SEO Guide for SMEs and SMIs: How to Increase Web Traffic (2024)

1. What does SEO really mean?

Search engine optimization (SEO) - a term that is used casually in marketing meetings and brainstorming sessions.

Search engine optimization is simply the process used to drive better and more traffic to your website using search engines. More specifically, it's the process of increasing organic traffic or unpaid website traffic, as opposed to traffic generated by paid online ads.

An important aspect to remember is that the SEO process is almost entirely done for search engines. It's about making improvements to your website and the way your customer experience is designed, in order to improve performance in search engine results.

Search engines favor certain qualities in content to assess its relevance and importance for its users. SEO is a way of ensuring that search engines are able to recognize the credibility of your website and have relevant information for search queries.

2. Why should you invest in SEO as a small business?

SEO has something to offer organizations of all types — big and small.

That said, small businesses generally struggle to level the playing field online as well as offline. SEO can be that factor that allows them to get ahead of existing and established competitors in the sector.

Here are some of the top reasons why small businesses should invest in SEO:

Reach more customers and drive growth

Ask any business owner why they invested in a website, and they'll say it's to reach more customers. But for smaller businesses, investing in a website would not be viable if it was guaranteed to produce the desired results. For small businesses, it's about reaching more customers and boosting their current growth rate.

A website that is optimized for SEO allows you to double the number of customers you might otherwise attract. Furthermore, the cost-effectiveness of SEO makes it an excellent strategy for small businesses, especially considering that it brings highly targeted traffic to your website. These factors make SEO a very effective marketing strategy.

And of course, as you may already know, the better the marketing strategy, the better the chances of small businesses growing.

Improves brand recognition

Another factor that works in favor of SEO is the fact that it can improve your website's search engine rankings. This is very important because by appearing on the first page of the SERPs, you greatly improve the chances of your brand being noticed by potential customers.

Also, it will allow your brand to stand out from those that don't make it to the first page. After all, only 0.78% of customers actually consult and click on the results of the second page of the SERPs.

In addition, did you know that it is necessary nearly 5 to 7 impressions for people to actually remember a brand? Small businesses that want to optimize brand recognition should therefore invest in search engine optimization and try to achieve better search engine rankings.

Help understand your customers

Understanding customers can help you improve the customer experience on your website, which can generate 5.7 times more revenue only brands that are lagging behind in this aspect.

Customers leave behind a record of their buying decision process when they search on Google. By analyzing the quality and quantity of consumer searches, businesses can better understand consumer intent and search intentions.

SEO can also help you understand the specific types of content that your potential customers are likely to use. Additionally, by better understanding the intent of your consumers, you can find better ways to engage and target them. By monitoring the type of actions they take or not take on your SERPs, you can optimize the performance of your website.

Reduces advertising expenses

For businesses, every cent counts, especially if it's a small business trying to find its place. At this stage, incurring heavy advertising expenses can be tedious and, in some cases, not even financially viable. In fact, 70% of marketers consider SEO to be a much more effective strategy than PPC.w advertising

In addition, the Google algorithm relies heavily on the relevance of your content to user search queries. Add to that the fact that the cost of researching and writing content is much lower than that of ads — online and offline. There may be a small initial investment in case you decide to take the help of an SEO freelancer on Fiverr able to secure this place for you, but at the end of the day, you won't spend anything close to what it costs to advertise.

A better return on investment in the long term

SEO can be a great strategy for attracting customers to your website and offers a consistent return on investment over a period of time. This factor sets SEO apart from all other marketing approaches.

SEO is a preferred marketing strategy, mainly because even a one-time investment and an effective strategy can continue to deliver exponential growth over the long term.

3. How do you formulate an SEO strategy for your small business?

Developing an SEO strategy is not that complicated, as long as you have determined all the necessary factors. To boost your website's SEO performance, you'll need to consider a combination of parameters within your website and your content on other platforms.

While SEO can require you to change the content and elements of your website, it can also require you to have the right tools to optimize and monitor your strategy. There are more than 1.86 billion websites active on the web in 2021. So if you don't have a website yet, it's high time to create one. After all, it's the first step in setting up your online presence.

