How to do SEO: 4 fundamental tips for small businesses

Luckily, there are a few SEO fundamentals that you can follow which can make a big difference to how well your website ranks on Google.

1. Content, content, content...and more content.

Just in case we haven’t made it completely clear, we’ll say it again - content.

One of the best ways to drive SEO for your business is to regularly publish new content to your website.

For most businesses, this is by way of a blog, but it can also include client testimonials, project case studies, company media coverage, and free resources (i.e. ‘how to’ guides and ebooks).

This will all help increase your business’ SEO but to be effective and target the right audience, you need to dive inside the mind of your customer and:

1. Understand what questions they’re asking themselves

2. Understand the keywords they’re using on Google and volume of people searching for these.

For example, take a person who is considering buying an investment property. Some of the types of questions they may ask themselves could include:

1. Should I buy an investment property?

2. What are the risks and benefits of property investment?

3. What makes a good investment property?

4. How much money do I need to buy an investment property?

5. How do I buy an investment property?

With this in mind, you can then start to cross reference these types of keywords in Google’s Keyword Planner (which is part of Google Ads) as well as some other free tools like KeywordsEverywhere and AnswerThePublic.

This keyword research will help you understand which content is most searched for and the types of terminology you should use.

Taking an ad-hoc approach to content can be a complete time-waster. Instead, put some strategy behind it to maximise your efforts.

2. Give your visitors a good experience

A steady flow of blog articles isn’t the only thing you can do on your business website to help improve its SEO. Google also wants to make sure it’s users have a good experience when visiting your website. The first thing you can do is make sure your website loads quickly. To do this, there are a few things you can do:

Avoid using large files that take too long to load. Images should be resized and compressed to suit the web experience, and autoplay video should be used with caution.

Reduce unnecessary URL redirects, for example URL shortening, for brokens links or if you allow multiple domain names to direct to your website.

Remove unnecessary plugs-in. If you have any plug-ins you don’t use - delete them. If you have multiple plugs-in that offer similar functionality, figure out which one you want to keep and remove the others.

3. Show that your business is legit

Your business is legit, right? Well Google needs to know that so it’s not showing shonky websites in its search results.

One way it ranks the credibility and authority of websites is by the number of backlinks a website has. The more backlinks your business website has the higher Google rates your authority.

(A backlink is when another website links to your website, thereby directing it’s users to your website.)

It’s important to note though, that these backlinks also need to come from credible websites, so don’t start trying to create backlinks from just any websites as this can actually hurt your SEO.

The best way to start creating backlinks is to identify credible websites you’d like to target, and then start reaching out to them via social media or email.

These might be news sites, bloggers, industry media or other companies in the field. Here are a few examples of how you can approach these companies.

Industry media: offer to start writing a monthly guest blog for them in return for a backlink to their website

Bloggers: bloggers are always on the lookout for content and you might be able to support them by sharing your unique industry insights in return for a backlink to your website.

News media: start following journalists on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. When they need people to interview for an article, they’ll often put the call out on their personal social accounts and you might be able to help them. After a while, you’ll start to understand the types of stories they cover and you may even be able to pitch stories to them.We’re not going to sugarcoat it. Creating backlinks can be very time consuming. The key is to offer value to those people you reach out to and help make their jobs easier.

4. Optimise your Google My Business

If you haven’t created a Google My Business account yet, then do it right now.

Google My Business is essentially a business listing on the Google search engine as well as Google Maps. In short, if you don’t have a Google My Business listing your business is virtually invisible online.

Once you have the listing, add as much information as you can about your business.

At the very minimum you should include your business opening hours, your business category, web address and contact details.

But to help boost your SEO even more, you should also include additional information like photos of your business (both on the street front and inside), the types of facilities your business has for your customers (i.e. wheelchair access, bathrooms, wifi etc), and let customers message you through the Google My Business app.

You can also start to encourage your happy customers to leave you Google reviews.

It all comes back to giving Google users a good experience (as mentioned in point 2 above). The more relevant information you can give people to help them with their search query, the more Google will favour your website.

Bonus

A couple of other things you should consider when thinking about SEO for your business website.

1. Make sure the information that shows in the Google search results (i.e. the webpage title, URL and description) appeals to the audience so they’re enticed to choose your content over others. All your good work would be for nothing if the title and description didn’t make sense to the audience!

2. We’ve listed some of the fundamental tips that you should do to help increase your website SEO, but there are also a bunch of don’ts. You can read Google’s webmaster guidelines for a full rundown but we’ve included a few things to avoid here:

Participating in backlink schemes

Automatically generated content

Loading pages with irrelevant keywords or keyword stuffing

Creating pages with little or no original content

Content hidden behind login page can’t be recognised by Google