5 SEO Tips for Small Businesses

In this article you will learn about:

• SEO as part of your marketing strategy

• Five tips to improve your SEO strategy

As a 21st-century business owner, you know how important it is to have an online presence. Of course, that doesn’t just mean having a digital shopfront. How you exist online can also help you attract new customers to your business – and a solid SEO strategy will help. If you haven’t heard about SEO before, or you don’t know what it is exactly and how it can help you grow your business for less, we suggest reading the Beginners guide to Basic SEO first.

SEO as a Marketing strategy

SEO stands for search engine optimisation – and it means putting things in place that will move your business high up on the list of search results that a potential customer will get when they type a relevant search term into Google, Bing or any other search engine. Your SEO strategy should form part of your broader marketing strategy. That means having a clear idea of who your audience is and what your objectives are. Here are five tips for getting your SEO strategy to work for your business.

1. Start with a health check

The first step in your SEO strategy should be to check the current health of your website as this affects a user’s experience. How likely are you to continue browsing a website that loads slowly or contains outdated information? Highly unlikely, right? You also need to ensure your efforts are not going to waste because your content isn’t discoverable. Ensuring that all your website pages are indexed, a step that enables search engines to find your content, is an important step in your SEO efforts.

Prevent prospective customers from abandoning your website by checking the speed at which it loads, ensuring that all the links work and that your website hasn’t triggered any Google penalties – update or remove any links that are broken, remove duplicate content and check for any dead pages. If you had an event three years ago and there’s a page for that event on your website, delete it or redirect the page to this year’s event.

Useful tool: There are many free tools such as Google page speed insights, SEMRush Site Audit and GT Metrix to help you measure the health of your website. You may feel intimidated by the jargon used in by these site audit platforms when displaying your website results. Don’t be. Each of these platforms provide the definition of each measure.

Google Search console is another great tool that will help you inspect your URL’s to ensure all your website pages are indexed.

2. Get your key words on track

Your choice of keywords should reflect what your target customers are searching for. A sneaky way to find relevant keywords when you’re coming up with your SEO strategy is to check what successful competitors are using. Once you have your keywords, create content around them. Make sure the keywords show up in the body of your content, subheads, headers and the URL. There’s a fine line between being inspired and copying and your customers can spot the difference quite easily. Keep this in mind as you plan your keyword strategy.

To find out more about Keywords, watch our SEO masterclass with Peter Jooste, an industry expert with more than 10 years’ experience in this field.

Useful tool: If the content management system you use for your website has an SEO indicator, use it. WordPress, for example, has a traffic light system. When the little dot goes green, your SEO is good. You can also use tools like Google Keyword Planner and SEMRush to up your keyword game.

3. Time your content

Having high-quality relevant content on your website that provides the answers people are looking for is an important part of a good SEO strategy and timing can make a big difference. You can make your content feel more up-to-date and relevant by including the year such as “hairstyle trends for 2023” or “Cult haircare finds for 2023” if you’re a hairdresser.

Seasonal content is another easy way to up your relevance. You can also plan around noteworthy occasions, such as big events or holidays. Remember to create a content publishing plan to ensure you regularly remove outdated content, update existing content and add new content.

While you’re at it, also geotag your content to make it relevant to your target audience – if you’re targeting customers in Randburg, Johannesburg make sure your site is tagged for Randburg, especially if events is an important part of your sales strategy to attract new customers.

Useful hack: Looking at trending topics, such as Google Trends and what’s trending on social media can help you identify what people are searching for and talking about right now. Looking at Google’s “People also ask” results on a search term is another useful way to find content ideas around your niche.

4. Include multimedia

Good quality, original images will help your SEO strategy by allowing you to tap into image search. We recommend leveraging both your website and free Google Business Profile to help you attract more customers. By you or your customers regularly uploading new images to your Google Business listing, you signal to Google that your business is still active and this positively affects your ranking.

Useful hack: SEO your images (yes really!) by naming the image with your keyword as the file name, using the alternative (alt) tags field that pops up when you upload the image, to include SEO keywords and creating a relevant caption to convey the “why” of the image as part of the content. This also helps improve the accessibility of your website for prospective customers that leverage screen reader software to navigate websites.

5. Use social media in your SEO strategy

Social search is a rapidly growing area of online search, especially among younger audiences. Instead of searching for something using a search engine, they type their search query into a platform like Instagram or TikTok. You don’t have to have a presence of every social media platform – look at where your audience is most active.

Useful hack: This has another purpose. Your SEO strategy should also help people find your business if they’re actually searching for it specifically (because their cousin recommended you, say). Social media platforms already have their own SEO in place, so by having an account, you can piggy-back off their SEO. Just make sure it’s up-to-date and looks professional.

A final thought

To remain relevant, it’s important to focus on your SEO strategy and make the time to review your performance, often. If you’re unable to upskill any of your employees, we suggest hiring a digital marketing specialist with SEO experience to do it for you.

Thinking about your business's online strategy but not sure where to start? Take our free digital maturity assessment and get an action plan to get you started.