Top 10 SEO Strategies Small Businesses Should Follow in 2018
Everyone wants to attract more eyes to their website. Strong and effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategies have the potential to push your site to the top of Google’s organic search rankings, leading to the growth of your business.
SEO is a fast moving field. So it’s no surprise that you find people who are swept up in new developments, trends, and practices. However, there are some SEO gold standards that all SMBs should adopt in 2018.
Define your audience
SEO drives traffic to the website. But that wouldn’t do any good if your website isn’t getting displayed in front of a relevant audience. Therefore, it is convenient that you identify the type of audience you are targeting and know their search patterns, demographics, geographic location, preferences, etc. A step in this direction can be taken by setting up a Google Analytics account which will allow you to learn more about them on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Put your audience first
When creating your blog posts, it is imperative that you have a reader-first mindset. What your readers actually got from the writings should be foremost in their minds.
Never assume you don’t have direct competitors
There will always be someone who has already used the keywords you want to target. Do your homework to find out who these competitors of yours are and how you can differentiate your SEO strategy from others.
Improve your page speed
Google places great emphasis on page speed. A high page speed improves the visibility of your site. According to Gomez.com, even a second delay in page load time can decrease customer dissatisfaction by 16 percent. All this is the most important in the case of mobile users.
Use long tail keywords
Using long tail keywords in your strategy is key to the success of your business. For example, considering the keyword “SEO Tips” can take a long time to improve rankings in Google. However, using long-tail versions of the keyword “SEO Tips” such as “SEO Marketing for Your Business” can increase your chances of ranking high on Google.
Local SEO
Small businesses should especially focus on local search. If you’re running a small brick-to-brick business, local SEO is of the utmost importance. It was recently found that 50% of consumers who search locally on their smartphone visit a store that same day. The figure stands at 34% when it comes to searching on a computer or tablet. Therefore, it is based on things that your business visibility should rank high in your area. Otherwise, you risk losing out to competitors.
Get your website mobile friendly
Survey results reveal that 60% of traffic comes from mobile devices and that number is likely to rise. Therefore, it is up to you to ensure that your site is optimized for mobile visitors and not difficult to navigate on mobile devices. This becomes even more necessary because Google is in the process of giving higher ranks to sites that are optimized for mobile devices.
voice search
With the passage of time, the use of voice-based search is increasing. Now it is clear that you can ignore voice search at your own risk. Since voice search queries are very different from typed queries, you’ll need to optimize your content for voice search.
Be authentic
SEO is not a sneaky or deceptive practice, although some people tend to think so. Fooling the search engines by using shady tactics will not help you. By doing so, you risk losing the trust of search engines.
Focus on quality over quantity of links.
Quality rather than quantity should be your main consideration when it comes to building links for your website. Creating a large number of non-quality links has the potential to damage the credibility of your website.
SEO is an ongoing process. However, starting with a solid strategy will translate into online success for many years.