Make It Easy To Find Your Business Online With These SEO Tips!
A primary goal for any website for businesses is to be easily discovered online. That's the main goal for any small business and more than ever for brick and mortar businesses transferring their business online.
It's wonderful to have a beautiful and informative website. However, it takes time and effort to be discovered online by your ideal client. While completing website projects for my clients they have a good headstart to be discovered online with SEO practices I implement into their website. However, if some chose to maintain their website on their own I provide SEO practices they can use to continue growing their searchability online.
Story Time: Here are some situations that have happened with past clients after their website was completed and may be happening with your website for your business.
Client 1. Client panics when they searched for their business or keywords and could not find their website on the first page of Google searches. Then I get a call immediately saying why can they not find their website in Google unless they type the whole name of the website. I explain to them it's because of a few things. Their website was just published, no one has interacted with it yet so Google does not find it relevant yet, and these are just a few factors to consider.
Client 2. The client website has been created and doing well in the beginning months after it's launch. Then after some time the client comes back and says no one has visited their website in a long time. After some time investigating with the client the things happing with the website I find out that there has been nothing done to it. No updating the website since it was created, no valuable content for users, and the client made changes to the website that messed with the SEO. Also, there has been no promotion of the website in any form. Of course I worked with the client to get them back on track. Also, I helped understand why they were having some of the issues so they can self-correct if need be in the future.
It may be a hard pill to swallow but just having a website is no guarantee that customers will find you online. It's a branding tool you use and cannot simply hope it works on its own.
“Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.””
An excerpt from Main Street ROI put's SEO this way and I think it is helpful for small businesses to know.
"One of the big misconceptions about SEO is that it’s all about tricking Google to get your website to rank high. Again, it’s important to consider Google’s mission. They want to organize all the information online and present it to the searcher so that only the best websites are at the top of the results page. With that in mind, the goal of SEO is to make it as easy as possible for Google to find your website (by using proper HTML code, writing relevant copy, designing for ease of use, optimizing page load speed) and then to give Google a reason to rank your website higher than all the other relevant websites (by publishing better and more robust information, getting more links, more online PR)."
If you're having problems getting your ideal client to your website from Google what can you do? Use good SEO practices on your website. Here are a few steps you can do on your own:
The first thing to do is to get to know your website editing dashboard. Here is where you'll be able to update most of your SEO information for the main pages of your website. Most website platforms have tutorials on how to use your dashboard and perform tasks like how to update your SEO.
Review your website performance, monitor which pages work better, which have a higher bounce rate, find pages needing improvement, and pushed further. Google Analytics can give you some great insights on that – if you don’t have it installed, I highly recommend you do so.
Create content your target audience would be searching for online in the form of a blog post or the descriptions of your products or services.
These are just a few things small businesses can do to their website to get started. I want to help small businesses find more success with their business online. So I created an SEO Checklist of common tasks overlooked or missing from most small business websites. This can help small businesses who want to have their ideal clients find them easier online! Which means more sales and business.
Try these tips out and let me know after some time if you find success.
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