Once your website is ready and online, you can proceed to implement the most essential tools that are likely to shape your SEO journey:

Google Analytics

The next step is to set up your account Google Analytics. Google Analytics is the holy grail of your SEO strategy because it will provide you with a comprehensive overview of your website's performance in terms of traffic, customer engagement, and conversions. Setting up your Google Analytics account is pretty easy. All you need to do is fill in the necessary information, provide your professional email address (Gmail) and link it to your website to start generating information.

Google Search Console

The next thing you need to do before optimizing your SEO performance is to set up your Google Search Console (GSC) - one of the most powerful SEO tools. With this tool, you can optimize your content and website performance issues based on search analytics.

If you already have a Google account, the setup can be done in a matter of minutes. You need to register on the website, add your website, and complete a verification process to get started. Once verified, simply submit your sitemap to GSC, so Google can crawl and index your website.

Google Business Profile

Once you've successfully set up your Google Analytics and Google Search Console account, the next thing you need to do is set up your listing Google Business Profile. Listing your business on Google Business Profile makes it easier for potential customers to find and get information about your business.

The procedure for creating a Google Business Profile is also fairly simple in most cases. All you need to do is fill in your business information on the Google Business Profile page, including your business address and contact information.

Once this is done, you can proceed to the verification process, during which you will receive a code from Google for your business address by mail. Once you have added this code to your file, your account will be verified and operational.

Google Tag Manager

The next step is to set up a tag management system where you can add code snippets (also known as tags) to your website or mobile application.

Once you set up these tags with Google Tag Manager, you can optimize your website based on these tags. You can define triggers associated with tags to take specific actions in response to certain events.

On-Page SEO Tips

On-site SEO is the process of optimizing and updating the website and its content for users and search engines. If you are wondering if these techniques are still effective, you should know that Google places great importance on matching website keywords with user search queries. So optimizing your On-Page content is always a good idea!

On-Page SEO allows search engines to align user search queries with the content of your website. In addition to the content, Google also analyzes the technical elements of the website in order to match customer search queries with the content of the site. Close to 57% of marketers state that optimizing on-page content is the most effective SEO strategy for their business.

With On-Page SEO, you can expect to get:

• Increase in online traffic and leads
• Measuring the performance and success of your campaign
• Increases the chances of growth at an early stage

That being said, for on-page SEO to be effective for your small business, you need to take a comprehensive approach to the strategy.

Start with keyword research

One of the best ways to understand what the best keywords are for your website is to conduct thorough research on your SERP competitors. Analyze your competitors' websites to better understand what keywords they integrated and how they did it.

Additionally, ensure that the keywords you select are correct and updated based on traffic and competition. Additionally, these keywords should be relevant phrases that can bring a lot of online traffic to your website.

You can also use keyword research tools to analyze traffic and rankings for specific keywords. These tools will also help you produce keyword lists per page that will allow you to find the most effective keywords for each page on your website.

Plan your web pages: Design and content

Creating a comprehensive site plan of web pages isn't very difficult, but creating your brand identity through the design and content of those pages is the hardest part. Ensuring that content is relevant and fits into a consistent storytelling is critical when it comes to creating web pages on your brand site.

Identify your target audience and ensure that your content is relevant to them. It's important to not use heavy jargon in your content so that customers from all walks of life can understand it the same way. When creating content, it is also important to ensure that the company first sets a goal to be achieved.

Blogging is also an excellent way to establish your credibility with your customers. You can work to build a loyal and highly engaged reader base by organizing your content around your target audience. In addition, the design of the site should be given as much importance as the quality of the content.

You should therefore organize the hierarchy and interconnection of the pages in order to make the site experience richer and easier for the target audience.

Optimize meta tags

Meta tags are often ignored or overlooked because they're considered too technical, but in reality, they're one of the most fundamental and crucial elements to include in optimizing your website for SEO. Metatags are important for organic SEO because Google algorithms give them significant weight.

Of all the meta tags, only the title and meta description tags are visible to users. However, from a general perspective, meta tags strongly influence how your site and web pages appear in SERPs. More importantly, meta tags and guidelines are pieces of code that tell search engines how to explore certain sites or web pages.

