SEO for Small Businesses:  What’s it all about?

To begin, we all want our websites to be found by potential customers.  SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all about getting your site to rank higher for search queries (what people type into search engines). If you’re an interior designer in Phoenix, of course, you want to be on the first page of search results when someone searches “interior design firm Phoenix” or “Phoenix interior designer.” 

Ideally, showing up in the first, second, or third position below the paid ads. The problem is, so does every other interior design firm in Phoenix. That’s why it’s imperative that you work toward SEO goals, such as ranking high for a number of search queries and ranking high for search queries that bring you well-qualified visitors – those who are likely users of your services.

Two Critical Sides of SEO 

SEO falls into two buckets: what happens on your site (“onsite SEO”) and what happens off your site (“offsite SEO”). People tend to overthink both.

Onsite SEO is basically how organized the content on your site is. You should consider this from the points of view of people and  Googlebot, which crawls through your site and tries to make sense of what’s on it. Think of your site like a drawer of silverware. When would it be easier to find a spoon, if your silverware was all mixed up in a pile or if it was sorted in an organizer? Make sure your content is “sorted”—easy for people and Googlebot to find—and you’ll be in good shape.

Offsite SEO is basically how other sites treat your site. To put it simply, which other sites link to your site, and are those legitimate links from legitimate sites?

Now let’s dive a little deeper.

Onsite SEO for Small Businesses: Key Things to Know and Do

Get a site that you control, with your own domain name. Not a Facebook page (that’s on Facebook’s domain).  And, not a site on another company’s domain. Not an address on a site builder’s domain, like WordPress or Wix. That won’t work. Your company name shows up in the URL address as just a subdomain, and it’s bad news. You want a domain that lets visitors know the website is all your own.

Set up analytics. Why? If you don’t have software showing how many people come to your site, how long they spend there, where they are located, etc., then you’re flying blind. There’s a reason you see so many gauges and sensors when you look into a plane’s cockpit.  You don’t need to pay for analytics software: just use Google Analytics. It’s free, and it’s the gold standard.

Set up Google Search Console. That’s more free software that tells you how your site is doing in search engines. Think of it like a routine visit to the doctor. It highlights what’s going well and what’s not going so well, or what may become a problem over time.

Use anchor text. This just means that it’s better to make links to other pages within your site like this, “Get small business help,” but not like this, “Click here to get small business help.” Why? Because the text that is linked is a big clue to people and search engines about what sort of page the link leads to. “Get small business help” is pretty informative, while “Click here” doesn’t tell anybody anything.

Craft your content carefully. Your content should always be useful for humans.  Don’t write junk content for search engines alone. However, the content should still be slightly customized for search engines.

  • Think about the keywords you want to target. For instance, if you visit my TranscriptionServices.com site,  you will notice on our Spanish transcription services page, we deliberately use the keyword phrase “Spanish transcription services” and variations like, “Spanish language transcriptionists”
  • Don’t cram in the same keyword too many times. On our page about Medical Transcription, we don’t repeat the phrase “medical transcription” over and over and over. That would be a red flag, alerting search engines and people alike that something spammy or scammy is going on.
  • This measurement is called “keyword density.” and finding the right balance is important. In my opinion, a keyword and its variants should constitute between 1% and 1.5% of the content on a page. So, if there are 1,000 words on a page, aim to put in the keyword 10–15 times. Don’t go over that amount; overusing keywords is called “keyword stuffing,” and it’s frowned upon by search engines.
  • Go for long-tail keywords. What’s a long-tail keyword? Here’s a great graph from Moz.com:

graph of SEO keyword types

 

The sweet spot is a keyword that lots of other people aren’t competing over but that (a) is still searched often enough to be worth chasing and (b) is likely to bring you the kind of traffic you want.

For example, a site called HoustonMovers.com  generates leads for Houston moving companies. Ranking for the phrase “moving company” nationally would be quite difficult, but ranking for “moving from Houston to Fort Worth” shouldn’t be that difficult to achieve.  You might ask yourself: “How do I come up with long-tail keywords?” Here are some free ways to identify long-tail keywords.

