Small businesses often wonder how to improve their SEO rankings on a limited budget. They want the benefits of the best SEO services but lack the resources to hire whole teams of people to work on search engine marketing. The good news is that there are many things a small business can do to improve its rankings in Google without breaking the bank. Following are a few of the most important.
Hire experts in both SEO and web design to develop your site in the first place.
Small businesses can benefit from hiring the services of the experts, even if those services are only temporary or part-time due to the constraints of the budget. When choosing a web developer to bring on board, you should consider getting more value for the money you invest by choosing someone who is knowledgeable in both SEO practices and web design.
While SEO and web design may appear to be independent of each other, there are many ways in which the two intersect. For instance, a responsive web design is generally considered better for SEO rankings, while a cleaner, simpler design can improve a user’s experience on a website, improving click-through rates and other factors that affect page rankings. As a result, a web marketing company that understands how to optimize both web design and SEO is the ideal place in which to invest even a small business budget, as you prepare your future web presence.
Conduct relevant keyword research.
Effective keyword research will show you which terms to use in your content and help you determine which topics you discuss on your website and how you discuss them.
One of the keys to successful keyword research is to go beyond broad and highly competitive terms. For instance, you will have a difficult time standing out from other shoe-related websites by building your content around the terms “shoes,” or “sneakers.” Instead, you will need to delve into the longer words and phrases, called “long-tail keywords”, that more accurately target the type of people who would benefit from your services.
Long-tail keywords comprise more than 70 percent of all online searches. As a result, by discovering the ones that relate to your business and optimizing your website for them, you will be more likely to enjoy greater click-through rates and better search rankings.
If you cannot afford to have search engine optimization services do the keyword research for you, there are several tools you can use to do it yourself. These include Google AdWords, Google Trends, and Wordtracker. These tools allow you to find keywords related to a topic, list them by popularity, and allow you to see how they have performed over time.
Emphasize frequent content writing.
If you wish to make the most of your SEO efforts, you also need to emphasize frequent content writing. Producing fresh, relevant content on a regular basis is becoming increasingly important in maintaining your search rankings and drawing visitors to your website. The best SEO services focus on creating this type of content because they realize its value to the SEO success of their clients.
Businesses often focus primarily on updating and maintaining their blogs. While this practice is important, successful content writing must go beyond blogs to include the rest of the website. When a website is frequently updated, Google will crawl and index that website more frequently, leading to improved rankings. In addition fresh, quality content is more likely to earn links, attract readers, and be shared on social media, all of which has a positive impact on your search rankings.
SEE ALSO: How to Write SEO Content with Meaning
Go beyond SEO plugins.
If you are trying to do your own SEO, instead of hiring web marketing services, it may be tempting to simply utilize one of the many SEO plugins available. These plugins are great tools, but they cannot offer you the comprehensive support you need. Instead, successful SEO requires careful thought, attention, and effort that extends beyond adding a few keywords to your pages. For instance, you need to consider your web design, the frequency and quality of your content, the type of keywords that work best, the steps you can take to help you increase the number of organic links back to your site, and more. When you make SEO a part of everything you do for your website, you are more likely to enjoy positive results than if you rely on a single plugin.
Hire someone to make your website mobile-friendly.
DIY SEO will only be successful if you can recognize where to invest the money you do have available into hiring professional help. One of the areas that you should consider handing over to an expert in your web development unless you yourself are an expert in this area. More specifically, you should consider a professional web developer to make your website mobile-friendly.
Google will soon be making the mobile-friendliness of websites an important factor in how that website ranks. In addition, there are specific things you can do when making your website mobile-friendly that will improve your rankings. Hiring someone who understands the impacts that mobile-friendly web design has on SEO can play an important role in your SEO efforts.
Before you hire an expert, you can also check your site for mobile-friendliness at Google’s mobile-friendly test site here. This site should give you an idea of where to start in your mobile design efforts.
Tag your blogs with targeted phrases.
Your SEO efforts will be more successful if you take advantage of the seemingly small opportunities you have to build your rankings. One such opportunity is the way in which you tag your blog posts. Employing well-placed, targeted phrases in your tags is a simple way to have a positive impact on your SEO efforts.
The following are a few tips for including keywords in your blog content successfully:
- Use long-tail keywords.
Once you know which long-tail keywords you need to use for your business, you can utilize these keywords in your blog tags. In this way, you will help to ensure that those blog posts are indexed and show up in the rankings for the keywords you want to target.
- Do not use too many keywords.
Using too many keywords can appear as keyword stuffing to Google. As a result, limiting your keywords to no more than two can minimize penalties for keyword stuffing. In addition, a limited number of keywords makes it easier for visitors to quickly grasp what that webpage is all about.
- Place your keywords in front.
By placing keywords in front, you make your page more appealing to visitors, increasing the chances that they will visit your page, and, therefore, improve your rankings and garner you more customers.
With wise keyword research, smart tagging of blog posts, a comprehensive SEO plan, and judicious use of web development and SEO experts, you can improve your rankings even with a limited budget.