Additionally, if you think you have multiple web pages on your website with duplicate content, canonicalization is the process of designating a web page as the one that should be crawled by the search engine.

The following best practices should be followed when defining metatags:

• Meta descriptions should be limited to less than 155 characters.
• The meta description should be voice-active and usable.
• The alternative text in the image should describe it as accurately as possible.
• Image alternative text should be short

Optimize header tags

Header tags can essentially define the visibility of your web pages and website on the search engine. Although they are part of your website's technical SEO, they are one of the easiest elements to optimize and improve your SEO performance.

Defining and optimizing header tags (H1) is very important because they allow the search engine to know what your page is about. In addition, they allow your web browser to know how to display your content in a structured way. On the other hand, page titles are displayed in SERPs and help search engines index your page properly.

Here are some of the best practices you should follow for titles:

• Headings should be used hierarchically and define the structure of the content.
• Follow your H1 with other title tags like H2, H3, H4, etc.
• Naturally include a keyword in the title to improve readability.
• The title tag should be limited to 66 characters
• Title tags should contain a good keyword.

Optimize images

Images serve multiple purposes on your website, as you may already know. Not only do they improve the aesthetics of your site, but they also guide site visitors through the content. When used and placed effectively, images can make content, even long and technical, more digestible and engaging.

First of all, it's always best to use original images rather than stock images or images from other sources. Second, the right supporting text in the image can help you index the image for the right keywords.

It is important to define the images in the correct file format and to choose the right file name for the images. Also, it's a good idea to resize your images according to how you want them to be displayed on the website.

Here are some of the best practices you should follow to optimize your images for SEO:

• Reduce the file size so that the image does not become cumbersome for your website
• The file name should reflect the subject of the image.
• Use JPEG for larger images, PNG to preserve image background transparency, and SVG for logos and icons.
• Make sure the images you add are responsive.

Additionally, there are plenty of tools that can help you optimize images for your website.

Optimize the structure of the URL

URLs are important because they indicate the unique address at which any resource on the web is located. But URLs do much more than let users know your website address, they can also help you rank higher and contribute to the user experience.

When defining your website's URL structure, following some of these predefined best practices can improve their effectiveness:

• URLs should be kept concise, but they should be final.
• Use words that are relevant and compelling to help users engage with the website.
• Use hyphens to separate words in the URL.
• Be careful when you mention subdomains so that your domain authority is not divided.
• Use lowercase letters to define the URL to maintain consistency.

Optimize link structure

The link structure works very much like the URL structure. While the latter tells the search engine what the content of a specific page is about, internal links complement it.

Links are generally of three types: internal links, external links, and backlinks.

Consistent link optimization can help you eliminate duplicate content from your website to a large extent. One of the crucial steps in optimizing your website link structure is linking pages on your site with internal links and adding external links to establish the credibility and authority of your content.

Here are some of the best practices you can follow to implement link structures:

• Add links that are contextual to the content of the page
• Link the category page to all subcategory pages to optimize the use of link juice.
• Choose a link hierarchy for your website and follow it throughout the site.
• Use SEO software or ask for help from an SEO freelancer on Fiverr to optimize the link structure of the website.

Local SEO tips

Local SEO is extremely important for businesses of all kinds. After all, 78% of local searches are likely to result in a purchase - online or offline in a store. In addition, 46% of all searches indicate local intent.

There are many reasons for small businesses to invest in local SEO:

• It helps you to compete with locally based businesses
• It can benefit even businesses that don't have a solid website.
• It's one of the highest conversion levels among local marketing channels.
• It increases your online visibility with customers in your region.

For your business to really benefit from local SEO, it's important to create high-quality local content. It's also helpful if your content strategy and design are more mobile-oriented. This is all the more important as the number of mobile phone users continues to grow and 30% of mobile searches are linked to places.

When trying to manage your local visibility, Google Business Profile can be a very useful tool. Your GMB listing can help you drive traffic to your website and receive calls that are almost guaranteed to convert. If your business is listed on Google Maps, chances are you just need to report your business account on Google Business Profile.

