SEO Tips for Small Businesses

seo effort

In today’s digital climate, if your business, big or small, is not featured on the first page of a search engine, it’s not in the game. It might as well be in the Arctic selling to polar bears.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), the intricate process of climbing up the internet search ranking ladder, is the most important it has ever been. If you’re reading this thinking either a) I have never heard of SEO until now or b) I’ve heard of it before but don’t use it, then by the end of today you need to progress from both of those categories and employ an enterprise SEO marketing company. Your competitors probably have.

For all its importance, SEO is certainly not an easy practice to master. Its complex labyrinth of techniques can leave you easily feeling overwhelmed.

So here are a few tips for unpacking the logistics of SEO and maximizing your chances of surpassing competitors.

 

Quality not quantity

Domain authority, entertaining content, well-written landing pages, keyword density. These all matter to the Google bots that scan your work and index it with a credibility and authority ranking.

Approaches to marketing online are continually evolving. As the computer systems that crawl web content become better at valuing content, they are beginning to favour sites that are hosting the most authoritative and sincere content while punishing  those that fall back on lazy, unethical tactics. It’s that old adage of quality, not quantity.

Content that people genuinely enjoy and get something useful out of will have the best performance in online search rankings. The reason for this is easy to understand: search engines want to serve their users with the best possible content for all of their queries.

Comply with search engine guidelines

There is good and bad SEO practice. Companies have rightly suffered from ‘black hat’ tactics. When this happens, SEO suddenly becomes counterproductive, since the repercussions from such unethical tactics are hard to recover from. Search engines will plummet your website’s credibility and authority, condemning it to a lowly search ranking; in other words, the no man’s land of the internet.

 

 

It matters which search engine you target

Google is the number one search engine in the world market – and by some margin. Around 80 per cent of US online traffic navigates Google.

So a high position in Google search rankings is going to reap more benefits than an equal ranking on Bing or Yahoo.

 

Use a digital marketing company

All the above tips have assumed you’d be doing the hard graft yourself; but it would likely be more effective to employ an enterprise SEO marketing company full of people that essentially have a PHD in SEO.

If you’re a small business, it’s likely not going to be practical or affordable to hire a whole team of staff dedicated to SEO, not least because it will be harder to attract the expertise. An agency is the more affordable option.

A digital marketing company is also rich in expertise and experience. With good knowledge of the latest complex search engine algorithms, of jargon, of marketing strategies, of what will work best for your company, you will maximise the chances of SEO boosting your enterprise.

Advertising is time consuming. Offloading this duty to a third party as opposed to dealing with it directly means fewer tasks to divide your time between. You can rip out a few pages of your portfolio and focus on priorities to which your skills are more tailored. A digital marketing company has the time to spend on promotional practices for your company because that’s what it specializes in. Hence, an agency will create more advertising content on a wider range of platforms.

Further, third party handling of your SEO will bring a fruitful new perspective on your company from an outsider.

If you decide to opt for a digital marketing agency, be sure to do your research to avoid the repercussions of a bad agency that relies on ‘black hat’ tactics. As discussed earlier, they are unhealthy for your domain, can actually worsen your search results ranking, and are hard to recover from.

 

Don’t be too dependent on SEO

For all the hype surrounding SEO and its effectiveness when practiced correctly, companies rarely do well by relying exclusively on SEO for growth.

It is important to market in a variety of ways, both online and offline. Experiment with pay-per-click advertising, give your business a social media presence, and perhaps even attract celebrity engagement with your products or services.

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