Be it small or big, a business is a tough mountain to scale. Apart from the plethora of considerations to keep in mind, there’s always the risk of losing out on your initial investments. You could either make it big out there, or there is the terrifying possibility that you lose even what you had initially set out with. But to shield yourself from such an outcome, there are some pretty handy and convenient strategies that you must follow for your small business. Without a decent stream of promotions on a variety of mediums out there, you stand to gain pretty little and lose too much. Talking of mediums, the most important one in this regard right now is the internet. With the advent of social media and the way users worldwide have adapted to it, the web is now a more profitable place to market your services than ever before. For small businesses, this comes as no less than a blessing since now they have something that actively reaches the masses effectively without even charging them much of an amount in return.
But whenever you talk of the web as a way of creating a general awareness of your business, you can’t help but talk of search engines. After all, how does the average user find anything on the web? Google seems to be the most popular answer. And for search engines like Google, SEO is a top priority. Search engine optimization separates the rest of the crowd on the web from the ones who are actually trying to accomplish something. If you’re looking to get some recognition for your small business, you must master this neat little element. And to help you with that here’s a little rundown of some of the most major strategies you can adapt to your web activities.
Content is King
If you run a website, regardless of whether it is for your small business or some other purpose, it must have the pretty good quality of content that is engaging as well as interactive in nature. The web is basically a cesspool of quality content from all over the world, and for your website to gain the attention it deserves; you must have something special to pull the visitors in. In fact, a major point that severely affects your website’s SEO ranking is the dwell time, which is basically the time an average user spends on your website. Needless to say, the higher is the value of dwell time, better will be your position in the SEO rankings. And what better way to maximize your dwell time than to keep the content engaging enough to keep the visitors hooked for a long time.
Optimize Your Images
When it comes to images, you have a goldmine of potential ways to jack up your website. Images are great since they can easily transform even the soberest content into one that is attractive and visually appealing. But there is a certain hidden cost to adding several high-quality images to your website. Images have the capacity to make a page bulky and slow loading. This is the reason why a balance must be found between quality and quantity when it comes to images. Additionally, if you use certain popular and high ranking keywords in the file name, description, caption or title for your image, then it is automatically signaled to search engines that your website hosts relevant content which is generally sought by users.
Can’t Compromise With Speed
If there’s one thing that has changed in the past couple of years, it is the attention span of the general populace. These days, no one has the time to stick around waiting for something to happen, they’d rather utilize that waiting time elsewhere. This is why search engines like Google and Bing take into account the page load speeds of various websites while determining SEO ranks. A website which loads fast will generally have a much higher SEO rank as compared to one which is slow to load. Small businesses can use this fact to race ahead of certain websites which may perhaps have a better following but fall behind on load speeds. Additionally, a page which loads fast will obviously have a higher dwell time as the visitors won’t switch on to other websites to avoid waiting for the content to load.
Optimal Usage of Headers
A pretty obvious way of gaining a decent amount of following quickly is to follow a certain style of writing that is appealing to the masses. And when it comes to the style of writing, almost no one likes to stumble onto huge blocks of text that seem to have no purpose at all. For small or developing businesses, even if you are trying to explain the nature of the services you provide, try to do in short paragraphs, and even then you must use headers which not only break your content into sections which are easier to read but also boost your SEO ratings with the search engines.
Outsourcing Information
You may have gone ahead and set up a well-functioning website for your business, but will you really get the attention you desire unless there is some strong authority backing up your content? Is there some way for your visitors to realize the authenticity of your content? Actually, there is. One way for your content to seem much more authoritative and authentic is to link out to high ranking and authority websites which already enjoy a vast popularity among the masses. For small businesses, this is a golden ticket to achieving fame and recognition as it convinces your readers that whatever content they find on your website is a hundred percent accurate and valid.
Mix & Match Your Multimedia
As stated earlier, images are the one true method of making your content more engaging and attractive to the average visitor. But the question here is, why restrict yourself to just images? For a website that’s truly built to last and propel your small business to fame and success, you must use a combination of multimedia files which can effectively give your content the required boost. Naturally, watching a video will be the preferred activity over reading a large block of text. Thus, more the number and variety of media files on your website, the better it is for your business.
Check for Broken Links
Just like there are a number of things which make your website more popular and take it towards widespread success, there are certain things which might damage its reputation. Chief of these is negligence towards the content you put on it and not constantly scanning for errors or outdated information. This negligence usually manifests in the form of broken links. Broken links are hyperlinks which redirect to pages which either no longer exist or have since been removed. Since they take the user nowhere and serve no purpose but to waste the user’s time, they are extremely unpopular and negatively affect a website’s SEO rating. The only way to weed out broken links from your website is to constantly check for them on a periodic basis.
