The following SEO Tasks should be practiced on a consistent monthly basis to be effective. Most of the small business websites that I have come across do not utilize these SEO Tasks therefore leaving potential customers on the table. They lack the know-how of Search Engine Optimization and are unaware of the benefits that proper SEO can provide for them.
Granted many of these small businesses don’t have the marketing budget; however, with the following simple SEO tasks they can grow their online presence and experience a measurable difference in leads and sales. Below I will be showing you 4 SEO tasks that any business owner could and should practice on a monthly basis to build targeted traffic to their website.
SEO Tasks: #1 Find Keyword Niches With Low Competition
The first step to website SEO should be focused on what your potential customers are searching for. Using SEO Tools such as Google’s Adwords Keyword tool can help you find a few keywords in which you can sprinkle around the content that you are writing for a specific web page. This helps search engines determine what your web page is about and will help you get found by your target audience. This is one of the SEO tasks that can be time consuming and overwhelming because of the amount of keywords that you can choose from. Just choose the keyword(s) that are most relevant to what you are going to be writing about or selling.
Starting a Small Business can be challenging but if you are starting out online with a new website, my recommendation would be to choose keywords in your niche that have low competition. I won’t be going in too much detail about keyword research as I will leave that topic for another time, however, I will show you some easy steps to follow.
First Step: Go to Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool
Second Step: On the left side you will see a category with the title ‘Match Types’. Under that there are 3 selections you can make. The only selection that should be checked is the [Exact Match] selection.
Third Step: Type in a list of related keywords or keyword phrases that you can think of in the search box. Google will do a quick search and show you all of the keywords it found. Go ahead and sort this from low competition to high competition.
Fourth Step: Choose the keywords with low competition and include them in the content of your webpage but do not keyword stuff.
Keyword research is one of the most important SEO Tasks that any website owner should do.
Here is an example of how a Google keyword research would look like:
SEO Tasks: #2 Write Informational & Quality Content
Small business owners tend to be one of the most knowledgeable within their industry because of many years of experience, however, the deficiency of strong on page SEO, results in an under-performing website. Writing great content on your website can be done in numerous ways. You can provide videos, infographics, white papers, case studies, blog posts, podcasts, and many more. The content that you provide will help build trust and confidence with consumers resulting in a high probability that they will buy your products or services.
To make your content more compelling you can use one of the following:
- How To and Tutorial Content
- Insert Some Humor In Your Content
- Create Controversy With Your Content
- Mix current Events With Your Content
SEO Tasks: #3 On Page Optimization
As you write great content for your website you must follow the best practices of on page SEO. Here are some simple tips to follow:
- Keyword density is still important. Make sure to use your primary keyword in your title tags, meta descriptions, URL, Image ALT Tags, and header tags.
- Post some images to your website to make it more attractive to visitors.
- Internal linking and External Linking. Make sure to link to other content on your website as well as to linking out to other high authoritative websites.
- Insert the authorship tag and schema.org code to your website.
SEO Tasks: #4 Continuous Tracking and Promoting
Every content and web page should be tracked to improve performance. Whether that is tweaking some of the on page SEO attributes or building more relevant links.
Another set of effective SEO tasks that you should practice is to pick your battles. If your website is new, you might have to build high authoritative links to your website to start attracting traffic. If your small business website has a high domain authority you could easily jump to page 1 for low competition keywords.
After writing content, every small business website owner should start link building and promoting their content through social media, RSS feeds, guest blogging, infographics, participate in forums, and blog comments. This will help establish your website as an authority in your particular industry resulting in more traffic.
Conclusion
On page optimization seems to be the most common deficiency in small business websites. There are many small businesses providing great content but a consistent practice of the above SEO Tasks would increase their presence online.
Follow these 4 quick and simple SEO Tasks to improve search engine rankings where your potential customers will find you and hopefully increase your revenue.
