101 SEO Tips for Small Businesses in 2020

Small business SEO continues to change as the Google algorithm evolves and makes use of machine learning along with the core RankBrain algorithm. Each year we analyze the latest trends in search engine optimization and update this article for our followers.

By implementing this small business SEO checklist, you’ll be on your way to increased traffic and lead generation:

1. SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Start now and never quit.
2. SEO is not a one time event.  It’s an ongoing process. How many keywords and common questions can you come up with for your industry?  Are you ranking in one of the first five positions on the first page for each of your keywords?
3. Quality content is one of the most important ranking factors. Be sure your content is relevant and remember, quality over quantity.
4. Make certain your content is written for humans instead of the search engines.
5. While lengthy content can be helpful to your ranking, content quality is way more important.
6. Take Security seriously and consider using a Firewall plugin if you’re on WordPress.
7. Each page should have a Title Tag with no more than 50-60 characters.  This title is usually what will show up in search results.
8. Pick out a unique focus keyword for each page and blog post of your site.
9. Make the focus keyword the first word in your Title Tag (within reason).
10. Use the focus keyword in your meta description. It may not help your site to rank better but it will be important to maintaining a relevant search description for your audience.  Notice that the focus keyword is in bold font in the meta description displayed on Google when entered by the user performing the search.
11. The focus keyword should appear in the first paragraph of your content when applicable.
12. Create an SEO friendly URL that contains the exact focus keyword (ex. https://www.persistseo.com/small-business-seo-tips/ instead of persistseo.com/p=123?/)
13. Do not use your keyword too many times or your page could get penalized by Google Panda.
14. Install the Yoast plugin for WordPress.  It’s free and it’s awesome.
15. Each of your pages should have one and only one H1 header tag. You can view the source code of your pages by right-clicking and choosing View Page Source.  Search for H1 and if you see it more than once, it would be wise to clean up your headers.
16. Use multiple H2 header tags to make the content easier to read. And, include your focus keyword when appropriate.  Never stuff keywords and try your best to make your content easy to read.
17. Use long-tail keywords or keyword phrases on your blog articles. Keyword phrases and how-to questions are typically easier to rank than broad search terms.
18. Research new keywords and look for low to medium competition and low volume keywords for your blog articles.
19. Use the Google Keyword Planner for keyword research. Login to your Google Adwords Account and choose the menu option for the keyword planner.
20. Backlinko has one of the best guide’s on keyword research I’ve ever seen.  Get a notepad ready and review Brian’s keyword research tips.
21. Add an XML sitemap to your site and submit to Google Search Console. The Yoast plugin generates an XML sitemap dynamically.
22. Use Yoast to create and configure your XML sitemap. The XML sitemap contains every page on your site and is important for Google to consume this file and index all your new pages and posts.
23. SEO for local business: add your business listing to trusted directory sites like Yelp, Chamber of Commerce, and HotFrog, to increase your citations.  You can request a scan of your local business listing here for free.
24. Install Google Analytics via the Global Site Tag (GST). Google Analytics will help you track the number of visitors and how they landed on your page. The GST will also allow you to track conversions more accurately.
25. Authenticate Google Search Console on your domain with your Google Analytics Account.
26. Connect your Google Analytics Account to your Google Search Console account for better keyword data.
27. Use Google Page Speed to determine how fast (or slow) your site loads.
28. If your page speed is slow, consider using a content delivery network (CDN) to speed things up. Your site’s response time is a factor in the Google search algorithm.  Siteground is a great hosting option for your small business website, especially if your site is on WordPress. In full disclosure, we get a free month if you click the link above and sign up.
29. Purchase an SSL certificate and apply to your site to transition to HTTPS. Google announced HTTPS as a ranking signal in 2014. With a SiteGround Hosting account, you can get a Let’s Encrypt certificate for free.
30. Consider adding 1-2 external links in your blog content to trusted sources (ex. Wikipedia, Google, etc). Your new visitors will appreciate the quality of your content if you link to trusted sources of information related to your industry.
31. Add social share icons on each page of blog content. Doing so will allow your visitors to share your content on their favorite social media pages.  And, it increases the chances that someone may decide to link to your content from their website or blog.
32. Share your content on your social media pages. If you don’t have social media pages setup for your business, you should do so ASAP.
33. Create a Google My Business listing for your small business.
34. Associate your Google My Business profile with your website.
35. Get your local business verified on Google My Business. Those map listings on the 1st page of Google Search could be worth thousands to small business owners.
    