Innovative Designs
Once you get the structure and content right, there’s only just one thing left to do. And that is to come up with a unique design that compliments your website and attracts visitors. Keep in mind that for small businesses which may have just established a website, having an innovative design can be an intuitive method of getting that initial reserve of visitors that is so critical to a website’s success. With great design, you are effectively signaling your professionalism and serious intent to the customer, and that is a great start, to begin with for any website owner or developer.
Mobile Optimization
Ask yourself what is the one thing that might have changed for businesses if you compare the way they are run now to the way they were run some ten years back. The most obvious answer to this question is that like a lot many other things, businesses too have gone mobile. People are now interested in accessing everything on the go. And if that means you are going to have to develop a separate website so that people can access your content easily on the go on their mobile devices, then that is what you should do. Mobile optimization is an important way of ensuring the success of your business venture. Combine all the important aspects of your desktop website and emulate them in a suitable manner into the mobile version if you truly want to achieve dominion over mobile devices as well.
Promote Yourself on Social Media
While tooting your own horn may not be considered a decent practice, the rules have been bent somewhat when it comes to the virtual world. As far as social media advertising is concerned, you must make great efforts to promote yourself and your business as much as you can. Integrating your website with all the major social networks and adding follow, share or like buttons on the page itself is just the very first thing you must accomplish to truly rock your social media campaign. For small businesses, social sharing and social media campaigns are truly beneficial as it gives business owners a chance to capitalize on their already established social media popularity and channel it to profit and promote their businesses.
Affiliate Yourself with Google
Google gives you this amazing functionality to register your business with them so that it appears in their indexes and is more easily displayed when it comes to fetching search results for relevant searches on the Google search engine. The registration is completely free of cost and is even independent of your website. Although, you may add your website as well if you wish to. Secondly, registered businesses will show up on several Google applications such as Google Maps, making it even more beneficial for your website’s popularity and traffic. The registration even gives you the option to add any photos which you might associate with the business, along with the logo you plan to use and the link to all your social profiles.
Extensive Use of Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Title tags are simply the text that shows up in blue and underlined on the search results page, while meta description refers to the text underneath. The importance of these two elements is highlighted by the very fact that more often than not, these two are the very first things associated with your website that the user sees. For small businesses which may not enjoy much of popularity, these two are the only means of judgment for the user in order to identify the usefulness of your website. If these are not structured and put together well enough, it gives the user no reason to even click on the link directing them to the site.
Include Keywords on the Website
This one is pretty obvious in nature, but more the number of keywords you include on your website, more will be the relevancy signaled to search engines. The way a search engine works is that it quickly scans your website for any keywords which might form a perfect match with the terms in the search query. The more of these matches there are, higher will be your website’s position in the search rankings.
Incorporate Google AdWords
When all else fails, Google comes to the rescue. If you’re not able to secure a top spot for your website on the search results page even after repeated attempts, you might want to consider actually paying for that spot. Google AdWords is a service by Google that lets you pay a certain amount so that your website always shows up on the very top of the search results page. As for the amount, it is not even fixed but actually varies as per the relevancy of your content with the search terms.
Harness Local Search
Being put into the local search category by Google may mean nothing unless you actually cite some other local businesses on your website. The best way to do this for small businesses is to link out to other similar and subsidiary business websites from the same field or locality. As for listing out your own address on the website, make sure you do it in text apart from adding a navigational link since Google needs to scan that address to truly establish your venture as a local business in the area.
Constant Updates are the Way to Go
Just like any other venture that you may have indulged in, building a website also requires constant care and dedication, along with active efforts to preserve the quality. For a website, this translates to periodic updates on your content and eliminating any useless, outdated or otherwise deprecated content that serves no purpose and simply misleads the average user. For small businesses, if you don’t treat your visitors to constant updates, it won’t take long for them to lose interest and move on to other websites.
SEO Experts to the Rescue
Being a businessman is no child’s play. And for the mammoth task of running a business, you require lots of time and a certain level of skill. Thus, to save yourself the time you need to actually run the business, a great way out is to hire a trusted and skilled SEO expert to manage the promotional side of things, while you get to focus on bettering the quality of services you give out. This is where we come in. With our years of experience and dedicated SEO services for small businesses, we can transform the reach of your business like never before. Reach out to us today!