All successful businesses share at least one thing in common: it’s easy to find them on Google. If you want your business to show up when someone in your area searches for products or services like yours, you’re going to have to make your website SEO-friendly.
There are the basics of SEO, like creating a Google Business Profile and listing your business on relevant directories. To fully maximize your website’s accessibility, you have to show Google that your website is relevant, trustworthy, and user-friendly.
Here are some fairly easy ways to optimize your small business’s website for SEO:
Leverage User-Generated Content
Your customers probably place a lot of value on reviews and testimonials. Well, so does Google. An SEO-friendly website is rich with reviews and testimonials. If you consistently encourage your customers to leave either form of social proof after making a purchase, you are consistently generating fresh and relevant content for your website. Reviews, testimonials, and frankly any user-generated content significantly enhances your website’s credibility. And when customers trust you, search engines will follow suit.
Increase Inbound Links
Another great way to gain the trust of searching engines is inbound links. When another website links to yours, it shows Google that this website trusts your website enough to send its own visitors to your site. Each inbound link is like a vote of confidence.
So, how do you get other businesses to link to your website? One popular strategy is forging a partnership with a credible business that offers a complementary product or service to yours. When your partner posts content that relates to your business, they link to your website, and vice versa. Other ways to get credible websites to link to yours include attending and sponsoring local events, applying for local awards, and conducting research that’s highly valuable to your industry.
Optimize Category Pages
People tend to search for specific products or services, not specific businesses. They might know what they need (e.g. “kitchen remodel”) but they might not know what kind of company can give it to them. Google often responds to these queries with links to product pages, as opposed to the homepages of these businesses.
For this reason, you should make sure your product pages are SEO-friendly in themselves. Are you using the most important keywords in the product name in description? Are your product pages easy to navigate, with high quality images?
If you offer products from many different categories, you should definitely optimize your category pages for SEO as well. In addition to relevant headings, make sure your category pages feature a clear product hierarchy, since this simplifies the customer experience and makes your website seem more legitimate.
Update Content Regularly
Updating existing blog content takes much less time than developing new topics and composing new content. For instance, if you have content that revolves around important statistics, see if those statistics are still up to date. You could potentially add another paragraph to the post to clarify the update.
Content can also be updated with quotes, additional statistics, and new developments in your industry. This is how countless successful companies continue to rank highly on relevant searches for years and years: They update high-volume content like listicles to account for new technology, new products, etc.
At this point, it’s probably clear that a cornerstone of an SEO-friendly website is fresh, relevant content. If your website is informative, easy to navigate, and constantly adding fresh and relevant content, then you’ve checked the main boxes for effective SEO. For further guidance about SEO for small businesses, contact the team at The Found Gen today.