Editorial Team
5 min read
If you run a small business these days, you probably have a website. According to recent consumer behavior research, eight in ten consumers in the United States search online for local businesses at least once per week, and about a third do so at least once per day. A strong small business website is crucial to attracting customers, and the key to a great web presence is search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is the practice of optimizing content and navigation on your website to improve its ranking on search engine results pages. The better your SEO, the more easily you increase website traffic so that new customers will find you. Whether you run a restaurant, retail shop, or service-based business, effective SEO can help your business rank highly in search results.
It’s worth remembering that SEO for small businesses is just as important as SEO for larger companies. SEO marketing for small businesses can drive major results. And the mechanics of how to increase website traffic don’t have to be mysterious. In general, search engines reward websites with content that is highly relevant to users and that is easy to navigate. Here are three essential tips to get you started.
1. The key to small business SEO is to think like your customers
Much of the best advice on SEO for small business can be distilled into a single sentence: think like your customers. Google ranks relevant content as the most important factor for a good SEO score. If your website is useful to consumers, their behaviors will earn you strong SEO rankings. Ask yourself: what phrases will potential customers use when searching for my business or products? What kinds of searches will they perform before making the decision to buy? Researching keywords and considering keyword competition will help you reach your target audience.
Don’t make the mistake of trying to be everything to everyone. Instead, think at scale. If you run a location-specific business, ensuring that your website can be found locally is a great starting point. To increase website traffic, register your business with the most common search engines and include your contact information on directories, review sites, and your webpage.
The idea of scale may also help when it comes to thinking about keywords for your content. Choosing “long-tail” keyword phrases that are rich in detail can make a big difference. “Coffee shop” is a generic keyword. “Best coffee shop in Berkeley, CA” is a longer-tail keyword. In general, there is less competition for long-tail keywords, increasing the likelihood that you will show up first on the search results page for a given search.
Writing useful, specific content also ensures that your content is valuable, interesting, and therefore shareable. Social media can be an effective and inexpensive way to spread the word about your business. And social media marketing works best if customers are inspired to organically share and engage with your content.
When in doubt, remember that junk content won’t get you very far. In the past, some companies tried to game SEO by writing only for search engines. This involved cramming a bunch of keywords into a blog post as many times as possible to rank highly for those keywords—it didn’t look pretty. Thankfully, Google recognized this practice and made a shift towards favoring readability and helpfulness over keyword cramming. While you may need to spend some time thinking like a search engine, ultimately, you still need to prioritize thinking like your customers.
2. Strong backlinks build your small business SEO reputation
A less obvious consideration when it comes to SEO for small businesses is link authority: a ranking based on the number of websites that include backlinks to your site and its content. Think of this like your reputation. If a lot of quality websites trust and reference your content, Google is more likely to trust your content as well. When a website with a high ranking, like the New York Times, cites a link to one of your posts in an article, your link authority will go up. When you start linking back and forth between websites it gets the link juice flowing.
Great backlinks for your small business can come from setting up a Google Business page, from local directory listings, and from social media and review sites. Remember that backlinks don’t all have to be directed to your homepage. You can also get backlinks to your blog posts or other sharable content. While some people try to game the system by purchasing backlinks, Google has banned this practice, and you can incur steep penalties. Getting strong backlinks comes back to the key principle of SEO: publishing great content.
3. A great website backend completes the small business SEO picture
Optimizing your website design for SEO content is the third major component in improving your search engine rankings. Your metadata, description tags, content headers, and even images all need to be aligned to get the most SEO value out of your website. While getting your website’s backend into order may seem like a daunting task, you don’t have to be a programmer to figure it out. There are a lot of resources out there that will help answer your questions and give you the tools you need to get SEO working for your small business.
Once you have the basics in place, remember you will need to continue to review your SEO regularly for performance and update it according to outcomes including whether it has helped to increase website traffic. Staying on top of SEO marketing can be straightforward and affordable. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are free tools that can give you a baseline understanding of current traffic to your small business website, and help you gauge how to improve SEO over the long term.
Fortunately, a Clover POS system makes it easy for small businesses of all shapes and sizes to grow an online business and manage it in one place. Learn how a Clover POS system can help your shop, restaurant, or services businesses build a standout online store.
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