Top SEO Tips For Small Business

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On the JJ Barnes Blog, to help support and encourage my fellow entrepreneurs, I share top SEO tips for small business owners, and the SEO myths that you should ignore.

Running a small business is a whirlwind – you’re the head chef, marketing guru, and tech wiz all rolled into one. But in today’s digital age, online visibility is crucial for success. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in, but SEO can feel like a complex maze filled with confusing myths and conflicting advice.

Myths and fallacies surrounding SEO can easily mislead businesses, resulting in squandered resources and the implementation of fruitless strategies. To truly excel in SEO, it’s crucial to separate fact from fiction and embrace evidence-based practices. 

In this post is your guide, I’ll share actionable SEO tips specifically designed for small business owners like me. I’ll debunk the SEO myths that hold you back and equip you with strategies to get your website ranking higher in search results thanks to help from Matthew Woodward, director of Search Logistics.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Remember those clunky websites from the early days of the internet, riddled with the same keyword repeated a dozen times in a single paragraph? That’s keyword stuffing, a black hat SEO tactic that’s as outdated as dial-up. Back then, search engines relied heavily on keyword density to determine relevance. Today, however, search engines are much more sophisticated.

Imagine a conversation where someone injects the same phrase into every sentence. It’s unnatural and off-putting. Your website content should be engaging and informative, not a keyword graveyard.

Google and other search engines are onto these tricks. Stuffing your pages with keywords can actually lower your ranking, pushing you further down the search results rabbit hole.

Instead of keyword stuffing, focus on creating high-quality, relevant content that naturally incorporates your target keywords. Think of your keywords as spices, adding flavor to your content without overpowering the dish.

Here’s how to strategically use keywords for SEO:

• Target the right keywords. Research keywords that your ideal customers are actually searching for.
• Sprinkle keywords throughout your content. Include them in titles, headings, meta descriptions, and naturally within the body text, but avoid overuse.
• Write for humans, not robots. Content should be informative, engaging, and provide value to your readers. Google can identify content written solely for search engines.

By creating valuable content that speaks to your audience and uses keywords strategically, you’ll attract more visitors, improve your search ranking organically, and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.

Focus on creating high-quality, relevant content that naturally incorporates keywords in a user-friendly manner. Use keywords strategically in important on-page elements like titles, headings, and meta descriptions, but avoid overuse.

-Matthew Woodward

Focus On More Than Just Meta Keywords

There’s a persistent SEO myth that’s been hanging around longer than parachute pants: stuffing your meta keywords tag with a laundry list of relevant terms will magically propel your website to the top of search results. Unfortunately, this is about as effective as using smoke signals to order pizza. Major search engines like Google officially declared meta keywords irrelevant for ranking purposes way back in 2009.

So why the disconnect? Back in the early days of SEO, meta keywords were a primary factor search engines used to understand a webpage’s content. However, webmasters quickly exploited this system, jamming irrelevant keywords into the tag to manipulate rankings. Search engines responded by devaluing the meta keywords tag altogether.

While meta keywords hold no weight with search engines, they’re not entirely useless. Some lesser-known search engines might still consider them. Additionally, they can provide a glimpse into what keywords you think are relevant to your content. However, focusing your energy here is a major case of diminishing returns.

Here’s where to place your SEO efforts instead:

• High-Quality, Keyword-Rich Content: Search engines prioritize websites that offer valuable, informative content that naturally incorporates relevant keywords. Focus on creating content that educates, entertains, or solves problems for your target audience.
• Strategic Keyword Use: Research keywords with high search volume and low competition. While meta keywords aren’t considered, strategically using these keywords in your title tags, headings, meta descriptions, and throughout your content can still improve search relevance.
• Technical SEO: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, loads quickly, and has a clean, crawlable structure. Technical SEO factors play a significant role in search engine ranking.

By ditching the meta keyword myth and focusing on these strategies, you’ll create a website that not only ranks higher but also provides a fantastic user experience, ultimately attracting more qualified traffic and boosting your business.

Rather than wasting time on meta keywords, optimise other on-page elements that do impact SEO, such as title tags, headings, image alt text, and quality content. These elements provide context to search engines and users.

-Matthew Woodward

Create A Crawlable Website

Remember the days of manually submitting your website to every search engine hoping they’d magically find you? Thankfully, those days are long gone. Today’s search engines, like Google, employ powerful web crawlers that tirelessly scour the internet, constantly discovering new websites and content.

