As a small business owner, you are probably in a position of wanting to increase traffic to your website whilst working on a tight budget. Driving traffic through natural search results is appealing to small business owners because of the high volume of people searching for your proposition, and the potential long term return on investment. But what are the most important things to consider for small business SEO in order to maximise your budget? We look at five key points below:
Keyword Research
Understand which keywords are relevant to you and will drive traffic. There are various tools you can use to judge keyword popularity which will give you an idea of the kind of phrases people search for in your niche.
Keyword Targeting and Optimisation
Based upon your keyword research you can judge which pages within your site can be targeted and incorporate the keywords in key mark-up – titles, headings, meta tags, page copy etc. In addition, you’ll want to ensure that your site structure falls in line with search engine guidelines, ensuring that crawlers can access and index your content.
One hint for small businesses - if you are geographically specific then your keyword targeting should be combinations of your proposition with your locations.
Conversion Tracking
Assuming your site is optimised and driving traffic, you’ll want to measure the success and return on investment. A free tool like Google Analytics allows you to track online leads, sales, brochure requests etc.
Map Optimisation
Several search engines now offer local results in map format, results of which are appearing in search engine results more and more. For example Google Local provides a map with business locations plotted on it and 10 links to relevant sites. For local businesses it’s becoming essential to appear in these listings – they are often the first result and drive a lot of traffic. It’s not just local queries that trigger these maps either – maps are being triggered for generic queries based on user location too.
Link Building
A key part of small business SEO is link building – ensuring other sites have links pointing to yours. There are numerous ways you can go about this, again for region specific businesses submitting to local directories will help aid your SEO and map optimisation.
These are the key considerations small businesses need to consider when wanting to improve traffic levels and visibility through natural search. If your small business needs help with SEO then contact Fusion Unlimited – our search engine optimisation offering can be tailored to suit the needs of small businesses, maximising your budget and helping improve your position in search engines and map results.
September 21st, 2009 at 4:05 pm
A bit of advice for those of you choosing keywords, don’t just go for what has the biggest search volume. If you select a key phrase that is not that appropriate for your business you could end up with a lot of visitors to your site taking one look and then leaving. This can boost your bounce rate which can have negative affects on your page raking, as Google sees your site as not relevant. Always be honest. Anna