By doing this and optimizing the content of your listing to provide useful information that customers will use to reach your business, you can improve your local SEO.

Acquiring local citations is another great way for websites to establish credibility and be accessible to their customers. A local citation is essentially a mention of your business name and contact information. As a business, you will need to ensure that all relevant information about your business is properly filled in. Here is an example:

Lucio Pizzeria is a small pizzeria located in Darlinghurst, New South Wales, Australia. If someone is looking for pizza in this city, they are likely to come across this informative Yelp page, which has all the information a customer may need to access the business. So it can allow users to discover your business and interact with you.

Encourage reviews and optimize responses

When strengthening your local SEO, it's also a good idea to encourage customers to post reviews on public directories and your Google listing. According to Trust Pilot, nearly 9 out of 10 customers rely on online reviews before making a purchase. With this in mind, the higher the number of reviews, the more likely customers are to want to do business with your business.

Off-page SEO Tips

Also known as offsite SEO, off-page SEO refers to various actions that you can take elsewhere than on your website in an effort to improve your SERP rankings and performance. Some of the actions that can help you in this endeavor include link building, influencer marketing, and content marketing, among several others.

We're going to go deeper into the process of running these activities and strengthen your Off-Page SEO in a moment. But first, let's look at some of the main benefits of this approach:

• Increase online visibility
• Increase your performance on SERPs
• Improve the ranking of your site and web pages
• Increase traffic to your website

Now that you know some of the main benefits of off-site SEO, here are a few ways to boost your off-site SEO strategy.

Acquiring backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most effective ways to boost the credibility and trustworthiness of your website. Pages that have a high number of backlinks are more likely to rank higher in search engines and attract more visitors. Additionally, backlinks act like votes, with each vote adding more credibility to your content.

To understand the exact impact of backlinks, consider the fact that the top result in Google's SERPs has 3.8 times more links than the lower results.

But the most important parameter for backlinks is quality. A high quality back link can be much more powerful than several low quality links. To do this, you need to check the domain authority of the website where you post your content. You should actively try to publish your content on websites with higher domain authority, as these sites may pass on some of their authority to yours.

Additionally, the anchor text that you link to on these sites should include a target keyword. It's even more important to ensure that the website you're using to publish your content has a thematic link to yours.

Maintaining a strong presence on social networks

We've already established the importance of links and how much they contribute to a website's overall performance and search engine rankings. Social media platforms are one of the ways you can create solid backlinks for your website on a regular basis.

Attention: social networks are not considered part of the classic SEO strategy.

But when it comes to creating connections, the power of social media cannot be ignored. In 2021, there will be more than 3.78 billionactive users of social networks around the world. It goes without saying that your customers - regardless of your industry - are present on at least one social media platform.

While traditional and established social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter, remain excellent means of communication, LinkedIn is an excellent platform to increase your inbound traffic if you are talking to B2B customers.

Technical SEO tips

Another area you can focus on to improve your SEO performance is technical SEO. Technical SEO refers to the actions you take on the server and the background of the website to develop a consistent positive performance on the SERPs. In essence, technical SEO is about making sure your backend is changed in a way that makes it easier for Google to crawl and index your site.

Some of the main benefits of working on your technical SEO include the following:

• Your website will load quickly, improving the user experience.
• Your website becomes easy for users to navigate and use.
• Search engines can quickly crawl, index, and rank your website.
• You will remove items that may hinder the overall performance of your website.
• You can optimize how your web pages will be displayed on the search engine.

With benefits like these, you can be confident that your website will provide a great user experience, which is undoubtedly one of the most important factors in achieving higher conversion rates.

Opt for a user-friendly website architecture

The architecture of the site is literally what it looks like. This is the hierarchical structure that you have assigned to your website and how your web pages are linked according to that structure. Creating a site architecture that is easy to navigate will help users and search engines better engage with it.

