Many small to medium enterprises are home-based businesses. One family or one person usually operates them. That person acts as the owner, marketer, accountant, sales officer, customer service officer, and more for the business. Their limited budget keeps them from hiring employees yet. As such, they also can’t afford professional SEO services for their website.
An SEO specialist plays an integral role in a company’s marketing strategy and team. They employ smart-page tactics to improve a website’s ranking in search engines. Their key duties include implementing and maintaining title and meta tags, URL redirects, and 404 errors. They’re experts in Google’s Search Console and similar webmaster tools; hence they know what a website exactly needs to increase traffic.
If you’re not the most tech-savvy person, an SEO specialist’s duties may sound alien to you. But luckily, there are beginner-friendly ways to improve a website’s search engine ranking without a pro. While these strategies won’t deliver the same effects as a specialist’s work, they set the groundwork for optimizing your website by the time you can already afford professional services.
That said, use these DIY techniques to start increasing your small business’s web traffic:
1. Tweak Your Title Tags
The title tag is an HTML tag seen in the head section of a webpage. It is featured on the search engine results page (SERP) and in the browser window. You wouldn’t normally see it on the landing page, which is the page you’re redirected to when you click a link on the SERP.
In itself, the title tag has little impact on organic rankings. But you can optimize it to add traffic to your website. For example, if you’re selling different products, you need a different title tag for each product category. The other contents of your website should also be categorized properly. There should be a title tag for the home page (usually entitled “Home”), about page (“About” or “About Us”), product catalog, contact details, and blogs.
Tag the contents of your website so that they will appear organized. Nobody wants to browse a website wherein the contents are all over the place. WordPress and other free blogging platforms are easily customizable for beginners, so you should be able to tweak your title tags on those platforms.
2. Use Keyword Tools
Keywords help users find the content they’re looking for. If you want to buy affordable women’s shoes, for example, you’d type those words on the search engine bar, and after pressing Enter, a myriad of women’s shoe brands will be arrayed before your eyes. The webpage that ranked the highest is the one that mastered keyword research.
Keyword tools help you determine the top keywords used in searching for content relevant to your business. For beginners, Google Keyword Planner is one of the best, as it’s free, albeit an active Google Ads campaign is needed for you to access the most useful data. Nonetheless, the tool gives you the demand score for each keyword and shows you the new words and phrases you can target.
3. Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Upon discovering the most used keywords related to your products or services, you may be tempted to stuff your content with those keywords. This is a mistake many SEO beginners make.
Keyword stuffing is the practice of adding the same keyword to your content numerous times so that you’d trick search engines into ranking your website high in SERPs. It used to be a standard SEO practice before until Google caught up and started penalizing it.
Instead of keyword stuffing, write actual, reliable content so that the keyword flows naturally in it. If keyword stuffing seems inevitable, try using latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords to avoid repetitive words. LSI keywords are simply terms and phrases similar to your target keyword.
4. Build Up Your Social Media Network
Improve your social media presence to make your audience aware of your website. That way, they won’t need to use search engines to find your website. They’d click the link you provided on your social media pages or type your website’s URL straight away.
Connect your website to your social media pages, so your latest posts will automatically be shared. And if you’re posting on your social media, Instagram, for instance, use Stories’ “Swipe Up” feature so that your followers will be redirected to your website when the content interests them.
The more people are aware of your small business’ website, the more web visitors you can get. So keep posting and sharing. Optimizing your website without a pro won’t be easy, and results will most likely take time to show, but it’s a good way to learn the basics of SEO. And every successful small business owner should have a generous knowledge of that digital marketing strategy.
