Small businesses have the toughest time in the industry. Not only are they pitted against the more established entities in the industry, but they also need to stand out against their competitors. To do so, they must not leave any stones unturned. They must grab all avenues that lead to success including a quality SEO strategy.

Below are the top 5 tips for an effective SEO strategy that small businesses could employ.

1. Gather quality users with the use of long-tail keywords

In the digital marketing and SEO space, we’ve all become familiar with keywords. However, its cousin – long-tail keywords – don’t make it quite often into articles on tips on boosting rankings. But we won’t make that mistake again.

Long-tail keywords are often used by users when they want to narrow down their search. Unlike keywords that are words or phrases that are targeted in order to rank in a search engine results page, long-tail keywords are queries that users type into a search engine in the hopes of getting valuable and relevant results. Whereas keywords are often generic, queries that use long-tail keywords are purposeful and with concrete intent behind them.

Search engines like Google have pivoted to favor these types of keywords because users who use them have a higher chance of a conversion. Small businesses who leverage long-tail keywords will be showcased more often in search results pages will benefit from this shift in perspective and the numbers are there to back this up.

Using long-tail queries has been known to increase a site’s traffic by up to 70%.

2. Actionable keywords in your metadata

A core tenet of SEO is to be able to persuade users to click you organically on the results page. Of course, you need to be able to engage with them when they arrive on your website but you first have to convince them to visit your site before you can persuade them to convert or take action.

Using keywords and queries is one step and using metadata is another. Metadata is a term used to describe information on a particular page or website and it appears in the header. Normally, this information is not seen but is very relevant to search engine crawlers who index pages in order to determine a site’s ranking. If your metadata jives with the theme of your website, it will greatly improve your ranking and help attract organic traffic.

There are several types of information that you can find within the metadata section of a site. These include:

• Title tag – This pertains to the title of a specific page and is different from the headline of a blog post or article.

• Meta description – This typically holds the information on what the page is about and is visible to both users and search spiders. The meta description is what appears as a short description beneath a search results link.

• Meta keywords – This element don’t hold much weight now nor should its used be encouraged, unless you want your page to be bloated with too many keywords.

Remember to be persuasive in writing your meta tag and meta descriptions. Mention your focus keywords in a natural way and only use relevant, helpful, and useful keywords.

3. Optimize and organize your pages

There is no one page on your website that is more important than others. All of them hold equal value in the success of your website. It is therefore crucial that you present them in a way that makes sense to your visitors.

Imagine having clicked on an interesting link you’ve been searching for only to land on a website that is clunky, disorganized, and confusing? You will, no doubt, immediately click out of it without even looking to see if it has what you are looking for. First impression matters and for an established SEO Company, a jumbled mess of web pages is going to discourage visitors from interacting with your website.

Besides clearly stating your product and services as well as your hours of operation, you also have to ensure that your web pages are categorized properly and in such a way that makes sense to visitors. You want to show a clear flow of navigation to help site visitors make their way around your website.

It might be helpful to incorporate elements such as a drop-down menu especially for pages with limited space. Such a feature will streamline pages and leave enough space to highlight the important content that you don’t want to be hidden amidst irrelevant content.

4. Check what keywords your competitors are using

For most small businesses, the last thing they want to spend their time on is seeing what their competitors are doing. With so much work to be done in establishing a fledgling business, most business owners try to focus on marketing tactics, conversion, and improving customer service than spend that time spying on the competition.

However, there are benefits in knowing what your competitors are doing and it could help your business grow bigger.

In order to grab online shoppers, you need to be persuasive in your content. But all that effort will fall on deaf ears if you’re not using the right terms to reach them. And this is where checking out the competition can help. Being able to see what keywords and key phrases they’re using will help guide the creation of your content. Which keywords are helping them increase their sales? Which ones are not doing so great? You’ll be able to make the right business decisions while avoiding the pitfalls that could cost valuable time and energy.

5. Create a page to attract local customers

With the popularity of the internet and e-commerce, many fail to realize that local customers still hold value. So many start-ups aim to cast as wide a net as possible, luring in customers far and wide but ignore customers within their vicinity. Only a handful pay attention to such customers and it is these businesses that are thriving.

It is relatively easy to put your business in the attention of local customers. You can sign up to online local directories, join business groups located in a given area, or sign up to Google’s Local Places. Claiming your business in Google will also mean that you create a local citation which then helps boost your site’s ranking when a particular user within your vicinity searches for your business.

Keep in mind that Google is not the only search engine, although it is the biggest and most influential. Don’t forget other search engines like Yahoo and Bing since they also have their own local listings for businesses.

AUTHOR BIO: 

Sarah Brooks is a passionate blogger and digital marketer. Sarah loves to write about her interests in travel, blogging, SEO and social media marketing. She’s currently working for PageMax –the leading SEO Company in Galway.