A good site structure can make your website user-friendly, increase backlinks, and be indexed more quickly. The architecture of a website can be classified into two main categories:

Flat architecture

Flat architecture refers to a website structure that allows access to the information users need in three clicks or less. Such a structure makes it possible to maintain the uniformity of the link juice flow and to improve the user experience. In such a structure, all web pages are well classified and have the same authority.
Here is a great example of a flat site architecture:

MAWO is the perfect example of how even e-commerce stores can successfully implement a flat site architecture and improve their user experience.

Deep architecture

Deep architecture, as you might have already guessed, refers to site structures that require more than three clicks from users to reach the information they need. The main disadvantage of this structure is that important pages can often be buried, and the deepest pages can hardly receive link juice. This means, of course, that navigating the site will also be quite tricky.

Large websites that have lots of defined categories and subcategories frequently have a deep site architecture. This is generally the case with e-commerce sites.

Here is an example of a deep site architecture:

Westmead Hospital, one of Australia's largest hospitals, has a deep site architecture. Watch what happens when you click on one of the options in the main menu. Such a long list can often be confusing for users. Some of the options in the dropdown menu can just as easily be represented by icons or options on the home page for easy navigation.

In big websites like this one, it's not impossible to have a deep site architecture. This is where Ariadne's sons can come in handy. Breadcrumbs refer to a series of links mentioned on the web page, in order to let the user know which page they are on and to facilitate navigation between category pages.

If you have too much content on a single page on your website, pagination is another option you can consider. With this option, you can provide users with additional navigation options, including adding buttons to scroll through pages or splitting content into multiple pages.

Add a Sitemap and a Robots.txt file to your site

Adding a robots.txt file is another important step you can take to make it easier for robots to access and index your website. The robots.txt file contains a set of instructions for robots that crawl your website. With this.txt file, you can manage robot activities and ensure that your server is not overloaded.

The site map, which describes the hierarchical structure of your site, should be added to the robots.txt file in order to guide crawlers on the architecture of your site. This will give search engines the information they need to explore your site.

Check the indexing and SEO of your website.

To ensure that your technical SEO efforts are up to par, one of the best things you can do is to constantly monitor if you're facing indexing or crawling issues. If one of your pages isn't crawled and indexed, it's a good idea to fix the issue as soon as possible so that the page's ranking doesn't suffer.

It's easy to check if a page is facing such issues using the Search Console or any other SEO tool. If a page isn't crawled, the search engine won't index it, which will prevent it from appearing in the SERPs.

Make sure your site is optimized for mobile

In 2021, more than 50% website visitors have accessed it from a mobile phone. This basically means that half of your customers are likely to access your website via their mobile devices, and it would be a shame not to optimize it for them.

Ensuring that your website is optimized for mobile phones is critical to the success of your technical SEO efforts. Optimizing the elements on your website, including the logos, icons, and images that you use, is very helpful. These elements can often be cumbersome, and optimizing them can speed up your website.

The other, more technical, solution is to implement accelerated mobile pages (AMP). The AMP project by Google was designed taking into account the speed at which customers expect to receive content. Essentially, it strips down your entire website and all of its elements and prioritizes the delivery of your content.

At its core, AMP is an HTML page that adds some limitations on what type of content to display first. This allows for super fast load times, making your website instantly accessible. Numerous websites have reported massive revenue growth and improved user experience through the use of AMP.

So, if slow load times are a persistent problem for you, give it a try and be sure to test the results before implementation. You can also ask for help from an SEO freelancer on Fiverr to make sure everything is done properly.

Increase the speed of your site

Today, speed is synonymous with high performance. Not only do website visitors expect their experience to be instant, but they also expect businesses to constantly optimize areas where the experience is poorer.

It all starts with accelerating site and page load times. Also, it's not just about the user experience, a slow website can cost you revenue. In fact, for most websites, the number of page views can decrease by 11%, and your conversion rates can drop by 7%.

Some of the most effective ways to increase your website speed include the following:

• Compress and resize images and videos on your website
• Minimize the use of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML
• Implement caching
• Work to improve server response time

Caching is one of the most effective ways to increase the speed of your website without having to sacrifice elements or anything important in the process. Contrary to popular belief, it does not speed up a slow website, but reduces the time it takes for the server to load your site.

