4 Things Small Businesses Need to Know About SEO

You know what SEO is, but do you know how to implement best practices to ensure that Google and other search engines show your website in search results? It’s much easier said than done.

Here are four things all small businesses should know to include when working on improving their search engine optimization.

Alt Tags and Titles

There’s a lot of unique terminology that comes with SEO, but it’s often not as complicated as it seems. Alt tags are simply descriptions for the images on your website. Since search engines can’t read images like they do with copy, alt tags allow your images to be translated in a language Google can understand.

Alt tags are especially important for small business service providers because it helps your images show up on Google searches for potential clients to see your work. Without alt tags, your images don’t exist to search engines, and you can miss out on possible leads and opportunities.

Backlinks

A backlink is exactly what it sounds like: a link on another website that leads back to your site. The important thing here is to create quality over quantity. You don’t want spammy sites to link to yours.

Think about all the people you’ve worked with, like other businesses or even publications. These are opportunities to create backlinks. When you create a blog post about a project, be sure to tag all the vendors or other contractors you worked with and ask them to do the same for you.

Another way to create backlinks is to be active on social media and interact with blogs and websites on which you want to be featured. Engage in discussions, share your information and knowledge, and drop links to your website when relevant. It’s important to do more than just drop a link because you don’t want to spam people. That’s definitely bad for business and people frown upon self-interests promotion and usually gets ignored.

Content

You’ve heard it, and we’ve said it: content is king. No matter how cool your website is, if you don’t have quality content that people want to read, you’re not going to get the leads you want. Don’t post blogs just for the sake of blogs—create educational and highly readable content that informs and entertains.

Blog posts aren’t just a way to show off your projects and add more SEO keywords—they’re a way to introduce prospects to you and give them an idea of your personality and skillset.

Want to learn more about content? Check out 5 Things Every Small Business Should Know About Content Marketing.

Optimize Your Homepage

Your homepage is, of course, the most visited page on your website, so it has to not only make a great first impression, but keep visitors intrigued enough to check out different pages on your site.

It’s essential to include your main keywords in your homepage title and throughout the content on the page to help you move up in search engine rankings. Know what keywords you want to rank for and be sure they’re on your homepage, but don’t overdo it, or your content will be more spammy and less quality.

While this is just the beginning of what you need to do to optimize your website and content for SEO, it’s a great start getting your site on track to move up in search engine rankings and get more results.

Optimizing for SEO takes time and thought, and it can feel like an overwhelming amount of work, especially when you have a full schedule and other facets to deal within your business.

But what if you could improve your SEO without lifting a finger?

That’s where we come in: a full-service, done-for-you SEO and getting you to the first page of Google results for your chosen keywords.

Why not leave the SEO to the experts?