Introduction
The fact is, generating traffic through Google (and other search engines) is still one of the best ways to get targeted visitors to your website. but, as a solopreneur or small business owner, optimizing your web pages for the search engines may probably be at the back of your mind. Using a Small Business SEO Checklist can save you time and concern and help you create content that will grow your business.
In this article you'll learn 20 more important practical SEO factors to increase the chances of having your business website rank high in the search engines.
What Is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a fundamental component of any effective digital marketing strategy.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves the various steps and practices you do to optimize your website, webpages and content to improve their visibility and rank higher in search engines like Google and Bing. The goal is to make your webpages rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs) when people search for information, products or services related to your business.
SEO is a complex subject that encompasses various techniques and best practices, but there are essentially 3 main parts, namely:
- Technical SEO
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
Why Optimize Your Small Business Website For SEO
Think about this for a moment... whenever you want to get some information about something,
Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! help users find websites they’re looking for by crawling the Internet. These search engines use special algorithms to determine the importance of a website and its relevancy to a user’s query. The higher your website ranks in Google search results, the more visitors you’ll get from that search engine.
By optimizing your website for search engines, you can improve its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs), attract organic traffic (as opposed to traffic that you pay for like ads), and increase your chances of reaching and engaging with your target audience. By optimizing your website for search engines, you can improve its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs), attract organic traffic (as opposed to traffic that you pay for like ads), and increase your chances of reaching and engaging with your target audience.
The Small Business SEO Checklist
There are many pieces and parts you need to snap into place in order to get good rankings. The following Small Business SEO Checklist makes it easy to make sure you have all the major factors in order to help you improve your rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
1. Choose Relevant Keywords
Keywords are words or phrases that people put into search engines to search for goods and services. They are the backbone of any SEO strategy. If you want to optimize your website, you must know and understand your target audience and their needs, and which keywords they type into search engines to find goods and services related to your business.
So, first off, you’ll want to brainstorm what types of words your audience is likely using to find information in your niche. You can then use a keyword tool (such as Ahrefs or Ubersuggest or your favorite tool) to uncover even more words.
A good keyword tool will not only give you an estimate of keyword volume (e.g., how often the keyword is searched for in the search engines), it will also give you an indication of how much competition there is for that keyword.
TIP: Be sure to choose highly targeted, relevant keywords – especially those with commercial intent. Also, look for the low-hanging fruit. These are the longtail keywords that may not have a lot of volume, but they also don’t have a lot of competition.
2. Optimize Webpages
The idea here is to include your keywords in strategic locations on your webpages - your meta descriptions, page titles, subheadings, image descriptions, alt texts for images, and throughout the content.
However, when placing keywords throughout your content, be sure to include the keyword without “stuffing” (spamming) it (that is, having the keywords appear too often within the content).
If your website is built using WordPress, then installing an SEO plugin like RankMath will be tremendously helpful with your on-page optimization.
3. Create High-Quality Content
The next step is to craft engaging content around your keywords. Your goal should be to write for human readers first and only include your keywords if you can do so naturally. Above all, Google wants to provide a great experience for their visitors, and that includes sending visitors to sites with high-quality, useful content.
The content you create should be helpful. In fact, all unhelpful content should be removed from the site since it doesn’t have a
purpose. You should always be producing content that’s engaging, well-written and informative. It should be relevant to your niche, topic, and goals.
Use the following questions to make sure you’re on the right track to creating helpful content for people first.
- Who is your existing or intended audience that will find the content on your website useful?
- Does your site have a specific focus or purpose?
- Are you creating content that clearly demonstrates your expertise and depth of knowledge. Have you actually used the product or service, visited the place, etc.?
- Will someone reading your content leave knowing they’ve learned enough about the topic to answer their questions and reach their goal?
- Do your readers leave feeling like they had a fulfilling experience?
If you aren’t sure whether you are creating for people or search engines, here are some more questions you should be asking.
- Is your content created to attract people from search engines instead of created with humans in mind?
- Are you creating lots of content on different topics hoping some of it will rank well in the search engines?
- Are you using automation extensively to product content on many different topics?
- Is your content a summarization of other people’s content?
- Does you content send readers back to the search engines to get more information?
- Are you simply writing about trending topics, not because you’d already be writing about them for your audience?
- Are you creating content that meets a particular word count only?
- Did you enter a specific niche topic without real expertise only because you thought you’d get the traffic?
If your answers are yes to some or all, you need to reevaluate how and what you are creating.
When creating helpful content, choose topics that you have knowledge of and that you can teach or share with your readers. Consider questions people may have, from the complete beginner to a more experienced person. The more quality information you can provide that answers their questions and leaves them feeling satisfied with what they know, the better you will rank in the search engines.
4. Improve Page-Load Speed
Google likes to provide a great experience for their visitors, which means they prefer to send their visitors to high-performing webpages. As such, one tip for improving your rankings is to be sure your webpages load quickly.
Search engines use the time it takes for a user to be able to read a page as an indication of the quality of the site. They consider the overall performance of a page when deciding whether to promote it in the SERPs.
Have you ever visited a website where it seems to take forever for the information and images to load? It’s frustrating, right? How often have you clicked away from a site because of slow load speeds? This is why fast load speeds are so important.
Load time is affected by many elements on your website: image size, videos, etc.
TIP: Use a tool like the Google's PageSpeed Insights to find out what might be slowing your webpages down and for suggestions on what to do for improvement.
5. Utilize a Mobile-Friendly Design
Another way to provide a great experience is to use a mobile-friendly, responsive design that looks great on any device (desktops, tablets or mobile). In fact, more people are using their mobile devices to search. If you’re website doesn’t load correctly or look pleasant on small devices, it won’t rank well.