Offer a secure browsing experience to your visitors

One of the most important parameters that you will need to take into account when managing a website is to ensure the safety of your visitors. Not only does security improve the customer experience and engagement on your website, but it is also, in its most basic form, a necessity for increasing traffic.

First of all, if you haven't already done so, you should use Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) for your website. This essentially means that the communication between the web browser and your website will be fully encrypted and therefore much more secure. It also guarantees the integrity of your website's data.

Also, be wary of phishing attacks and take steps to prevent them from the start. Phishing is the act of tricking customers or visitors into entering their personal information using a fake email or website. It is one of the most significant cyber threats and can be avoided by constantly monitoring and analyzing your web traffic. It would also be a good idea to make your employees aware of these attacks and reward them for proactively identifying and reporting these vulnerabilities.

When running a small business, exploiting even the smallest of your vulnerabilities can be very expensive. So one of the basic steps you need to take is to secure your administration pages. Set up strong security for these pages by training your admin team to constantly update passwords and stay on the lookout for vulnerabilities.

Fix broken links

Broken links can seriously disrupt the user experience and lead customers to dead ends in their browsing journey. If left unaddressed, these disruptions may indicate to the search engine that users could not find the information they were looking for, and that the time spent on the site has therefore been shortened.

To avoid this, check frequently to see if any of your links have typos and if they work properly. Set up redirects in case the page to which a link points no longer exists.

If you can't fix a specific link, rather than letting it exist on the web, be proactive by removing it.

Customize, delete, or redirect 404 pages

Like other aspects of Technical SEO that we've covered so far, one of the best ways to deal with a 404 error page is also to monitor it regularly. When a user clicks on a URL and the page corresponding to that link no longer exists, your website should ideally return a 404 error. It's necessary but, of course, it doesn't improve the user experience much.

To prevent the 404 error from impairing the experience you're trying to provide, consider setting up a 301 redirect that tells the browser that content has been moved to a different URL. You can thus consider fixing the specific backlinks that return the error in order to maintain the authority of the page.

Use structured data

Structured data is used to guide search engines about how content should be displayed. They are especially useful when creating Rich Snippets, AMPs, and knowledge graphs. Also known as Schema Markup, structured data is considered to be the language of search engines.

While it's not yet a ranking factor, Google strongly recommends that brands use it, as it can have a significant impact on website rankings in SERPs. The format used is JSON-LD, which is not intended to be read by humans and is only readable by search engines.

Schema.org, a community created by the world's most powerful search engines, now organizes schema vocabularies containing the standard markup for structured data on the Web. They are essentially pieces of code that you can integrate directly into your web page depending on its nature.

It may seem technical at the moment, but once you get the hang of it, you can quite easily implement very beneficial features such as “People Also Ask” and “Frequently Asked Questions” to increase your visibility in the SERPs.

Use a CDN to avoid server overload

You can also make your website more responsive by improving its design and setting up a content delivery network (CDN). The CDN is essentially a group of servers located in different locations where you can send all of your content so that it is displayed transparently on customer browsers.

You can avoid overloading a single server by using the CDN, as it will distribute your content across multiple servers using load balancing. By using the CDN, you can get a plethora of benefits such as:

• Better respond to traffic spikes
• Ensure greater user satisfaction by improving the speed of your website
• Faster content delivery and increased efficiency, especially for e-commerce sites.
• Reduced bandwidth consumption and decreased latency.

By now, you should have a detailed understanding of how website SEO works and what steps you can take to improve your SERP rankings. Armed with this knowledge, we're now going to explore the use and application of one of the most important tools you'll ever use for your business — the Google Business Profile.

4. Google My Business: A Brief Overview

So, if you're targeting local customers, we highly recommend creating a Google business profile page. Why? Because a typical business registers every month at least 59 shares on his Google Business Profile page.

To understand the enthusiasm around Google Business Profile, you need to know that it is a gateway that allows your business to have a strong presence in other essential applications such as Google Maps and Google Reviews.

And let's be honest: as a small business, these tools can make a big difference in your revenue and performance.