Write meta descriptions. Every page on your site should have one. That sounds complicated, but it’s not. Basically, a meta description is the short snippet of text that Google displays under the title of a search result. ( See the example in the image below.  ) To learn how to write effective meta descriptions, check out this good meta description writing advice.  

Pay attention to your website’s slugs. No, not the slimy things that like to destroy your garden. Slugs in SEO are the part of the web address that comes after the domain name. So, the second part after the forward slash in the example below ( english-italian-translation ) is the slug. Why does this matter? It’s one more clue for search engines (and people searching) about your page’s content. Which example below is better?

https://translationservices.com/english-italian-translation   

or    https://www.translationservices.com/page93

 

Notes about Small Business SEO and Website Page Titles

Use an effective title. What you add as your page’s title (the one that appears in the tab in your browser) makes a big difference. That’s what usually shows up in Google as the link you would click on. Let’s look at NYCTutoring.com.

website title example

 

Things to Remember About Titles for SEO

  • Don’t use “Home,” “Homepage,” for your home page title. It doesn’t convey any concrete information about your site’s topic.   
  • Choose the most important phrase you want to rank for, and shift it to the beginning of the title. For this site, it’s “NYC tutoring services.”
  • Toward the end of the title, you can add some other keywords that are less important but that you’d still like to rank for. For example, it’s important for us to compete for the phrase “Brooklyn tutoring services,” so we added “Brooklyn” to the title.

 

Enable SSL. SSL is what changes your site’s address from “http://” to “https://.” That “s” in “https” stands for “secure.” It’s pretty much expected by searchers and search engines at this point, even if you don’t transmit funds or sensitive information through your site.  

There are different levels of SSL certificates.  Which you need depends on your website. The lowest level (SSL) is fine if yours is just an informational website or blog.  If you sell products or services, a higher level is advisable. Customers aren’t going to trust us with personal and financial information if our sites do not indicate they are secure. People feel better when they see the “https://” or the padlock icon.  Compare this secure site on the left to how Google Chrome displays http:// (insecure) sites:

secure-and-not-secure-website-SEO-results

       

All images need “alt” text. Don’t be intimidated by this technical-sounding term. It’s just text that you manually write to describe your images to do the following:

  • Tells search engines what’s in the image
  • Tells blind people what’s in the image (a screen reader can read it)
  • Is displayed instead of the image when the image has trouble loading

It’s important for search engines, but it’s also the key to making your site accessible for people with sight impairments.  The Americans with Disability Act is now moving to make Internet Accessibility mandatory. 

two-women-talking-at-a-table

The alt text for this image is: “Two women having a conversation at a desk.” If the image didn’t load, you’d still know exactly what was supposed to be there.  Don’t freak out, thinking you need to ‘code’ alt text into your website or blog. Most website platforms like  WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace, for instance, make it easy to add alt text when you upload images for your website or blog. They have image editing areas where you just type the alt text into a box and you’re done.

Don’t duplicate other people’s content. There are few viable shortcuts with SEO. It is not the best way to reduce your workload by taking text from somebody else’s site and loading it onto your own. That’s not a great practice for a variety of reasons, and SEO is one of them. Google hates duplicate content. If you take this route, Google will certainly not rank that content highly, and it might even decrease the ranking of all of your pages if your use of duplicate content is extreme.

Remember how we talked about Google Search Console above? You can use it to find out if penalties have been applied to your site.  I’m oversimplifying here  There are a few good reasons to ethically duplicate content on websites, but that’s too deep in the weeds for this article.

Don’t store text in image form.  Any text within the image becomes a part of the picture and can’t be found by the bots.  Again, this comes down to accessibility for people with sight impairments, and making the site more searchable. What’s easier for search engines to interpret—option A or option B?

picture of a cute dog

Freepix.com link

As you probably guessed, search engines (and screen readers) are much better at handling option B (a picture with a caption).

OK, friends,  we have reached the end of our high-level overview of onsite SEO. Follow these Onsite SEO tips and you’ll be about 80% of the way to setting your Small Business website up for successful SEO results.  Let’s move on to Off site SEO issues you should be aware of.