Here’s how it works:

• The Mighty Web Crawlers: Imagine a fleet of digital librarians constantly exploring the vast library of the internet. These are web crawlers, sophisticated algorithms that follow links from one webpage to another, discovering new websites and indexing them.
• Indexing for Visibility: Once a web crawler discovers your website, it analyzes the content and adds it to a massive index. This index is like a giant library catalog, allowing users to find your website when they search for relevant keywords.

While search engines are fantastic at finding new websites, there are a few situations where manually submitting your sitemap (a file that lists all your website’s pages) to search engines like Google Search Console can be beneficial:

• Brand New Website: If your website is brand new and hasn’t gained many backlinks (links from other websites), submitting your sitemap can give search engines a nudge in the right direction, helping them discover your content faster.
• Large or Complex Websites: For websites with a massive amount of content or a complex structure, submitting a sitemap ensures all your pages get properly indexed.

Focus on Creating Great Content

While submitting a sitemap can be helpful in certain cases, it shouldn’t be your primary SEO focus. Search engines prioritize websites that offer valuable, informative content. By creating high-quality content that naturally attracts backlinks, you’ll ensure your website gets discovered and ranked organically.

Bonus Tip: Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and easy for search engine crawlers to navigate. This will significantly improve your chances of getting indexed quickly and comprehensively.

Focus on creating a crawlable website structure with an XML sitemap to help search engines efficiently index your pages. Ensure your site loads quickly and is mobile-friendly for an optimal user experience.

-Matthew Woodward

Create Shareable Content

Social media has become an undeniable force in the digital landscape. But when it comes to SEO, many entrepreneurs wonder: do likes, shares, and comments directly impact search rankings? The answer is: not quite. While social media can’t directly manipulate search engine algorithms, it can be a powerful indirect ally in your SEO efforts. Here’s why:

• Brand Awareness Boost: Social media platforms are fantastic for getting your brand name out there. The more people see your brand on social media, the more likely they are to search for it directly on search engines. This increased brand awareness can translate to more organic traffic and potentially higher rankings.
• Referral Traffic Powerhouse: Engaging social media content can drive valuable referral traffic to your website. When people share your content on their networks, it exposes your website to a wider audience, potentially leading them to click through and explore your offerings. This influx of referral traffic can send positive signals to search engines, indicating valuable content that resonates with users.
• Building Trust and Authority: Social media allows you to connect with your audience on a deeper level, fostering trust and establishing yourself as an authority in your industry. Search engines consider user engagement and brand sentiment as ranking factors, so positive interactions on social media can contribute to an overall positive perception of your brand.

While social media offers these indirect SEO benefits, it’s important to remember that chasing vanity metrics like likes and shares won’t directly boost your search rankings. Search engines prioritize high-quality content that provides genuine value to users.

Here’s how to leverage social media for SEO the right way:

• Create Shareable Content: Focus on crafting informative, engaging content that people naturally want to share with their networks. This could be blog posts, infographics, videos, or anything that resonates with your target audience.
• Be Consistently Active: Regularly post valuable content and interact with your followers. Respond to comments, answer questions, and participate in relevant conversations. This organic engagement builds trust and encourages people to follow you for valuable insights.
• Promote Your Valuable Content: Share your website content on your social media platforms, driving traffic back to your website and encouraging further engagement.

By using social media strategically to build brand awareness, drive referral traffic, and foster trust, you’ll create a powerful SEO support system that complements your efforts to create high-quality, search-engine-optimized content. Remember, social media is a marathon, not a sprint. Consistent, audience-centric engagement is key to building a loyal following that fuels your SEO success.

Rather than chasing social signals, prioritise creating high-quality, shareable content that provides value to your audience. Build an engaged social following organically by being consistently active and responsive.

-Matthew Woodward

High Quality Backlinks

In the early days of SEO, the mantra was simple: the more backlinks you had, the higher you’d rank. This led to a wild west of link-building tactics, with webmasters amassing massive quantities of backlinks, regardless of their source. But those days are long gone. Today’s search engines, like Google, are far more sophisticated and can easily distinguish between high-quality and low-quality backlinks.

Here’s why focusing on quantity over quality backfires:

• The Google Quality Filter: Imagine a bouncer at an exclusive club. Google’s quality filter acts similarly, scrutinizing backlinks to ensure they come from reputable sources. Low-quality backlinks from spammy websites or irrelevant directories are essentially denied entry, offering no SEO value and potentially harming your ranking.
• The Panda Penalty Party Crash: Low-quality backlinks can trigger Google’s Panda penalty, a nasty consequence that can significantly decrease your website’s search ranking. This penalty targets websites with thin content and a poor user experience, often associated with sites that prioritize quantity over quality backlinks.

