As a small business owner, website optimization should be at the top of your priority list in order to gain a competitive edge. One way to accomplish this feat is to ensure your site shows up on Google’s first page of search results for your industry specific keywords.
Studies have shown that nearly 70% of search traffic comes from someone clicking an organic result on the first page of Google. Go ahead. Type away. See if your business website appears on the first page for a common term in your industry.
Keyword Analysis Tools
Keyword Analysis should not be taken lightly and there are many tools that help you determine what your prospects may be entering to find your business on Google. At PersistSEO, we’d recommend that you use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner.
You can setup a Google Account (or use your gmail account) and register for adwords. Once you do so, you can use the free keyword tool to determine the best option for driving traffic to your website.
After your initial keyword analysis, work to optimize those keywords in the following areas:
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is an extremely important aspect of website optimization. Every website should implement the following tags and SEO best practices:
- Title Tag – The title tag is what Google uses as the title in the listings when someone searches for your page. Do you have a title tag on your home page and subpages that utilize your keywords? If you don’t have a title tag or it’s not optimized properly with your keywords and the right character length, your rankings will suffer.
- Meta Tag Description – Every site should have an optimized meta tag description. Google displays this description underneath your title tag and looks to this description to find out what your site is all about. Having keywords and cities in this tag can help your click through rate on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
- H1/H2 Tags – Each page of your site should have one and only one H1 tag. This H1 tag is a heading normally located at the top of the page and again, your keyword for the page should be used in the H1. H2 tags are subheadings that should be present on the page as well. You can certainly have more than one H2 tag.
- Keyword Density – Be sure to determine a focus keyword for each page and ensure that you’re using the keyword or keyword phrase throughout your content. Keyword density for any keyword should remain between 1-3 % to avoid the appearance of spamming and to keep your audience interested in reading your posts. With Google’s new Rank Brain algorithm, semantically related keywords are just as important, if not more.
- Google Search Console / Analytics – Be sure to configure your site with Google Search Console and Google Analytics by enrolling in Google Analytics, a free tool. Next, you can automatically authenticate your GSC account with your Google Analytics asynchronous code.
Social Media Marketing
If you write a blog post on your website, or have a video to share, social media marketing can indirectly help your SEO. The more your blog posts or videos are shared, the better off your SEO is going to be for your industry specific keywords. After writing a new blog post, share the blog on popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media sites of relevance in your industry.
As your friends and co-workers like or share your pages, you’ll get the benefit of improved SEO rankings for your industry specific keywords. Be sure to write relevant, compelling content that will encourage others to share your page.
Video Marketing
Do you have a tip or tutorial to offer your prospects? You can use video software and use a voice over or background music to emphasize your topic. By using your keywords in the title of the video, along with a link to your website in the description, you’ll get the benefit of a highly ranked YouTube video and your business website should improve in the rankings due to the citation and link value from the video.
Directory Marketing
Listing your business website on many other trusted directories like Yelp, Superpages, Bing, and Yahoo, will help your SEO in a couple of ways. First, if you optimize the description you add on each directory site by incorporating keywords, Google will use those as citations and you could eventually get a boost in your rankings for your business website.
Next, the external link value (for those sites with dofollow links), is also important. In other words, Google adds a point to your SEO for each link it finds on other trusted sites. Directory submissions are especially important to local SEO efforts.
Content Marketing
Writing blogs, press releases, and building out additional pages on your website all contribute to improved website optimization. If there is something newsworthy within your organization, consider writing a news release and submitting it through the free news release site called prlog.org. You can setup a free account and submit as many news releases as you’d like.
Having an SEO optimized news release with your website URL, along with keywords, will work to improve your rankings on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
If you’d like to learn more about website optimization and how to get more leads for your small business, contact PersistSEO at 1.888.987.7332 or complete the online form for a Free SEO Analysis of your website.