Digital Marketing

Top 10 SEO Strategies Small Businesses Should Follow In 2018

Everyone wants to attract more eyes to their website. Strong and effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategies have the potential to bring your site to the top of Google’s organic search rankings, leading to your business growth.

SEO is a fast moving field. Therefore, it is not surprising that you find people who are carried away by new advances, trends and practices. However, there are some gold standards in SEO that all SMEs should adopt in 2018.

Define your audience

SEO drives traffic to the website. But that would be of no use if your website is not displayed in front of a relevant audience. Therefore, it is in the adequacy of things that you must identify the type of audience you are targeting and know their search patterns, demographics, geographic location, preferences, etc. You can take a step in this direction by setting up a Google Analytics account that will allow you to learn more about them on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.

Put your audience first

When creating your blog posts, it is absolutely necessary that you have a reader-first mindset. What your readers were actually getting out of the writing should be top of mind.

Never assume you have no direct competitors

There will always be someone who has already used the keywords you want to target. Do your homework to find out who these competitors of yours are and how you can differentiate your SEO strategy from others.

Improve your page speed

Google places great emphasis on page speed. A great page speed improves the visibility of your site. According to Gomez.com, even a second delay in a page’s load time can reduce customer dissatisfaction by 16 percent. All this is the most important in the case of mobile users.

Use long tail keywords

Using long tail keywords in your strategy is key to the success of your business. For example, considering the keyword “SEO tips” can take a long time to improve your ranking in Google. However, using long-tail versions of the keyword “SEO tips”, such as “SEO marketing for your business”, can increase your chances of making big profits on Google.

Local SEO

Small businesses should especially focus on local search. If you have a brick-to-brick small business, local SEO is of the utmost importance. It has recently been discovered that 50% of consumers searching locally on their smartphone visit a store on the same day. The figure stands at 34% when it comes to searching on a computer or tablet. Therefore, it is in the suitability of things that the visibility of your business should rank high in your area. Otherwise, you risk losing to competitors.

Make your website mobile friendly

Survey results reveal that 60% of traffic comes from mobile devices and that number is likely to increase. Therefore, it is up to you to ensure that your site is optimized for mobile visitors and not difficult to navigate on mobile devices. This becomes even more necessary because Google is in the process of awarding higher rankings to sites optimized for mobile devices.

Voice search

Over time, the use of voice search is increasing. Now it’s clear that you can ignore voice search at your own risk. Since voice search queries differ greatly from written queries, you will need to optimize your content for voice search.

Be authentic

SEO is not a deceptive or deceptive practice, although there are people who tend to think so. Tricking the search engines using shady tactics won’t help you. By doing so, you risk losing the trust of search engines.

Focus on quality over quantity of links.

Quality rather than quantity should be your main consideration when it comes to creating links for your website. Creating a massive number of non-quality links has the potential to damage your website’s credibility.

SEO is an ongoing process. However, starting with a solid strategy will translate into success online for many years to come.