Mobile-optimized websites include several factors:
- A theme or template that allows content to resize automatically for multiple screen sizes, resolutions, and orientations. This provides the visitors with the same browsing experience regardless of the device they're using (desktop, tablet or mobile phone).
- Proper formatting of content. If your pages are content heavy, it makes it difficult for readers to wade through on a small screen. Yes, you want quality long posts, but the format needs to be optimized for easy reading.
- Proper formatting could include optimizing paragraphs with shorter sentence lengths for mobile users. Using images or videos that are adjusted for smaller screens – or that adjust automatically. It also includes using readable font sizes.
6. Use Internal Linking
Whenever you link to a page on your own website, be sure to use an appropriate keyword as the anchor text. Example, if your keyword is “dog training tips,” then those three words should be the clickable part (the link) in a sentence.
7. Create a Clear Site Structure
Think through your web structure before you start building your site, which will help you create a site that’s easy to navigate and includes a keyword in your navigation menu. You can also create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google. Again, an SEO plugin like RankMath can help you with that.
8. Use an Alt Tag for Images
Using alt tags helps Google better understand your images. Alt tags also make your website more accessible for people with vision impairments. You can also include your keywords in the alt tag and/or as part of a photo caption.
9. Build High-Quality Backlinks
Google and other search engines view a link from another high-quality website to your website as a “vote” that you too have a high-quality website. That’s why you’ll want to naturally collect links from authority sites in your niche.
The key once again is the word “naturally.” Don’t buy links or do link exchanges or get links from poor-quality sites, or anything else of that nature. Instead, focus on quality. You can collect these links naturally by guest blogging, distributing press releases, and creating unique viral content that a lot of high-quality sites will naturally want to link to.
10. Research Your Competitors
You can improve your rankings by finding out what keywords your competitors are using and where they’re getting their backlinks. Then you can be sure you’re optimizing for the same keywords and getting the same backlinks.
11. Craft Longform Content
Google prefers longform content over “thin” content. Be sure your content is a minimum of 300 words long. Ideally, content pieces should be around 1000 words long where possible. You can now leverage the power of AI tools to help you create long form content faster and easier. I recommend Koala Writer because of the high quality of the long form content it produces.
12. Optimize for Voice Search
Quite a few members of your audience likely use voice search, so be sure to optimize content for it when possible. This often means optimizing for complete sentences (e.g., “how do I train my dog?” versus “dog training tips”).
13. Secure Your Site
Google and other search engines prefer secure websites, so be sure you’re using “https” and an updated SSL certificate. You can also include relevant security badges on your site, especially on order forms, to build trust with users.
Visitors are cautious of sharing their personal data on websites that aren’t secure, making it more susceptible to hackers. Some search engines will flag or even block webpages if they are not secure.
14. Monitor Bounce Rates
If people land on your pages and immediately leave, Google isn’t going to rank those pages as well. Monitor your bounce rates and improve the quality of webpages where a lot of visitors click away quickly.
For example: a landing page with a high bounce rate may need a better headline or a faster-loading page.
15. Optimize URLs
Create URL structures that include your keywords. For example: yourdomain.com/niche-category/keywords.html. If you’re using WordPress, you can choose exactly how to set up your link structure.
16. Craft Shareable Content
Creating high-quality, unique and useful content helps get more people sharing your content, especially across social media. Google and other search engines take these “social signals” into consideration when determining rankings, plus you’ll also get highly desirable backlinks if and when an authority site links back to your site. Here are 4 Quick Steps to Getting More Shares and Engagement on Social Media.
17. Ensure Your Site is User Friendly
You may want to do usability and accessibility testing to be sure your site is easy to use and navigate for your audience. For example:
- Be sure your site’s navigation is intuitive.
- Design content in multiple formats so that people of differing abilities can access it.
- Put the most important information at the top of each webpage.
- Design content for easy readability.
- Ask for only the information that’s necessary when visitors fill out forms on your site
… and similar ideas for improving readability, usability and accessibility.
18. Audit Your Website Regularly
Auditing your site every three months will ensure that you catch broken links, broken scripts, and other issues affecting your page performance and search engine rankings.
19. Ensure Your Site is Crawlable/Discoverable
Search engines like Google and Bing use digital bots (often referred to as "spiders") to crawl across the world wide web to find (discover) and index (add to their list of records) web pages.
But your site has to be discoverable and crawlable to get indexed and show up in the SERPs. The first step in doing this is to create and submit your website's sitemap to Google via your Google Search Console account. Then you'd want to do ensure your website has a clear structure, strengthen your internal linking structure, regularly update and publish new content, and the other steps listed in this article to improve your SEO.
The exceptions to this step are any pages you want hidden from the public, such as download pages.
20. Stay Informed and Up-to-date About SEO
The search engine landscape changes quickly at times, and you need to stay abreast of these changes. You can stay informed by following authority websites such as SearchEngineWatch.com and SearchEngineJournal.com. For a more in-depth practical understanding and actionable steps you can checkout RankMath's SEO Course.
Above all, stay away from spammy tactics or anything that tries to “trick” the search engines. As always, create a high-quality, mobile-responsive, and user-friendly site for humans, and the search engines will naturally like it too.
Conclusion
SEO is an often-changing landscape, but the above steps include the “tried and true” factors that are likely to stand the test of time. Bottom line: include your keywords on your web pages without spamming/stuffing, write for humans first, and make sure you have clean code and a fast-loading site.
You can download a pdf version of this small business SEO checklist using the button below. That way, you can have it at your fingertips as a good reference whenever you’re working on improving your webpage’s standing in the search engines.