When users enter search queries that indicate they are looking for a product or service near them, they are very close to the act of buying. These leads can easily be converted into customers if targeted at the right time. That's where the Google Business Profile can help.

So, if you haven't claimed your account yet, now is the time to do it and set it up.

Once you're done, read on to learn more about the specific attributes and characteristics you need to know while optimizing your GMB list.

Key attributes

Some of the main fields that you should consider filling out when optimizing your GMB list are as follows:

Pictures

Photos are a great way to establish the credibility of your brand and website. By presenting photos, you can provide an overview of your business and all that it has to offer potential customers. You can add a profile photo and a cover photo, as well as several other images. If you want to go further, consider uploading videos to increase variety and drive engagement through your ad.

Adress

Be sure to add your business address to your GMB listing so that customers who want to visit you can easily access it. If you operate across multiple sites, you can also add all of the sites to the “Manage Sites” tab on the Google Business Profile dashboard.
The best part is that each site will be associated with a separate list, allowing customers to rate their experience based on the branch they visit.

Contact information

You should also add your contact information, such as your phone number and email address, so that customers can easily reach you on their preferred communication channel.

Opening hours

Add your business hours to the list of your business's physical location.

Web site

You should definitely include your website URL, as the GMB list is known to generate a significant amount of website traffic for businesses - small and large.

Other information

Outside of these fields, you can enter:

• Health and safety measures
• Other platforms to contact you
• Brief description of your business

Once you've completed all fields and defined all attributes, your complete listing will be displayed with an option for customers to get their questions answered and to post reviews.

A comprehensive list can serve as a business card, as well as an argument if created effectively and can give you detailed information about your performance in the SERPs.

Here is an example of a complete profile sheet Google My Business :

Once your list is live and updated, you can also post status updates frequently to let your customers know important information about your business.

These can be event announcements, limited offers and discounts, or information and updates about your services and activities.

You should also regularly monitor the search results provided by Google Business Profile to understand what type of impressions your listing produces and how it contributes to the growth of your business.

5. How do you measure the effectiveness of your SEO strategy?

Now that you've defined your SEO strategy and everything you need to consider, the next step is to measure how effective these strategies are for your business.

Let's look at some of the tools that can help you do that:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is perhaps the most popular and well-liked tool when it comes to monitoring and tracking website performance. In addition to helping you monitor your online traffic, it can also help you get an overview of the performance of your social media applications and videos for your business.

You can also gain insights into which keywords and landing pages are performing best for your business and effectively manage your PPC advertising spend. Differentiate between organic and non-organic visitors to your website and target your SEO efforts in a more optimized way.

The best part is that you can get a detailed overview of your On-Page, Off-Page, local, and technical SEO, all in one dashboard.

Google Business Profile Analytics

If you have a Google Business Profile account, you can see performance information on the dashboard as well as using Google Maps. You might be wondering how GMB analytics is different from Google Analytics. The answer is simple: GA monitors your SEO traffic, while GMB monitors the traffic on your listing.

To get an overall picture of the effectiveness of your SEO strategy, you should implement a combination of both.

You will be able to track the following parameters:

• Users who viewed your profile
• Search traffic
• Management inquiries
• Messages
• Clicks on the website
• Total interactions
• Appeals

Armed with this information, you can manage and optimize your SEO according to your needs.

Ahrefs

Presented as an all-in-one tool set, Ahrefs is preferred by many SEOs for its user-friendly interface and full range of features. Ahrefs comes with a range of tools that can be used to optimize different aspects of your SEO strategy:

• Site Audit: Optimize your website by using information about specific areas to improve on your website.
• Site Explorer: Analyze what your competitors are doing in terms of SEO strategy and what works well for them.
• Content Explorer: Get insights into the top-performing content in your industry and improve your content strategy accordingly.
• Keyword Explorer: Get insights into how certain keywords are performing and what your customers are looking for.
• Rank Tracker: Watch your search engine rankings and know who is competing with you for the top spot.

With these tools, you can be confident that your SEO strategy will be powerful and driven by data-driven insights. If you want to use a single tool to provide you with all the data you need to implement a powerful SEO strategy, Ahrefs is a great option.

