• Home
• /
• SEO
• /
• The SEO habits your small business must adopt to survive

The SEO habits your small business must adopt to survive

Search engine optimization is the key to being competitive online. It involves adopting on and off-page practices, that can raise your company’s profile on search engines.  In this article, we provide the habits your small business should adopt to improve its SEO.

Does your small business have an SEO strategy? To compete with both local and global businesses, you need a solid search engine optimization plan. Yet this is not a one-time event. SEO must be something adopted into everyday practice. Below, we discuss the SEO habits your small business must adopt to survive.

 

Begin by knowing your current position and your competitors

The first place to start with search engine optimization is to know your current standing. Even if you have done very little apart from setting up a website, you may still have accumulated some sort of rank when it comes to search engine optimization. This is because Google and other engines use factors such as domain names and backlinks from other websites to calculate where they should put you on their pages. If you have had links from local business forums and websites, they will all count. You can do this with a domain authority check, which gives you a ranking appropriate to others in your niche.

After this, start with a competitive analysis for SEO. This is a method in which you check how the SEO of competitors is doing. You can see where their strengths and weaknesses lie. You may notice certain keywords they are not picking up on, or see where they are getting their backlinks from. All this information can help you build your strategy, and it is one we will come back to in the following tips.

 

Request backlinks

Backlinks are links back from one website to your own. The better that website is, the more authority is transferred to you. Thus, the more quality backlinks you have, the better your SEO is.

Website authority goes up and down, so don’t just aim for well-established sites. You may get a link from a small site that grows over the years, increasing the link juice.

Getting links can cost money if you hire an outside marketing firm to do it for you. However, you can start requesting them from other sources. If you work with other people, ask for a link back from their websites. Get yourself into local media and community events, and ask for links back from radio stations and newspapers. Get into the habit of doing this regularly. If you are struggling, go back to your competitive analysis and see where they are coming from, then go and get some from that source.

 

Research current keywords and trends

Keywords are the ones you embed in your website and the articles on it. When people type them into Google, your articles will appear, ranked depending on your current level of SEO. For example, if you have an article where the keyword is “How to use a circular saw” and you have the fifth-best SEO ranking for it online, you will appear fifth on the page (Excluding paid suggestions).

You can check your competitor’s keywords using your previous analysis. If you have a better ranking you can start to develop content that steals searchers, and essentially leads, away from them. You can also use a keyword tool to see what people are searching for and how much competition there is for it.

However, the habit you should get into is looking for trending keywords and topics. These suddenly become popular due to current events and the news. In large companies, the very fabric of their operations means it can be quite a while to get content out that responds to this. However, if you can check trending topics on social media and forums, you can quickly jump on searches people are making in real time.

 

Adapt your content for the searcher’s intent

When people type in keywords, you can glean their intent. For example, if someone types in a “Red cocktail dress” they are probably trying to buy a specific product. If they type in “Where is the best pizza restaurant in York?” they don’t know the area and are planning on visiting. Both have different intents. One wants to buy something and one wants information.

When you create content, make sure you are matching it to the searcher’s intent. If it is to buy the product, you want them to arrive on a page that tells them all the good things the product offers. You may even have discounts to sweeten the deal.

Blog posts are great for people wanting general information, and you can link them to other posts on your site or product pages. Frequently asked questions sections are useful for people looking for information on a product or service. All of these improve the customer journey and mean that essentially, they will stay on the website, improving your SEO and hopefully making a purchase.

Backlinks, keyword research, personalization, and knowing what competitors are doing are the general takeaways. They are not the only things you need to do, but by implementing them you will gradually see your SEO rankings climb meaning more sales online.