When you are handholding your young startup as it takes its baby steps towards adolescence, it becomes difficult to handle all operational aspects. One critical issue that needs your attention is the security of the website and IT systems. While most small businesses do neglect this aspect, studies show that small businesses bear the brunt of these attacks. Mostly because they are unprepared against such attacks. A 2019 Ponemon report on the status of cybersecurity with small businesses showed that only 30% of the sample companies stated that they have adequate security postures against cyber threats. Understand how a secure website helps It always helps a startup if the founders understand the problem at hand. Similarly, it also helps if they are aware of the dangers of a potential data breach and the methods that can be deployed to prevent this from happening. Once you have an inkling about the issue at hand, do formalise a plan to address this issue. Devise a formidable secur...
Whenever we decide to buy a product or utilise a service, we turn to the internet and search online. Statistics suggest that over a billion searches are done every day. Again, the first five organic results are known to share 67.60% of all the clicks between themselves. SEO requires a sincere and ongoing effort from a dedicated team to see the rankings move up or at least hold on to the rankings on the first page.
There are almost a thousand such updates to Google’s
algorithms every year, and some of them make a startling change to search
rankings. You must ensure that the search rankings of your website remains
stable and take the necessary steps towards the same. We will discuss some of the smart SEO solutions for small business.
Keyword Research
If you are new to the SEO world, you need to start with
keyword research and subsequent finalisation of the keywords. There are various
tools, including free ones like the Google Keyword Planner, that can help you. Having
the keywords in the right places is essential rather than stuffing them all
over the content. Having long tail keywords also helps in ranking for keywords
with low competition.
Create gripping content
Upon finalising the keywords, your bloggers need to write
enticing content that will bring more visitors to your website. Focus on how
the content will benefit the visitors. You need to add relevant images to your
content and tag with relevant keywords.
Search engines dislike duplicate content, and you must
ensure there isn't any on your site. If there are such pages, ensure you
utilise the canonicalization feature to prevent such duplication. Also, check
for any broken links and use the 404 page to tell visitors that the content is
no longer available politely.
On-page optimisation
Once the content is finished, move on to optimising the
webpage for search results. It starts with the page URL that needs to describe
the content of the page. The page title and meta tags need to be optimised to
pull more visitors. The title tag and the meta description are what will draw
the visitor to your website and must be written with great effort. Do remember
to insert the keywords at relevant places to enhance your SEO. WordPress users
can take advantage of various plug-ins like Yoast for help in on-page
optimisation.
Technical SEO
Your site needs to be responsive and mobile-friendly.
Moreover, do optimise for a robots.txt and an XML sitemap and submit them to
the search engine Webmaster. Structured data is equally important to improve
search rankings as it provides information to search engines about the context
of your webpage. The website must have an SSL/ TLS certificate to be secure as
the non-HTTPS website are penalised during search rankings.
Off-page optimisation
Engaging in backlinks is one of the ways to improve your
search engine ranks. It is essential to engage in backlinks from a website with
high domain authority. Your site should not have spammy and irrelevant links.
The latest updates from Google prevent websites from engaging in paid links and
having backlinks through link farms. Backlinks can be gained through high-quality
content, guest blogging and influencer marketing.
Engage in social signals
When engaging in SEO services for small business, do
remember to include social media as a significant part of your SEO strategy. While
there are different schools of thought about social signals, they do affect
your rankings. You have created gripping content, but you need to market it
too. Adding share buttons on the post will help to make it visible. The
visitors need to be encouraged to share the posts to their social media pages.
Periodic website audits
You must undertake periodic audits of your website to help
you understand where you stand with respect to the industry best practices. You
may either depute an SEO consultant or get it done online. To reduce the time for
online search, we have collated a few of the better websites for you.
Screaming Frog: It is a desktop application that crawls your
website and provides insights about any SEO problems. It has over thirty
parameters, like response times, meta tags, security, anchor text, etc.
SE Ranking: It can provide the details of SEO errors on the
site and create separate tasks for content writers, web designers and
developers. It crawls based on seventy parameters.
Marketing Grader: It was founded by Hubspot and is easy to
use. It provides a holistic view covering your blogs, social media, a lead
generation apart from giving an SEO report.
Use data-driven tools
Some of the SEO companies for small business are:
SEMrush: It is an all-in-one product that covers numerous
SEO features. You can do an audit of the website and undertake keyword research
too.
AHREFS: It helps you to track competitors and do other SEO
related activities like keyword research, backlink analysis and rank tracking.
It also does rank tracking.
MOZ: You can do site audits and continuous SEO monitoring
using this tool. It also tracks your rank across multiple search engines,
backlink analysis and keyword research.
Use web analytics
Once you have set your SEO goals, you need to test them
periodically. It will help you make suitable changes in the overall SEO
strategy allowing you to make informed decisions. Some of the analytics tools
you can use are:
Google Analytics: It is a free analytics tool that gives you
insights about the demographics of visitors to your site. Including this tool
in the scheme of SEO for small business is a necessity.
Crazy Egg: You can build heat maps and track where on your
website, the visitors are clicking and how they navigate away from the site.
Kissmetrics: It helps to track the movements of visitors
throughout your site and see the changes in their behaviour and identify the
recent referrers.
Undertake competitive analysis
Are your competitors outranking you? Snoop on your
competitors to gather SEO ideas using these tools:
Spyfu: You can analyse and download the most profitable
keywords – organic and paid.
Rank Signals: It helps you find the backlinks and the
sources of the traffic to your competition. You also get to know the blogging
frequency of the targeted websites.
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