What’s the secret to a successful small business online? It’s simple (no): Build a solid foundation for your business and don’t neglect search engine optimization. SEO plays an important role in business development and helps to expand the audience of potential customers. A bad business website is comparable to a TV channel whose programs are broadcast exclusively at night. Not many people will see his ad, even if it looks quite creative. Likewise, you might have a terrific business idea, but your customers won’t find you if the search engines don’t show your site in search results.

With the right SEO strategy, you will achieve significant increases in website traffic, your brand awareness, and ultimately your bottom line. You are probably reading this article because you don’t know how to increase the number of leads and get them through the sales funnel. Below you will find 7 effective SEO strategies for small businesses 2021 that apply to any industry.

The higher the position of your site in the search results, the faster your business will develop. You cannot achieve everything overnight. But, putting into practice the 7 tips below, you can achieve significant results.

1. SIGN UP WITH GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

Have you already created your account in Google My Business and Yandex.Directory? If not, then what are you waiting for? Create an account now – it’s completely free!

According to a 2015 study by Think With Google, nearly a third of queries made from mobile devices are queries based on the user’s current location (for example, “coffee shop near me”). But this data refers to 2015. User behavior changes dynamically from time to time. The number of similar searches without the words “near me” has increased by 150% over the past two years. Google and Yandex prioritizes displayed search results based on user intent. For example, results based on the user’s current position are considered the most relevant. For this reason, having an account in Google My Business and Yandex.Directory is an integral part of a successful local SEO.

First of all, create a free profile and enter the data: your company’s phone number, address, opening and closing times (business hours), other information that may be useful to users. This data will appear in Google Map search results.

Also Read : How Does Seo Help Improve Your Brand Awarness?

One of the key benefits of Google My Business is the ability to share experiences (leave reviews) using a dedicated tool. Each new review will be notified by a letter to your e-mail. You can respond to any feedback, start a dialogue with the user. This is a great way to turn a “reviewer” into a regular customer.

The second important feature of Google My Business and Yandex.Directory is the presence of a section with questions and answers. According to research, most people do not want to call company representatives, preferring to conduct a dialogue using the messaging tools on the site.

After creating an account in the Yandex and Google help systems, add your business data to other local directories: Yelp, TripAdvisor, and others. Thus, you will further expand your audience of potential customers.

2. OPTIMIZE YOUR SITE

Search engine optimization of website pages (SEO) is much more than adding keywords, headline and main content. Your job is to create quality content that includes keywords, LSI words, and other related keywords. The increased concentration of key phrases is more likely to harm your site’s rankings than increase it. Optimize your target keyword phrase in the following sections:

• Title.
• Description.
• Main content.
• Images.

When optimizing your page for location-based searches, add specific terms and names that potential customers can use to find your business. For example, if a user is looking for a Digital Marketing course in Varanasi or the surrounding area, they are more likely to use the search phrase “Varanasi Digital Marketing course” than just “Digital Marketing Course.”

3. OPTIMIZE YOUR SITE’S PERFORMANCE AND MAKE IT MOBILE-COMPATIBLE

Use an original design, attractive fonts and a nice color scheme to make your site look amazing. But, if it loads slowly, you will lose some traffic and rating. Before starting your link building and content development campaigns, do everything you can to ensure that your site is performing at peak performance.

If the site has a good structure and its pages load quickly, search engine robots can quickly crawl and index its pages. Eliminate any technical issues you encounter, such as:

• Duplicate content.
• Duplicate title and description meta tags.
• Incorrect sitemap.
• Broken links.
• Unoptimized images.
• Incorrectly used canonical tags.
• Images are not in the correct format and resolution.

Check your site carefully for additional tools such as SEMRush and others.

4. USE MICRO-MARKUP TO STRUCTURE DATA

Local markup helps search engines to identify individual components of pages, for example:

• Company name.
• The local address of the company.
• Contact phone number.
• Rating of the quality of goods and services provided.
• Working hours and so on.

JSON-LD is the preferred micro-markup format for local SEO. All data is displayed as a substring in the search results. A handy tool that generates micro-markup code is located on the Schema.org website

5. PLACE INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS IN SPECIAL DIRECTORIES AND LOCAL PROFILES

The success of a local business is largely due to the accuracy of the contact information you provide, such as company name, address, phone number. It is imperative to ensure the accuracy and consistency of contact information in all quotes, as they represent online mentions of your business, making it easier to find it. Correct quotes contribute not only to an increase in the rating of your company directories, but also to an increase in the rating of your site as a whole. The best way to create quality quotes is to use a dedicated tool to spread the word about your company.

6. OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE CONTENT

According to Bill Gates, content comes first, and that’s the truth. Content marketing is the best way to grow your company’s potential customer audience. However, not all small business owners have the resources to launch truly effective content marketing campaigns. Therefore, we bring to your attention two important tips for content marketing:

• Give priority to video content. It takes less time to create and promote videos than running a text blog. According to numerous studies, the majority of Internet users prefer video content. By betting on video content, you will satisfy the needs of the majority of your audience.
• Use social media and other popular content distribution channels. If you focus on a single channel of information dissemination, you are unlikely to achieve great success in content marketing and will not be able to significantly expand your audience of users. Use all social platforms to distribute content. By choosing the right channel for disseminating information, you will increase your target audience.

7. GET LINKS FROM REPUTABLE LOCAL ONLINE RESOURCES

Links from reputable web resources can significantly increase your site’s search engine rankings. However, many small business owners neglect this strategy.

For links, look at local bloggers, newspaper sites, event pages, and other resources that contain content relevant to your business.

To collect links, you need to figure out where your competitors are getting them from. Tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs will help you with this.

CONCLUSIONS

Organic traffic is the best way to generate conversions and sales. Use the strategies listed above to boost your site’s search engine rankings and the results won’t be long in coming.

According to experts, by 2040, 95% of all purchases will be made through e-commerce services. Because of this, many small and medium-sized enterprises are already moving their business to the online segment.

Companies hire SEO professionals to get quality content and improve their website’s online visibility. For the effective design of interfaces without errors, it is recommended to contact the best experts in the field of optimization.

WHY IS SEO IMPORTANT?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps to increase traffic. Effective techniques can improve the user experience and usability of your website.

SEO helps to build the trust of your website visitors. When people search for some information and notice an address at the top of the SERP (in the search engine results), they have a feeling of reliability. This is what prompts a person to buy on the site.

WHAT IS SEO AUDIT?

SEO audit is an assessment of various factors that determine the performance of a website. The analysis makes it possible to figure out why your site has a low rating or why it does not fall into the search ranking. In short: you get solutions to improve the functionality of the web resource and increase traffic.

SEO audit is extremely important for understanding the market position. In any online business, this analysis should be done at the project launch stage or at the beginning of a new quarter. Basically, you are figuring out which areas should be improved. All found deficiencies can be eliminated within a certain time.

Let’s take a closer look at what is included in an SEO audit.

TECHNICAL SEO MISTAKES

The first thing to identify is possible technical problems. The technical analysis determines why a resource is down. This is an opportunity to assess two main aspects: availability and indexability.

Accessibility: If a web resource cannot be found by Google and other search engines, you will never attract a large audience of visitors. This indirectly affects the availability of a potential client. Amazon, the e-commerce giant, is working hard to regularly update its content to attract as much traffic as possible.

Accessibility, convenience for guests, and competent search are all equally important.

Indexability: it is necessary to make sure that the pages fall into the search of search robots and are visible to the end-user. To make it easier for Google, Yandex, and other search engines to find your site, work on its accessibility and indexing functions. Web resources that do not meet these features are subject to sanctions. If there are too many pages, the rating drops. Scanners and robots may not even display them.

As a result, you may receive a notification about the reasons for the sanctions in your Webmaster tool account. All you need to do is identify the deficiency, correct, and create a revision request. Any technical mistakes can be easily eliminated by ordering services from the best SEO specialists.

Layout issues

About 61.72% of the population use Chrome as their primary web browser. Another 15.23% use Safari to surf the net, and the rest use Internet Explorer or Opera. The structure of the site layout plays a key role for it to display correctly in these browsers. If the download time exceeds 0.80 seconds, then the probability of bounce increases by 85%.

Bad or outdated visual design, lack of high-quality images and logical structure, hidden details – all this negatively affects the ranking process.

On-page flaws and keyword difficulties

The content of the website must correspond to the products and services offered. Inconsistency between data and text, as well as visual content, will interfere with ranking. Some companies hire bloggers to write copy, but most of the information is just copied. This duplication has a negative impact on ranking statistics.

