Improving your small business’ SEO ranking takes an investment in time and money. It’s not something that you will see overnight results, and that drives many to give up. However, if you stay with it and have the perseverance to give it what it takes, you will reap substantial rewards.
Partnering with a small business marketing consultant is an excellent option to take most of the pressure off doing it yourself. Catania Media Consultants work with two industries that rarely have the time it takes to improve their business website’s SEO ranking: law firms and medical professionals.
Your small business marketing consultant partners at Catania know all the ins and outs of driving traffic to legal and medical websites. We can help yours acquire new clients and patients and scale profitability. However, if you want to take on this vital project yourself – or are just interested in how it’s done – these SEO tips for small businesses will give a little insight into what it takes.
Create Quality Blog Posts with Optimized Structure
There are several ways Google determines which websites appear higher on their search engine than others. It comes down to how easy it is for Google to find yours as well as how valuable the information there is to searchers. Two basic SEO tips for small businesses to rank higher are creating quality blog posts and using an optimized structure.
There is a difference between blog posts and your web content. Your typical content is still essential but refers to your forward-facing text – such as landing pages, service pages, and the overall content that everyone will see just by navigating to your homepage. Blog posts are more detailed, focusing on minute topics relevant to your clients or patients. Both webpage content and blogs use SEO keywords that will help you match with more searchers, but you are not likely to update your webpage content every day while you can do so with blog posts. And this is why blog posts are strategically advantageous.
Blog posts can be made quickly and help your SEO ranking because Google also looks for newly published material when steering browsers toward websites. Your blogs are also a great way to stay up with the latest trends according to what people are searching for online. Important legal happenings in your area or the newest drug and treatment information are all ideas for keeping blogs current according to search interests from Google’s analytics.
But because blog posts require active management to stay current, a small business marketing consultant is where many busy legal and medical professionals turn to for help. Catania Media Consultants can not only help you come up with the right keywords and topics for regular blog posting but has SEO writing specialists that can write it for you, too.
Keeping an optimized structure throughout your website content and blog posts is one of the SEO tips for small businesses that often go overlooked. This means more than just sprinkling keywords throughout your pages and articles. Google ranks websites by how well your content and blogs are written, ensuring they are easily digestible to readers. Some other things it looks for are:
- Title tags and subheadings – break down your posts into sections for a more readable flow.
- Images and videos – people browsing the internet love accompanying pictures and videos when they read. Ensure that they don’t slow your page speed, or it will have the opposite effect on your ranking.
- Meta description – helps Google find your content and gives readers a quick synopsis of what they will find when clicking on your link.
- Internal links – help provide structure by allowing easy navigation around your site.
Acquire Backlinks
Backlinks are a tool that savvy marketers use to give a massive boost to their website’s ranking. A backlink is a link to your website from another website. This is one of the most important SEO tips for small businesses because Google highly favors websites with backlinks as it shows they have authority in their field. The reason for this is that if other websites vouch for your site by providing a backlink to it, it is likely that there is high-quality content that readers want.
Acquiring plenty of backlinks takes a large number of resources and connections. A small business marketing consultant like Catania can do it for you. We have built relationships over the years and find solutions to get backlinks posted on other websites back to yours, giving you the boost in SEO ranking that your small business needs.
Install a Sitemap
Blogs, content, and optimized structure will be useless without installing a sitemap. Sitemaps lay out the design of your website and its most important pages for Google to “crawl” – when a bot is sent to your website and reads what you have available. Sitemaps also make it easier for human browsers to navigate your website and find relevant pages.
When a professional small business marketing consultant gives SEO tips for small businesses, they usually recommend you install two types of sitemaps: XML and HTML.
An XML Sitemap is found in your domain’s root folder and is comprehended by search engines. An HTML Sitemap is attached to your website footer for human searchers, making the user experience more comfortable. There are other sitemaps for different functions, such as videos and images.
Improving Your SEO Ranking is a Large Task, But There is Help
There are many aspects to improving SEO rankings. These SEO tips for small businesses will have a significant impact but are not comprehensive. It takes years to learn everything, and there are different strategies that individual websites should focus on to make it work for them. But a small business marketing consultant can save time and, in the long run, money. If you are a medical or law website, we can help. Contact Catania Media Consultants to help you improve your SEO ranking.