When running your new small business, you may be amiss as to what exactly SEO is and how it can help you gain new business leads. But SEO really does matter, and the sooner you start implementing these best practices, the sooner search engines will see the value in your site. Here are 5 tactics you should be using for your small business SEO.

Ensure that your website is quick and user-friendly

First and foremost, ensure that your website is quick. Aim for below a three-second load time, more than that and people will leave your page. This is referred to as “bouncing” by Google and is one of the factors that will negatively affect your position on the results page.

One way you can speed up your site is by utilising adaptive images. These work by automatically detecting your visitor’s screen size and adapting the image size to suit. This way, your website requires less bandwidth to load. Adaptive images also make your website more mobile friendly, a huge ranking signal now that Google is rolling out mobile first indexing.

Another is to ensure that your website is being cached. Browser caching stores static versions of your website.

Sprinkle LSI keywords in your content

Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI is the use of words semantically linked to your target keywords. By semantics, I just mean they would normally show up in a normal conversation with your keyword. LSI keywords are a relatively new concept for SEO managers with the advent of googles RankBrain algorithm. In short, LSI is a specific approach that tries to grasp the underlying structure and meaning of language. This will assist with your small business SEO efforts.

For example, if your keyword was Apple and your website also included the LSI keywords fruit, healthy, and sweet. Then Google would know that you would be talking about the fruit, instead of the consumer electronics.

Why LSI keywords you may be asking? Well, Googles Artificial Intelligence is getting smarter and smarter, and LSI keywords allow it to make sense of the internet wound it. By utilising these, you help Google understand your website, and by extension, your brand. As a result, you are (should) be rewarded by higher rankings.

Optimize all your text

It goes without saying that you should write for your users and not for the search engines. The latter strategy may have worked in the past, but nowadays, it will have your rankings dropped like a stone. Focus on putting out high-quality useful content that actually adds value to peoples lives.

A good place to start is to ensure that your title tag starts with your target keyword (and wrapped in an H1 tag). Understandably, your title tag is one of the most important SEO factors, It’s the first thing a google spider sees when reading the code of your site. Another important factor is your meta tags. Not only do they entice people searching the web to click on your site, which is itself a good SEO signal, but they also help Google better categorise your content too. Ensure that your target keyword is in there as well.

And finally, we have the alt text. Alt text is the information that goes behind your multimedia. Googles Spiders have trouble picking up information from images and videos on your site, as they cant actually “see” your site. Alt-Text helps them out by providing context around what they display.

For example, If your Keyword is “Virtual Assistant” and the image is of a lady sitting at a computer, you might want to add the alt text “Virtual Assistant sitting at work at a home desk.” This gives context to the image whilst also entering in your keywords.

Keep users onsite with multimedia

People are visual learners, we learn from observing our environment. The digital world is no different, in fact, half of the human brain is involved in processing visual cues. It is worth noting not to go overboard, however, images can take up as much as 60% of your site size, slowing loading times. Read our web design mistakes to avoid hurting your SEO in the process. Multimedia such as images, videos, infographics and PDFs are all successful in keeping people on your site for longer.

Keeping people from “bouncing” and staying on your site tells search engines that people find your content relevant and useful, thereby boosting your rankings further. Just remember that you can optimise alt-text, keywords and even links within these formats too!

Small Business SEO linking strategy

Links are still one of the most important SEO signals. Links help spiders find other websites with relevant content to add to their knowledge graph.

There are two types of linking strategies you should focus on, internal and external. Most websites have a good internal linking strategy, linking to other pages on their site. One thing to keep in mind is to ensure that you have an XML sitemap hosted on your site. This I the document that spiders use to crawl through your pages, without it you will likely be left behind by search engines.

In terms of external linking, you want to ensure that the sites you link to have these characteristics:

• Of a higher domain authority than your site
• Their content is relevant or on topic with yours
• Have a low spam score

Here at PrimePixels, we offer digital marketing services that will assist you with your small business SEO efforts and digital marketing needs. We have a team of digital marketing experts who are keen to help get your brand out there. Don’t hesitate to contact us for more information.