If you want the opinion of a true web nerd, Search Engine Optimization should be a part of the marketing strategy of every small business.
Getting free traffic from search engines is highly valuable, and not all that difficult if you understand the fundamentals and the process to keep the traffic coming in.
Plus, for most of the population these days, if your business doesn’t show up in search results, you might as well not even exist.
Here are 7 SEO musts for your Louisville small business.
Fix Your Website Errors
Search Engines hate website errors. These are things like broken links, outdated software, security vulnerabilities, poorly configured web servers, duplicate pages, thin pages, old technology, slow pages, overly large images, and more.
All of these things make it harder for them to do their job, which is to crawl your website and catalog its contents.
If your website contains errors of any kind, or even things that just aren’t ideal, get those fixed right away. The more up to date and stable your website is, the more likely it is to rise in search results.
If you need help fixing your website, we can help you with either our WordPress Rescue service, or a monthly support plan.
Build a Great Contact Page
To stand out to search engines, it’s not enough to just have your phone number or email address somewhere on your website.
In order to be seen as a trusted business, you need a dedicated contact page that lists your address or service area, your phone number, and your email address. You can even build a form to make it easier to get in touch with you. Check out our contact page for a good example.
The reason is that businesses that make it easy to get hold of them tend to provide a higher level of service. Listing your address on this page also helps to search engines understand where your business is located. This helps boost your ranking where localized results matter, as it does for most small businesses.
Create Solid Foundational Content
The content of your website is what search engines use to understand what types of products and services that you provide. Potential customers want to read this content on your website so they can understand your business.
By providing high-quality content about what it is that you do in several formats (text, images, video, pdfs), you’ll give search engines more to chew on in order to understand your business. This translates into more ranking opportunities and higher rankings.
For example, if you provide 7 separate services, build a separate page for each one, not just one that lists all of them. Then optimize each one of those pages for specific keywords. That is 7x the ranking opportunity.
One word of caution here is not to create content just for the sake of content. Make sure it is relevant to your business and your customers.
Write Ongoing Fresh Content
While we’re on the subject of content, let’s keep going. This is where a lot of businesses fail. They’ll build their website, and then everything stops right there.
We’ve all seen outdated websites with the last piece of content posted 7 years ago. Don’t let that be you. If you’re not going to keep up with content, don’t even do it in the first place.
Search engines love fresh content. People love to read it. But it’s easy to get too focused on running a business and forget about marketing the business.
Because of this, outdated websites tend to fall lower in search results while other businesses keep their content fresh.
In order to stay relevant, it’s a good idea to create a new piece of content for potential customers about once a month. Many businesses do it even more often.
This can be a “how-to” piece, a “top tips” list (like this one), an announcement of a new product or service, or any number of things.
Just write something that keeps your website fresh, and is relevant to your potential customers. The LWN blog is a good example. We don’t post all that often (a few times a year at most), but when we do, we like to provide something meaty and relevant to our customers.
If you’re not sure how to set up a blog to write content, let us know and we can help you out. We also have an SEO service which we provide optimization work on your website, and ongoing coaching to help you do your part.
Establish Trust On Your Website (especially your homepage)
Before people will get in touch with you, they need to trust you first. Building in trust factors throughout your website goes a long way. These are things like:
- Team Pictures and Bios
- A Genuine “About” Page
- Visible Contact Methods
- Real Reviews and Testimonials
- Certifications and Recommendations
- Social Proof such as # of businesses served, etc
- Examples of Past Work / Portfolios
- Up-to-Date Authoritative Content
All of these things together help establish that you are running a legitimate and trustworthy business that people are going to have a good experience working with.
While it may seem crazy, search engines pick up on these things on a website, and they’ll rank your website higher if you are able to display these types of trust signals, especially on your homepage.
Build Your Google My Business Property
Google has been doing a lot of work in the last few years with it’s Google My Business profile. This is one of the first things a business owner should have set up after building a website.
It allows you to post photos of your business, collect reviews, list services, tell users about your business, provide directions, business hours, and more.
One of the main benefits of a Google My Business listing is that Google will display results that match your business when people are searching for similar products and services. This is a great way to stand out, and by using it in conjunction with a well-optimized website, you’ll get a lot of free traffic.
Keep Up With Your Website
No one wants to go to a website and not be able to use it, but that’s what will happen if you don’t keep up with your website, or have someone do it for you.
I’ve seen this hundreds of times. A company spends thousands of dollars on a website build, and then never touches it again.
It might not happen overnight, but eventually, it will break, the technology will get outdated, the content will get outdated, it will get hacked, or a number of other things if someone isn’t looking after it.
Search engines will even delist websites or mark them as hacked when things like this happen. I’ve seen this happen as well, and can take months to recover from, if you notice it.
The point of all of this is, your website isn’t a one-time project. It’s a living business asset that should be utilized to market your business.
If you need help keeping up with your website, our monthly support options are perfect for you.
Get Control of Your Website
If you find yourself in need of help with SEO, or even just keeping up with the day-to-day of your WordPress website, we’re here to help.
As I write this post, our monthly support plans start at just $99, and full website rebuilds can be done for a few thousand (pricing will vary).