For small businesses, getting exposure on search engines is a very costly objective. Typically, a small business will invest time and effort and if successful, the investment budget grows organically (no pun intended!) overtime. In order to do so, a model has to be adopted which focuses on using budgets in the most effective ways and measures return accurately so as to justify further investment. Here are some key areas that small businesses should focus their SEO budgets on to ensure success.
Include PPC in Your SEO Budget
While SEO will yield a solid return, organic credibility takes time and after months and months of investment the last thing you want to find out is that your strategy focused on the wrong users / keywords. By using PPC alongside SEO, you will quickly start gaining valuable intelligence about your market, including buying trends, keywords of value and also leads / sales straight away. Utilize PPC to strengthen your SEO strategy, and ensure your SEO strategy is based on actual data from your website rather than ideas or concepts.
Focus on matching keywords to landing pages
If you have knowledge of the keywords that are important to your business, go through your website and match the keywords up to the most relevant pages within the website. If you go through your website and realize there isn’t a page that quite fits the keywords, then create a new page for those specific terms. This will ensure you are providing a relevant, high quality experience to your users, and will also build credibility in the eyes of the search engines as you have clearly thought about your websites usability.
Regularly look at your analytics and integrate goal tracking
Google analytics is a powerful tool that can tell you on a daily basis how well your marketing is performing. Take some tutorials (available for free on YouTube) and understand how to look at traffic per channel (SEO, PPC, email etc.), the pages that are performing well, and through the implementation of goal tracking, the performance of your website visitors. Goal tracking will help you to track how many enquiries / leads / sales are being generated from your marketing channels such as SEO, so this really is critical to setup.
Ensure your Google Business profile is up-to-date
Google business is a really important feature of your SEO strategy. When users search using a location prefix (e.g. “plumbers in London”), Google will return a list of results on a map that sit within the designated geographic location. Ensure your business profile is setup and completed properly so that your business is shown on the map listings. It also helps to increase buyer confidence if you can collect reviews against your Google profile, so get your customers to do this too.
Ensure your website loads quickly with no delays
Site speed has been a consistently key requirement of ranking high within the organic results of search engines. The reason for this is simple, the faster a website loads the better the user experience. Ensure your website loads fast, and regularly test it using tools such as Pingdom Tools, which will tell you how your website is performing and what needs improving.
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