings over time and build a significant stream of organic traffic from search.
1. Get the technical elements of your website right
Taparia said Google’s goal is to rank the best sites at the top, which means the bottom line of any good SEO strategy is to make sure you have a good website.
Neal Taparia
Courtesy of Neal Taparia
Erin Fabio, founder and CEO of the digital marketing agency Grit Studiotold Insider that too many small business owners interpret this as simply having a nice website design and skipping important technical optimizations, such as including meta descriptions i title tags on the content pages, creating a good URL structure, and ensuring fast site speeds. “Technical optimization is the first step that is often a relatively low climb,” he said.
Another way to tell search engines that you have a good website is to reduce your bounce rate, or the number of people who leave your site after viewing just one page. Taparia said to think about this from a product standpoint: Is your website easy to navigate? Are there compelling images that make people scroll? Are there elements that encourage people to interact more with the website, such as links to other content?
2. Focus on long tail keywords
Targeting certain search terms, or keywords, on your website and through other media such as blogs is a crucial pillar of a successful SEO strategy. But Fabio said too many business owners are targeting the wrong keywords. “Small businesses should work to rank for specific keywords instead of generic terms. If you’re working to rank for ‘moisturizer,’ you have a lot more competition than if you’re working to rank for a “Clean Lavender Moisturizer,” said Fabio.
Marianna Sachse.
Courtesy of Marianna Sachse
When talking about SEO, they are often called long tail keywords. Marianna Sachse, the founder of the children’s clothing brand jackaltold Insider that he uses Neil Patel’s Respond to the public tool, which is free for three searches a day, to help discover more specific keywords to seed your content strategy with. “I’ll search for things like ‘kids clothes’ and it gives me a whole list of similar things that people are searching for, which gives me a long list of ideas for blog posts,” she said, adding that has seen a 45% to 50% increase in landing page traffic to his top blog posts in the past year by using this approach, along with other SEO best practices like constant updating of its content.
3. Differentiate your content from others and avoid keyword stuffing
Fabio said that blogging weekly about your target keywords is a great way to increase your website’s SEO. But it’s important to make sure your content isn’t mimicking other content’s rankings for those same keywords; otherwise, you’ll struggle to outrank them in search results.
Taparia recommended doing a competitive analysis using current top-tier articles. “Look at all the top search results to understand what content they have and why Google surfaces them. Then ask yourself: How can I create content that is even better than this? What is missing that a user wants from this content?” he said For example, this could mean creating content that is more researched, organized in a more user-friendly way, or that meets a need or answers a question that other content doesn’t.
As you write, you want to avoid the common mistake of keyword stuffing. “The key to good content is to make it sound natural. Mentioning the keyword 30 times in an article could be a negative signal to Google,” said Taparia. Although there is no magic keyword number, some experts recommend aiming to use the keyword every 200 words. Sachse said he approaches this by working his keywords into the captions and alt text of the images as well as the text.
4. Look for natural opportunities to link
Another useful tactic to improve your business’s search engine traffic is to get links to your site from other quality sites, which improves your domain authority. The worst way to approach this, and the strategy many small business owners use, is to send blanket emails to publications asking them to add a link to your website in one of their articles. For one thing, people are likely to ignore you. But the quality of the site linking to you is also very important.
Taparia approaches Unwind Media’s link strategy similarly to how other companies approach public relations: looking for opportunities to deliver real value elsewhere. “One big thing we did early on was leverage the platform Help a reporter and look for opportunities to share our expertise,” Taparia said. “Often when you’re cited, they include a link to your site, which is a powerful link, especially if it’s from a well-known publication, because Google trusts that publication. “
Taparia also began conducting original research and posting the results on his company’s blog before sharing it with reporters. “For example, for one of our sites, we looked which words do Americans have the most trouble spelling by state, created an infographic and shared this research with reporters. We got a lot of people citing our website and driving traffic to that blog post,” he said, adding that this helped improve organic traffic for that specific topic to an average of about 620 visits per day in July to about 4,800 visits per day on average in December, or a 765% improvement.
Once all those strategies are in place, “the key is patience,” Taparia said.
“SEO grows over time,” added Fabio, “so at 12 months, you should see much stronger results than at six months.”
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