Also Read: Six Creative Business Promotion Strategies For 2020

Such keywords from different sources knockdown algorithms, and then Google and Yandex recognize only the strongest sources as top-ranked. As a result, SEO suffers greatly for the rest, and impressions to potential users are deteriorating.

Off-page issues

Off-page ranking factors determine how accessible it is, how often people link to your URL in their articles, and whether it’s trustworthy. Both Google and Yandex use several algorithms to learn which URL is linked more and how often it appears in searches.

In 2020, YouTube and Wikipedia appear most frequently in search. So, to join these leaders and ensure consistency in the online marketplace, you should stick to the webmaster guidelines.

You also need to supplement your website or blog with fresh and relevant content to stay popular with readers and bloggers. The growth of interest among users will help to maintain higher positions in the search results.

To test how well your site is performing and whether it helps to increase sales, consider the possibility of an SEO audit today.

It’s not enough just to create a website. You have to promote it in the search engine to attract new visitors and increase sales. A website without search engine optimization is like a store in a remote area where no one wants to shop. It is not for nothing that they say that the best way to keep a secret so that no one knows about it is to tell about it on the second page of Google search results. Statistically, the top-most ranking in it attracts 32.5% of organic traffic, followed by 17.6%, and the seventh only 3.5%. With this in mind, on the second page of search results, you can expect to attract no more than 1% of visitors from total traffic. If your site appears only on the third page and further, it can be said to be dead.

Search engine optimization helps improve all metrics including traffic, sales, and brand awareness. For example, if you own a tire brand in Dubai or an SEO firm from Jeddah and rank first for the keywords “Tires in Dubai” or “SEO Jeddah”, then you will be able to attract the most organic traffic possible and also have the highest conversions. and improve brand awareness. A well-promoted brand is remembered by potential customers. They start to believe that you are the best company in your field and therefore can be trusted. This is why brand awareness has become synonymous with search engine optimization.

HOW EXACTLY SEO CAN HELP BUILD BRAND AWARENESS

A well-designed SEO campaign will play a huge role in boosting brand awareness. The search engine optimization techniques listed below can make your brand famous around the world.

1. Link building

Link building is an integral part of SEO and a proven way to increase brand awareness. Quality backlinks affect search engine rankings, which in turn affects visibility. They also promote your brand to site visitors where backlinks are posted. For example, a post with a link to your site in a reputable publication will not only raise your rankings but also increase brand awareness among the thousands of daily users of these portals.

2. Referral program

Referrals can be a good way to get new leads. People are ready to talk about the things they have acquired and the new places they have visited. To promote your business, you can use customers who have already tried your product. Encourage them by offering discount coupons in exchange for referrals. This will reduce marketing costs. This strategy is used by large companies like PayPal, Dropbox, and Uber, which only underlines its importance.

Also Read: How to create a brand: 5 steps for beginners

3. Guest posting

There is no denying the fact that content plays a key role in SEO. Placing great posts mentioning your brand on other blogs with similar topics is a good way to reach new audiences. This is a great opportunity to target online readers. If the content is educational, then consumers will begin to recognize your brand.

4. Infographics

Some netizens prefer to rely on images and graphics instead of reading blogs. Infographics are a colorful presentation of information that can be used to grab the attention of customers. Its advantage is that it is often shared on the Internet. If your infographic offers interesting and reliable statistics and is also provided with beautiful pictures, then it will quickly go viral.

5. Investment in PPC

Pay per click (PPC) is a great ad model that can be used to drive online leads. Even if customers don’t click on your ads, they will see your brand in search results. Reminding customers of your brand over and over again on different platforms can help increase brand awareness. All major companies invest in PPC.

6. Social media contests

It’s not enough just to have social media accounts. They need to be proactive and one way to do this is by running contests. Ask your followers to share specific links to promote your brand and offer a prize to the people with the most likes or comments.

7. Cooperation with regional partners

Start your journey to the very top right from where you are now. Form partnerships with local entrepreneurs (this is especially beneficial for regional businesses) and sponsor seminars, festivals and charities. This is the most effective way to become a leader in the local market.

8. Hire influencers

Influencers are people who are popular on the web and can greatly help in promotion. Since they already have a huge following and are trusted by their words, you can increase the popularity of your brand overnight if they advertise you. You can even partner with them.

OUTPUT

SEO is extremely important for brand awareness. A huge number of promotion methods are connected with it in one way or another. The above methods are not only hidden but also easy to implement – this is exactly what is needed to take a brand to the next level.