Moz

Moz is presented as a comprehensive SEO solution for businesses of all sizes and types and is a really popular tool among small businesses. It has a plethora of easy-to-use tools and learning materials that can train and drive small business results.

Moz offers a suite of paid tools for businesses such as: Moz Pro, Moz Local, Mozscape API, and STAT. In addition to that, it offers a wide range of free SEO tools such as:

• Link Explorer: Get information about any site or web page by entering the URL and getting data such as domain authority and page authority.
• Keyword Explorer: Generate lists of successful keywords, conduct keyword research, check keyword difficulty, and get to know what your customers are looking for.
• Domain analysis: Analyze the performance of any domain and gain insights into metrics like domain authority, ranking keywords, and the most important pages.
• mozBar: A Chrome extension that can be installed to get an overview of the SEO performance of any website in the SERPs.

The number of free SEO tools offered by Moz can help small businesses get a head start in their SEO strategy. To add an extra layer of expertise, you can always opt for one of their paid plans.

6. Mistakes to avoid when developing an SEO strategy for your small business

A popular superhero once said, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Now that you know everything there is to know about creating effective SEO strategies and implementing them, you need to make sure you're doing it diligently. Since mistakes can cost your small business a lot of money and time, here are a few mistakes you should avoid:

SEO is only an afterthought

Many businesses believe that core business functions need to be given full attention and resources and that SEO may come later. Big mistake!

If you have created a great website For your business and as you prepare to expand, SEO should be taken into account from the start. In fact, your website can benefit from integrating SEO into the design process, so that search engines can crawl and index your website without a problem.

If your website already exists and you are waiting for the right time to launch an SEO strategy, now is the time. Businesses are already establishing their dominance over SERPs by implementing SEO efforts, so if you want to get ahead of the competition, it's good to start developing an SEO strategy now.

Have unclear end goals

While it's important to start putting in SEO efforts no matter what level you're operating at, it's important to set clear goals before embarking on this path. Otherwise, you risk diverting resources to areas that don't need as much attention to begin with.

With this in mind, define your end goals and make a list of the things you want to achieve with your SEO strategy. Once that's done, you can confidently start optimizing your content and website in that direction.

Be eager for the results

Compared to other marketing methods such as PPC advertising or offline marketing, SEO is a long-term process. But if you adapt your SEO strategy correctly, you will get results even after a few months.

Many businesses make the mistake of investing in SEO, constantly checking if they're getting results, and then abandoning their efforts after a few weeks of non-performance. Remember that your SEO efforts are just the beginning.

Give search engines time to crawl, index, and rank your website. Allow users to discover your business and take action. More importantly, allow the strategy to show its capabilities, as the results will have a greater impact on your online performance than any other marketing medium or channel.

Neglecting local SEO

Of course, you dreamed of internationalizing your business when you started your small business. But as they say, Rome wasn't built in a day.

Likewise, creating a global presence takes time, and more often than not, it starts locally. That means there's really no excuse for ignoring your local SEO just because your end goal is bigger. By ignoring local SEO, you will lose potential local customers who could be milestones on your path to globalization.

Even the biggest businesses in the world have had to focus on localization and local SEO to reach the extent of their success or to maintain it over a longer period of time. For example, Apple is in the process of presenting its version of a business directory similar to Google Business Profile, and it's called Apple Business Register.

When Snapchat launched in India, the company built a local community of AR creators, created local content, and used localized strategies to try and succeed. When you're a small business, you have a bit of leeway to try new strategies, which can easily happen when you're targeting customers through local SEO. You should therefore prepare yourself and define strategies for the various local platforms and directories.

7. Conclusion

As an owner, you need to consider multiple aspects when it comes to running and growing your small business. Creating a quality website is only the beginning, but there are many challenges to overcome in order for this site to be useful for your business.

With increasing global competition, there is no time to lose, even for small businesses, when it comes to establishing their online presence. That's where SEO comes in. With the right SEO strategy, the good SEO software and with the right goals in hand, you can dominate the SERPs and overtake even the biggest competitor you can have online.

If you want additional help setting up your SEO strategy, we're here to help.