The start of the year is a time for reflections and resolutions, it’s also a time for action. If your small business website is in need of some TLC now is the perfect time to give it the attention it needs. This year promises to be an exciting one for SEO with Google intending to make changes to its algorithm in the Spring, add to that development in voice and video SEO and you have advances that can’t be ignored.Â
Identify Your Keywords
If you’re running a small business chances are you have a website. You might even have one that’s well optimized for SEO, but that doesn’t mean you can forget about it. The search engines are continually searching for new content that threatens to outrank you in the organic search results.
Now, at the start of the new year, it’s a good time to audit your website and define your keywords. Are they the same keywords you were using before? Can you create any new long-tail keywords that might give you an advantage in the rankings? It’s not enough just to continually create new content you have to optimize existing content too.
The easiest way to find your keywords is to input the keyword into the search engine to see what comes up. These are high volume keywords that you will compete with directly if you have the traffic to do so. Otherwise use software tools such as Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, Google Trends, Answer the Public, and Google Search Console to create new long-tail keywords.
Optimize Your Website for Keywords
The keywords you establish in your research are all important. These are search terms that will match your future customers to your content and into your sales funnel. The keywords should match the content on your webpage as well as the Title of the webpage. Optimising in this way is called On-Page SEO.
This process of optimizing is important for successful SEO. The major search engines like Google and Bing have bots and spiders that assess the quality and relevance of your websites content. This means your On-Page SEO needs to be up to date and well configured to ensure the search engines emreadsbit correctly.
To optimize your On-Page SEO, first make sure your Page’s Title is relevant to the content. The Title on the page should contain your primary keyword and be less than 60 characters in length. Your meta description too must be less than 160 characters to prevent it from being chopped off in the results page. Finally, use H1 heading frequently and include keywords on them.Â
Monitor Your Keywords
If you’ve been running your website for a while on Hosting.co.uk, you will have noticed some variation in its performance. This is mainly down to two factors, the search engines modify their processes and new content becomes available that challenges your ranking. In order to maintain a strong position in the SERP you have to monitor your keywords and regularly optimize.
One way to regularly check your keywords and optimize your SERP performance is to use the Google Search Console. The console gives you valuable information about your website and its overall performance in SERPs. It also gives you information on the performance of particular keywords. This information is invaluable for optimising your small business website for best performance.
If your SEO is consistently underperforming despite efforts to optimize it you might need a special audit. This can be arranged through websites like robots.txt, site maps, or certain third party organisations. A professional SEO audit should give you a detailed outline of how your website functions and where the issues lay.
Optimize for User Experience
It’s true the user’s experience of your website doesn’t directly influence your SERP performance but it can have an effect indirectly. The search engines will monitor traffic and performance of a website and use it as qualifying criteria – high traffic indicates both quality and relevance. How a user experiences your website is integral to this.
As well as optimising your website’s SEO it might be an idea to review it’s usability. Does your website conform to modern expectations? Does it have a clear and simple layout that’s on-brand but also functional. Is it optimized for different devices? There’s nothing more frustrating than one that isn’t and results in users navigating away. This is bad news for any aspiring SEO strategy and need to be addressed quickly.
The digital landscape has changed considerably in the last few years with changes made to interfaces and content – there is now more voice search and video SEO than ever before. To stay relevant in this changing landscape you need to stay in line with emerging practices and user’s expectations. Older website model and content that isn’t optimized for multiple channels is destined to perform poorly.
Improve Your Organic Search Results
SEO is all about one thing, improving your organic search results so you reach your target audience cheaply and effectively. There’s good news all round. The search engines are not only set up to support this endeavour, they are also willing to help you out with your strategy so you don’t fall behind. Keep up to date with search engine policies and practices for the latest developments.
Even if you don’t have the best SEO in the business you can still reach your target audience through paid advertising. This too is set up with efficiency in mind. Google Ads, for instance, allows you to use your budget efficiently by only charging for relevant clicks. While this can be worthwhile for some small businesses it’s always better to improve the organic results.
You can do this with some of the ideas mentioned above but bear in mind that SEO is changing and new forms of content and optimization are becoming relevant. So even if you have a stellar SEO strategy for your website in the conventional sense, you might still be outranked by content better optimized for voice and video. Still, you should consider all possible options moving into 2021 and keep up the pace.