    Tips for Improving SEO and Best Practices

36. Create Google Posts to improve your local map ranking on Google and inform your visitors of coupons or deals.
37. After verification with Google My Business, update your profile to 100% by adding a category, office hours, relevant images, website URL, and office contact information.
38. Ask your happy clients to consider leaving a review on your Google My Business page. High quality, positive reviews from your customers will help increase your local visibility.
39. For local businesses, it’s important for you to respond to all of your Google Reviews.
40. Duplicate content is bad for your SEO.  Create unique, compelling content.
41. Use your focus keyword when naming your images and include an alt image tag and image title with the focus keyword.
42. Add a lead capture form above the fold to increase the chances you’ll get a lead. “Above the fold” refers to visibility of the form on your page(s) without having to scroll down.
43. Require only minimal information on the lead capture form (ex. Name, Email). Phone should be optional.
44. Be sure your phone number is in a prominent place so your new visitors will not have to search for your contact information.
45. Your site should be easy to read on mobile phones.  Perform a mobile-friendly test on Google Search Console to see if your site measures up.
46. Create an awesome mobile experience.  Google has reported that mobile searches outnumber desktop searches.
47. To give your products and services pages a boost in rankings, link to an internal page of your site with a focus keyword as the anchor text.
48. Be sure to use diverse anchor text when linking to your internal pages.
49. Add 3-5 tags to each of your new blogs posts, using your focus keyword and other related topics.
50. Add keyword rich categories for your blog posts.  Categories are more general and tags should be more specific to the individual blog articles.
51. Add rich snippets to your website.  One example of a rich snippet may be a 5 star review that will show up in the Google search results. Verify your rich snippets with the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.
52. Review your crawl errors in Google Search Console.  Google is pretty good at letting you know if there are any errors with robots.txt or 404 errors.
53. Use the redirection plugin for WordPress to setup redirects to decrease your bounce rate.  This action is especially important if you’re doing a web redesign.
54. When making significant changes to certain pages of your site, use the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console and submit the URL to Google for more rapid indexing of new information.
55. Run a Google Ads campaign for a few months to learn more about the best keywords for your industry and apply those keywords to your SEO strategy.  Google Ads generally provides better keyword data than Google Analytics.
56. Use primary keywords with higher search volume and low competition on your main products and services pages.
57. Occasionally Geo-Tag your Title Tag with city names in your service area.  For example, “Atlanta SEO Expert – PersistSEO.”
58. Be patient for the first 3-6 months.  Most local SEO campaigns take 3-6 months before moving the needle. National SEO campaigns may take 6-9 months or more.
59. Check references when choosing a new SEO company.  Understand their methodology and be sure it doesn’t include any blackhat or grayhat techniques.
60. Brainstorm new keywords and use Google Search to find suggested keywords (usually at the bottom of the page).
61. Use LSI keywords in your content. Google related searches can help you determine similar keywords to use or “People also ask” questions in the search query are great to pull ideas from.
62. Use Schema.org to add rich snippets or local address markup.
63. Navigate to Search Engine Optimization – Landing Pages in Google Analytics to review impressions, clicks, and average position for each landing page.
64. Consider running Page Speed Insights reports on a monthly basis and have a developer make improvements to the site performance.
65. If using WordPress, choose a mobile friendly child theme or have someone build a custom site that is mobile friendly.
66. Update and add quality content regularly.  Adding new content or re-optimizing old content can help make your site more relevant.  Google loves fresh content.
67. Don’t design a new website without considering SEO.  Be sure your web designer knows SEO and has references to back it up.
68. Google considers the WWW and Non-WWW versions of your website as two separate domains.  Consolidate your SEO to one or the other.  In WordPress, you do this by ensuring your URL on the Settings page is the WWW version of the website.
69. Links from high domain authority sites can give you a boost in search rankings.  It’s your job to be creative and build content worthy enough to be added to an official government or university site, or any other high quality website.
70. Compelling images and properly optimized video can significantly reduce bounce rate and engage your visitors longer.  Search engines will reward you.
71. Create a sitemap page (for humans) that includes a link to every page on your site.  Include the sitemap URL in a global link on your website.
72. Bruce Clay does a great job of explaining how to organize your website into silos for the best SEO results.
73. To determine if all of your pages have been indexed on Google, type site:www.mydomain.com into the Google Search bar and replace “mydomain” with your website name.
74. Backlinks are important to increasing your search placement.  To determine who has linked to your website, login to Google Search Console and choose Links in the left navigation.
75. Create Video content with keyword rich titles.  Add a lengthy description explaining the video with a link back to your website.
76. If you want to rank at the top of Google, using free template sites is a mistake.  Most do a poor job of handling SEO friendly URLs and the way they serve pages is often times less than desirable. In other words, steer clear of Wix, Weebly, and other free website templates.
77. Update old pages on your site with new and improved content.  Search Engines seem to give weight to pages that are updated often.  Be sure the updates are substantive changes.
78. Never hide text on your website.  Search engine crawlers understand CSS code.  Every precaution should be taken to include visible text.
    

