8 Ways Small Businesses Can Increase their Online Visibility

Guest blog by August Ash

In 2022, the digital landscape is larger and more complicated than ever before. It’s an environment that is ever-changing and seemingly becoming smarter every day. While it's important that all businesses keep up with current digital trends, it's even more critical for smaller businesses trying to keep up with established companies. A well-made website is one of the most valuable assets to any business. Website design, website speed, and user accessibility are just the tip of the iceberg for criteria website visitors judge harshly when accessing a site for the first time.

https://www.bizjournal.com stated that 97% of small businesses are found online. But how do people find you in the first place? Here are 8 ways to increase your SEO for your website.

1. Perform a Technical SEO Audit

It’s crucial before starting your SEO journey to make sure your website doesn’t have any common technical SEO problems. These problems can include:

Make sure you index your website’s usability.

2. Publish High Quality. Relevant Content and Lots of It

When we speak about SEO, we mainly are looking to please Google. A study from https://www.searchenginejournal.com found that Google owns close to 86% of the market share. Google crawls your website regularly and will give more credibility to pages that are found and interacted with often. By publishing high quality and relevant content, you can hopefully draw in the right people and have them engage with your site. This could come by way of having a section of your website that promotes blogs, articles, or industry trends for example.

3. High Volume Keyword Research

Keyword research is a necessity for businesses looking to bring new users to their site. Google offers free keyword forecasting tools within their Ads platform. https://ahrefs.com also gives an in-depth analysis for what keywords are more popular based on volume of searches and how competitive the keywords are. When Google crawls your site and in return, hopefully ranks you higher on Google, an important piece of that ranking is your headers for each individual page.

4. Meta-Tagging

Meta tags are snippets of script put in on the back end of your website. The implementation will vary based on what platform your website runs on (WordPress, Drupal, etc). Meta tags can be placed on each individual page and should be a paragraph with high volume keywords that describe the content on the page.

5. Don’t Forget About Your Competition

Where does your competition rank? When you type in a similar service or a service you both provide, how do you rank compared to them? What are they doing differently? Some smaller companies fight so hard to be unique that they stray away from basic best practices just because of what their larger competitor is doing. While the idea of being unique and differentiating yourself is important, those larger companies most likely have more resources than you to optimize their site to help them rank as high as they are.

6. Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile should be established. This will be the first thing that people see when they type your business’ name in the search bar. More information can be found here to either edit your existing profile, or create one: https://www.google.com/business/

Learn more about Google Business Profile here: https://augustash.com/blog/sem/how-update-your-google-business-profile-page

7. Build Your Internal and External Back Links

Internal Links are links that link to another page on your site. https://calhouncompanies.com/sell-my-business

External Links, also called back links are links out to pages on a topic from website with high domain authority. This will also help build credibility with Google to trust your page more

8. Be Patient

SEO is not an overnight fix. This will take time. Make sure a site like Google Analytics is set-up on your website. This will allow you to track your progress month over month to compare the data. SEO is just one piece of the puzzle but ranks among the most important to help you and your business rank as high as possible on Google.