4 Ways For Small Businesses To Improve Their SEO In 2022
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SEO Friendly Website
For many small businesses, the website is treated as a ‘one and done’ part of the operation.
Over time, websites can quickly become outdated as new practices are introduced and this can negatively impact how high the website can rank on search engines.
It doesn’t have to be at the cutting edge of
website development,
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SEO Friendly Website
but checking over things like making sure it has a mobile friendly design, improving your ‘core web vital’ score or improving the site load speed will all have a positive impact on SEO performance.
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Local SEO
Local SEO refers to ranking on search engines for location search terms, like ‘coffee shop Leicester’ or ‘restaurant near me’.
It’s one area where small businesses can achieve great results, so having the right set up to target your local area can help you rank highly and acquire new customers.
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Local SEO
So how do you
improve your local SEO performance?
Firstly, we would recommend looking at your ‘Google my Business’ page and optimising that for your targeted area.
Secondly, adjusting your website text to include your service areas is a great way to indicate to search engines that you cover that
location.
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Local SEO
Search engines scan the page content so they know what to deliver to users, so adding location to your pages is a great way to increase the likelihood of ranking for a local search.
Page URL’s are a strong indicator for search engines on the page content, so including the location here is a great way to rank higher for a local search term.
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Local SEO
Just be careful not to overdo it, as too many pages with the same content will flag as spam and could remove you from ranking altogether.
We would recommend focusing on one or two key service areas, then using the page content to add smaller locations outside of the key areas.
How do you know
which tactics to use to
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Local SEO
rank higher in local search?
One of the easiest ways is to do the search yourself (in incognito mode) and see what ranks the highest.
Go onto each page result and see if there are any common denominators – for example, if they all have your location area in the page URL’s, then that would be one of the first things to change.
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Citations
Although citations technically come under the local SEO umbrella, it’s vitally important that your citations are created and up to date.
So, what are ‘citations’?
Essentially, citations are online mentions of your business.
The key acronym is NAP – name, address, phone number.
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Citations
Any external website that displays your businesses NAP is a citation, so any social media profiles, business listings (Yelp, Thomson Local etc) are included.
Citations are essential for SEO, as they are a vote of confidence in your business for search engines that you exist and operate.
Think of it like word of
mouth for the internet
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Citations
– the more websites Google or Bing can see that have your NAP details, the more trustworthy you become in the eyes of search engines and the more confidence they have in recommending your business to someone performing a search.
A neat (and free!) tool is available from Moz to check your local citations – sign up for as many as are
relevant for your
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Citations
business, and make sure any existing citations are up to date.
Any inconsistencies in your NAP across citations can be a red flag and actually harm search performance, so it’s vital to check on a regular basis to ensure the information is accurate.
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Start A Blog
One of the best ways to improve SEO performance is to create new content.
Search engines love delivering fresh content to users, so starting a blog on your website is the logical step to increase the amount of content, and organic search traffic, to your website.
Not only that, a blog gives you unique content to
share with your social
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Start A Blog
media followers that brings them back to your website.
The more people you have on your website, this increases the chance of a conversion or a lead being generated, so not only is it a great brand building exercise, it has an impact on the bottom line of the business too.
One of the most difficult parts of starting a blog is,
well, actually starting it.
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Start A Blog
The key with any blog is opting for quality over quantity – a well laid out and thorough ‘guide to yoga poses’ with images/videos will attract and engage many more readers than a few hundred words, plain text paragraph on why yoga is great.
The very first thing to do is create a list of topics to write about – they want to be closely related to your business, so you
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Start A Blog
attract the right kind of visitors to your site.
Once you have your topics, start to research what content there is and think about what you or your business offers that isn’t currently available.
You can use already existing content as inspiration, as long as you do it better.
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Start A Blog
You don’t have to turn into a full time blogger either – 1-2 a month is sufficient for a small business, which should be achievable with some time dedication towards it.
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