Three Incredibly Overlooked SEO Essentials for Small Businesses

The modern business owner understands the need to maintain a strong SEO strategy in the face of fierce competition; however, doing so can be easier said than done. With so many moving pieces when it comes to organic search, from content creation to backlinks and beyond, the mere idea of ramping up your SEO strategies can quickly become a headache.

While most marketers have the principles of SEO under control, there are a few overlooked tactics that can easily beef up any ailing search strategy. Whether you’re looking to dominate your competitors in Google or simply improve your click-through rate, consider addressing these overlooked aspects of Internet Marketing.

Home Page Optimization

Bounce rate is often overlooked by marketers who don’t want to acknowledge the weaknesses of their site. However, bounce rate can indicate red flags such as a sloppy site design, irrelevant or unremarkable content, or poor site architecture. Users shouldn’t be dropping like flies as soon as they reach your site; therefore, it’s crucial that you figure out what’s wrong sooner rather than later.

Keep in mind that your home page is not only the first impression of your business to your users, but also to search engines. Likewise, you need to include appropriate content and imagery that will keep users on the page. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution to optimizing your landing page, ensure that your landing page…

• Features language and keywords relevant to your business and industry to signal that visitors are in the right place
• Establishes a welcome tone through its design, imagery and content
• Isn’t overly “sales-y” and invites users to browse rather than feel forced to buy

While you can easily start wasting time if you obsess too much over SEO, if there’s one area of your site to fine-tune, it’s the home page.

Giving Your Content a Purpose

Content marketing can be search engine gold for small businesses; however, many SMBs fail to make the most of their content strategies as they write blog after blog with no end-game. As crafting content can be a time-consuming and tedious process, it’s important to ensure that each piece you write has a corresponding purpose in mind.

If you’re crafting content for SEO purposes, for example, make sure that you’re carefully researched your keywords and follow a formula of keyword density that doesn’t signal itself as spam in the eyes of your readers. Furthermore, ensure that you include an appropriate call-to-action in each post, whether it’s for a user to click a link, download a software or perhaps even purchase a product.

Additionally, keep track of your content (and images used within your content) so that ideas may be repurposed or recycled in the future. Whether you’re using an Excel spreadsheet or a virtual data room such as Firmex, organization amongst your content creation team is incredibly important.

From five-word headlines to 10,000-word guides, each piece of content you write can be incredibly powerful to users looking to educate themselves. In short, make each word count.

Link-building

The passive “if you build it, they will come” approach to SEO is long gone. Unfortunately, many SMBs still fail to make the most of their web-presence as they lack an active link-building strategy.

Building backlinks signals to Google that you’re website is worth visiting. If you’ve gone through the blood, sweat and tears of building a sleek site with content worth sharing, you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you aren’t actively trying to build new links.

Link-building doesn’t have to be rocket science: in fact, it can be as simple as…

• Sharing your latest posts via the social network and optimizing them accordingly (for example, what works on Pinterest may not work on Facebook or LinkedIn)
• Reaching out to blogs within your niche and offering a guest post, which can result in huge exposure and link-juice for your own site
• Establish yourself on niche forums and sites such as Reddit which allow user-submitted content and encourage posting relevant links back to your own site

The more links you build, the more valuable your site is in the eyes of Google and new visitors.
Your business and its site simply can’t afford to sleep on SEO. If your strategy feels stagnant, consider breathing new