We’ve talked before about SEO strategies for small businesses, and you probably already know that keywords play an important role in increasing your business’ visibility in search engines.
Knowing how to incorporate keywords into your website content and online listings can go a long way when it comes to helping customers discover your business. In fact, 71% of marketers say using strategic keywords is their number one strategy for SEO.
That said, there are many other factors at play that can impact your ranking in search engines and boost your SEO efforts.
So, what else should you be focusing on with your SEO marketing strategy?
Backlinks.
A backlink is any link from another website that leads to your business’ website. As you can imagine, backlinks are a great way to organically direct traffic to your website, especially if they come from a reputable source.
But the benefits of SEO backlinks go beyond that. Having links from a variety of trusted sites back to your site can significantly impact your ranking in search engines. This is because they signal to search engines that other websites trust your content.
To learn more, check out our guide to SEO boosting backlinks – the what, the why and how to get them for free.
Customer reviews.
Positive reviews are crucial for small businesses – there’s no doubt about that. But what you might not realise is that customer reviews also impact your SEO performance.
According to research by SEO software provider Moz, customer reviews are one of the most important factors that Google’s algorithm uses to determine a page or website’s search position.
So how do you encourage customers to share their opinion? Find out with our article on how to get more online reviews for your business.
Online directory listings.
When you list your business on online directories like Google Business Profile and Yellow Pages Online, your business will pop up in search results when customers search for relevant keywords related to your business and area. This includes searches such as ‘[Business] near me’ and ‘[Business] in [Suburb]’.
Having up-to-date online directory listings is especially beneficial for local SEO, which means you’re more likely to be found by local customers rather than just people who are searching for your products or services.
Want to know more? Read our guide to why local SEO is worth the time and investment.
Schema markup.
Schema markup is code that you put on the HTML of a web page to give search engines more information about the content of that page.
When schema markup is added to a web page, it typically creates an enhanced description, commonly known as a ‘rich snippet’. Rich snippets make your web pages more engaging and attractive to users, which increases the likelihood that people will click through to your website – indirectly improving your SEO efforts.
It sounds technical, but in truth schema markup isn’t very difficult to add to your website. You can find out more about how to implement it in our free schema markup eBook.
Metadata.
Metadata describes the information on your webpages so it’s easy for both search engines and humans to understand what each page is about. The most common types of metadata to be aware of are:
- Meta title tags: This is the title of a page that shows up as a clickable headline in search engine results. The ideal length of a title tag is about 60 characters, and it should contain relevant keywords while succinctly describing what the page is about.
- Meta descriptions: This is the description that appears below the title in search results, and it should be about 160 characters. Although meta descriptions don’t directly impact search rankings, they’re an opportunity to encourage people to click through to your page – so they should be clear, concise and include a compelling call-to-action.
- Heading tags: Heading tags are used to identify headings and subheadings within your content. They should contain relevant keywords and be used in order of importance, for example <H1> for the main headline, <H2> for subheadings and <H3> for pull-out points.
- Image alt tags: Also known as alt text, this is the written text that appears instead of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load. It’s beneficial to include alt tags for images because it helps tell search engine crawlers about the content on a webpage.
Website page speed.
Page speed is the time it takes for a webpage to load, and it plays a big role in both SEO and providing a good user experience.
Data from Google shows that an increase in page loading time from one second to just three seconds means it’s 32% more likely that the user will leave the website without visiting another page. At five seconds this number rises by 90%.
If your website’s loading time isn’t cutting it, there are some simple steps that you can take to get up to scratch, which you can read about in our guide to improving website page speed.
Website structure.
Website structure is how all of the pages on your website are organised, and it’s a fundamental aspect of SEO. If your website’s pages aren’t ranking well, or aren’t ranking at all in Google, it could be due to a poorly-designed website structure or navigation.
On the flipside, if you get your website structure right from the get-go, you can be confident that all of your core webpages – and any subsequent pages you add – will be found by Google.
You can check out some practical, actionable tips to improve your website structure in our free eBook – A small business guide to technical SEO.
E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, and it’s part of Google’s algorithm that evaluates the quality of a webpage’s content. It’s not known exactly how Google figures this out, but some of the potential factors include:
- The number of backlinks linking back to the page
- How long the website has been publishing content in the topic area
- Whether the webpage’s content is relevant to the website/business
- Whether or not the content satisfies user intent (e.g. to find out more information or get an answer to a question)
- How much time users spend on the page
- External profiles on sites like Yellow Pages and Google Business Profile that provide context about the brand
It’s a good idea to keep E-A-T in mind when creating content for your website. You can find out more in our article on where and how to optimise your content, and take our free SEO Checkup to find out how your business is performing online.