So, how do you build a backlink profile that actually helps your SEO? Here’s the golden rule: focus on quality over quantity.

Here are some strategies to get you started:

• Create Link-Worthy Content: The best way to attract high-quality backlinks is to create content so valuable, informative, and engaging that other websites naturally want to link to it. This could be industry reports, in-depth guides, or original research that other websites would find beneficial for their own audience.
• Guest Blogging on Reputable Sites: Contributing guest posts to high-authority websites in your niche can earn you valuable backlinks. Focus on creating high-quality guest posts that resonate with the target audience of the host website.
• Build Relationships with Influencers: Connect with industry influencers and thought leaders in your niche. By providing valuable insights or collaborating on projects, you can organically earn backlinks from their websites.

By focusing on these strategies, you’ll build a backlink profile rich in quality links from relevant and authoritative websites. This, in turn, sends strong signals to search engines about the credibility and value of your website, ultimately boosting your search rankings in a sustainable way. Remember, it’s better to have a handful of high-quality backlinks than a mountain of spammy ones.

Focus on earning high-quality, relevant backlinks from authoritative and trusted sources through tactics like content marketing, outreach, guest posting, and building relationships. A few high-authority backlinks are far more valuable than thousands of low-quality ones.

-Matthew Woodward

Embrace Data-Driven SEO Strategies

In the ever-evolving world of SEO, there’s no shortage of conflicting advice and outdated tactics. But what truly separates SEO success stories from frustrated also-rans? The answer: a data-driven, user-centric approach. Here’s why ditching the guesswork and embracing evidence-based strategies is the key to maximizing your SEO performance:

Unveiling the User Journey:

Search engines like Google prioritize websites that deliver a positive user experience. But how do you know what users actually want and how they interact with your website? This is where data becomes your secret weapon. Tools like Google Analytics and Search Console provide a wealth of insights into user behavior, including:

• Traffic Sources: Identify where your website traffic originates from, allowing you to tailor your content strategy to different audiences.
• Top Performing Content: See which content resonates most with your visitors, informing future content creation and optimization efforts.
• User Engagement Metrics: Analyze metrics like bounce rate and time on page to understand how engaged users are with your content. This can help you identify areas for improvement and ensure your website offers a smooth and satisfying user experience.

By analyzing this data, you can gain a deep understanding of your audience’s needs and tailor your website accordingly. This might involve optimizing page load speed for mobile users, simplifying navigation for better user flow, or creating content that addresses their specific search queries.

Prioritizing Value Over Fluff:

Data also helps you identify what content actually drives results. Forget chasing trends or keyword fads – focus on topics that genuinely interest your target audience and provide them with value. Here’s how data can guide your content creation:

• Keyword Research with Real Data: Utilize keyword research tools that go beyond search volume, providing insights into user intent and search behavior. This ensures your content targets the right keywords and delivers the information users are actively seeking.
• Content Performance Tracking: Monitor how your content performs in search results. See which pieces attract organic traffic, generate leads, or convert visitors into customers. This data helps you refine your content strategy and prioritize topics that resonate most with your audience.

By creating data-driven content that provides genuine value to users, you’ll establish yourself as a trusted authority in your industry. This not only improves user experience but also sends positive signals to search engines, ultimately boosting your search ranking organically.

SEO is a Journey, Not a Destination:

The beauty of a data-driven approach is that it allows for continuous improvement. By constantly analyzing user behavior and content performance, you can refine your SEO strategy over time. This iterative process ensures you stay ahead of the curve, adapting to changing user preferences and search engine algorithms.

In conclusion, ditching the guesswork and embracing data-driven SEO empowers you to make informed decisions based on user behavior and real-world results. By prioritizing user experience and value through data analysis, you’ll create a website that thrives in the ever-evolving landscape of search engine optimization.

Ditch the myths and outdated tactics in favour of a holistic approach centred around high-quality content, technical optimization, mobile-friendliness, and authoritative link building.

-Matthew Woodward

About Search Logistics

Search Logistics operates as an SEO Agency specialising in tailoring strategies to meet the specific needs, goals, and budget of each client. Boasting an elite team of SEO experts, the agency’s core mission centres around effectively increasing search traffic. Beyond client projects, the experts are actively engaged in mentoring at the UK’s top universities, delivering insights on international conference stages, and contributing to Matthew’s SEO blog. Prioritising staying ahead of industry trends ensures clients receive the highest standard of service. Partnering with Search Logistics guarantees a dedicated team committed to maximising online presence.