    SEO Tools and Search Algorithms

79. Check your HTML code with the W3c Markup Validator to ensure there are no major issues.
80. Verify that your site does not have broken links or links that are redirecting, with W3c Link Checker on the same site as above.
81. Use the Rank Checker Mozilla Firefox Add-on to check your keyword rankings.  You can export the results to Microsoft Excel and add a date column to track how you’re doing.
82. BrightLocal has a great keyword tracking tool if you’d like a paid solution to tracking keyword rankings.
83. Using a tool like eClincher will allow you syndicate your content out (with ease) to multiple social networks.  Spend time building out each social network with a profile picture and bio as time permits.
84. Having too many external links in your page content is a bad idea for both search engines and the end user.  External links can be useful to your website visitors but according to Matt Cutts, you are dividing the PageRank of the page between the number of links you add.
85. Google Webmaster Guidelines states that a “reasonable number” of links should be used for each page.  Don’t do anything spammy and provide quality content.
86. Use hyphens to separate multiple words in your URL (ex. www.persistseo.com/small-business-seo-tips/.  Stringing words together in your URL is not as easy for Google to read.
87. Make sure your robots.txt file is configured properly.  The robots.txt file allows you to block certain pages from the search engine and you’ll want to confirm that all of your important pages are accessible by the Google bots that crawl your site.
88. Understand the differences between Panda, Penguin, Pigeon, and Hummingbird.
89. A Google Penguin penalty is caused by adding unnatural links to low authority sites with repetitive anchor text.  Google will penalize your site on a particular keyword or keywords that have been unnaturally linked.
90. Google Panda penalties result in a site wide penalty based on low quality content, duplicate content, or extremely low word count.  Too many ads on your website could also set you back with a Panda penalty.
91. Though not the official name, the Google Pigeon update occurred on July 25, 2014 and affected the local search results.  Many map results were reduced from a 7-pack to a 3-pack, or removed altogether.  In 2020, we have only a 3-pack map result that’s affected by Distance, Prominence, and Relevance.
92. The Google Hummingbird algorithm introduced a completely new algorithm for search queries during Google’s 15 year anniversary.  The new algorithm looks more closely at the true meaning of the search term and understands synonyms better than before.
93. Too many guest posts are not a good idea for helping your SEO.  As a matter of fact, Google has announced that guest posts could hurt your site.  Simply write quality content on your website and share it on social media.  Look for ways to provide compelling content so that others will want to link to your site.
94. If you’re starting a new business, consider choosing a domain name that includes the main keyword for your industry.  It’s not a requirement but could help a bit with your rankings.
95. Compress the images on your site. We’ve found the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin works wonders and the paid version is even better and/or the SiteGround Optimizer plugin.
96. Include your primary keyword, focus keyword, and your brand in your Title Tag, in that order.  If you have a recognized brand, you might consider adding your company name at the beginning of the title tag.
97. Research your top competitor sites and determine which keywords they’re using to rank well.
98. Google has nearly 90% of the search market share in the US.  Focus your efforts on Google but don’t disregard Yahoo and Bing.
99. Create a Webmaster Tools account with Bing and use their keyword research tool to find new keyword opportunities.
100. Consider adding your business to a paid directory site for your industry that ranks highly on Google search.
101. Combining an SEO and Adwords campaign can increase your leads due to the trust factor and the sheer number of times your business appears on the page of search results.

Did you find these tips for improving SEO valuable for your small business?  If so, comment below and let me know your thoughts.