4 fantastic SEO tips for small businesses

Whether yo’re a start-up company or a multi-national corporation, the likelihood is that you will have heard of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) in your business endeavors. The real challenge comes from knowing how and when to use this tool for your business success.

We have compiled a list of our fave 4 SEO tips; free for you to use, learn and share as you like.

1. Content Is King

There will be ample opportunities on a well-built website to optimise content for search engines (including your page titles, image descriptions and more!). Careful planning and research of relevant keywords to your business goals will aid you in producing content rich pages. This does not mean, however that you should over-cram pages with keywords this type of SEO (commonly referred to as black hat) can lead to you being removed and blacklisted from search engines. Besides this, you need to keep the text legible and enticing for your website readers!

2. But so are links!

The best search engines look for sites of quality information, not just quantity of keywords. And how is quality determined? By the links to your site! Consider each and every site that links to you as a referral for your business. Be careful though; search engines are smarter than you or I “ñ they will know if you are building too many links too quickly and again penalise you for this. A great tip here would be to find sites that compliment your business offering and contacting the website owners; quite often a mutual exchange of links is a cost effective way to improve SEO ranking as well as making new contacts.

3. Compete for realistic keywords

So now that we’ve established the importance of keywords and links, it’s time to hone in on your keyword list. It is quite often beneficial to have a smaller set of targeted keywords that answer all (or most) of the needs of someone searching. Think logically; if you sell a product/ service to a local market only, then what tangible benefit would you gain from visits halfway across the globe? In cases like these, optimising your keywords to include your geographic location can yield the best results in the long term.

4. SEO is about the war, not the battle

And we really mean this! There is little victory to be found in winning first page rankings for obscure and unsearched keywords (be careful as this is the promise made by many bad SEO companies). Your time is better spent in testing and fighting for keywords that meet a balance between covering your business needs and competitiveness. Be prepared, this can be a lengthy and time consuming process. And as always, if in doubt, seek professional advice it could save you a lot of unnecessary costs in the long run!