Offsite SEO: Key Things to Know and Implement

Remember, I said that SEO falls into two main buckets, Onsite and Offsite.  Well, the offsite bucket is the part that gets a lot of people in trouble. People tend to do one of three things:

  • They don’t do any offsite work, and with disappointment setting in when their site gets no traction in search engines.
  • Too many take shortcuts and engage in spammy/scammy practices.  Disappointment sets in when their site gets jettisoned from search results (perhaps even after seeing some initial success).
  • They take their time and make steady progress toward ranking higher, and they eventually find that their work has paid off. 
  • Think six months from action to traction.  If you start working on your SEO goals now, you’ll likely see results in about six months. My ProofreadingServices.com site currently ranks 1st–3rd for most proofreading- and editing-related terms, but it took a few years of work to get there.

3 Ways to improve Offsite SEO results.

  1. Most offsite SEO revolves around getting good-quality links to your site. We can think of link quality like a political endorsement, which needs to be valuable and relevant to be useful.  Let’s say I’m running for mayor of Houston, Texas. Considering that situation, I should seek endorsements from the governor (relevant and valuable), and maybe city council members (relevant but less valuable). Similarly, if I write a blog about dogs and get a link (an “endorsement”) from the American Kennel Club (relevant and valuable) and several links from local dog grooming businesses (relevant but less valuable), I’m in good shape.

But, here’s the flip side. Let’s say I’m still running for mayor of Houston, and I get an endorsement  from a baker in Austria. Weird, right? That endorsement is neither relevant nor valuable. The same goes for websites. If you write a blog in English about dogs and you’re getting  links from Chinese car detailing websites, something fishy is going on. Humans might not notice,  but Google certainly will. It’ll flag those links as spammy and scammy and might assume that you’re up to no good.

  1.  Get links, it’s important but how?   This can be an entirely separate topic.  I could go on about this for eons. It’s a very deep topic, but for now, I’ll keep it short. Here are a few tried and true ways to begin.
  • Write guest posts for other people’s blogs, just not too often, and quality has to be good.
  • Create infographics and share them far and wide. Readers love to share graphic messages.
  • Send your blog posts out to reporters and other bloggers.  Remember: the theme or topic should be relevant to their readers, or they won’t share the link.
  • Do something worth writing about, and share with the local press and relevant bloggers.  Think: press release. Do something to catch readers’ attention and interest. 

I know we have covered a lot of SEO territory, but this is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to creating links.  There is so much more to consider. Here are some good resources for further reading on Link Building.

 

  1. All content needs to promotion. If you wrote a great blog post, printed it out, and put it in your kitchen drawer, how many people would see it? None.
  • What if you sent the blog post out to a few friends? Okay, that’s a good start.
  • Well, what if you blew it up and put it on a billboard? That may sound weird, but you’re getting the idea.
  • What if you put it on Reddit, shared it with a few bloggers you’ve developed relationships with, and sent it out to your mailing list? Now we’re talking.

Keep in Mind

It always takes longer to rank unbranded content than branded content. From Terri’s title tag, we know that she’s working on ranking for “Maurer Consulting Group” (branded) and “small business adviser” (unbranded):

Sm-business-adviser- SEO-Title

Does she rank for “Maurer Consulting Group” quickly and soundly? Yes –  she already does. Will she rank for “small business adviser”? Maybe, but right now, it is not placing as high in the rankings as she might hope.  With some additional work, she can move her firm closer to the top of search results for that keyword phrase.

Note: Do you remember my mentioning long-tail keywords? Because Terri has “small business adviser” in her title, she ranks higher for phrases such as “small business adviser design firm” (for which she is on the first page). Go, Terri!

Small Business SEO Guide Wrap Up

And, just like that, after this whirlwind crash course, we’re done. Your head may be spinning, but you now know the basics of SEO. I know this is a lot of information and can be confusing.  Bookmark this post and come back to it frequently. SEO is not a one-shot event.  It takes some work; some trial, error and tweaking.  There’s certainly more to learn about search engine optimization.   But, this information puts you well on your way to a your site ranking well in searches for terms that matter most to you and your business.  Try not to let yourself and your small business get lost in Google!

 

luke-palder-headshot

Luke Palder, founder of a number of businesses with websites anchored by Solid SEO Practices.  This SEO Optimization article uses examples from some of his companies:  Proofreading Services.com, TranslationServices.com and TranscriptionServices.com to highlight concepts noted within this guest post