10 ways your small business can improve its SEO ranking

1. Ensure you are publishing relevant content

The number one way your small business can improve its SEO ranking is through posting relevant content. By doing this, it allows customers to regularly visit your website, which then drives more traffic to your site. Websites that have regular visits are seen by search engines and become trustworthy to them, therefore increasing their SEO ranking.

2. Keep your site updated 

Just like publishing relevant content, the most important reason for keeping your website content up to date is to increase your SEO ranking and help search engines find your website. By getting rid of old information on your website it allows for your content to be ranked much higher, therefore improving your SEO. Be sure to keep your website relevant. This includes keeping your metadata and meta tags updated. 

3. Metadata

Metadata is data that gives information about other data. When designing a website, it is important that you use metadata, and keep it updated to ensure that your website is always up to date. SEO professionals can also help you with creating metadata for your website and business. 

4. Keep up With Your Competitors 

When looking at SEO, your number one competitor is the websites and businesses that are in the top 5 results on a search engine. It is important that in your marketing strategy you include a competitive analysis of these businesses in order to be able to keep up with them and what they are doing. Whilst looking at their strengths, be sure to make a list of their weaknesses so you know what your small business is doing right compared to them. 

5. Reviews 

Reviews are one of the biggest factors that will shape an individual's decision these days. A person will search a review on a product or service and get previous customers' opinions before purchasing it themselves. Reviews are a simple and affordable way to get customers to build trust and buy from your brand. However, through positive reviews search engines are also able to build trust with a business which will then allow them to improve their SEO ranking. 

6. Create different content 

Posting different content on your websites and pages is so vital in improving your SEO ranking. If you were to post videos on your page then it gives visitors to that particular site a reason to stay longer. Videos not only build brand trust and loyalty with search engines, but they also allow the search engines to see that visitors are spending a long time on that website, therefore the SEO ranking will improve. 

7. Use a Mixture of Paid and Organic Search Marketing 

Small businesses don’t always have the time and money to spend on content marketing, however, in some circumstances improving an SEO ranking may take a long time and your business may need to budget in paid search to get your foot in the door. 

Paid search generates instant results which can provide value for your business. It is important for you and your business to know how to use both paid and organic search and be able to acknowledge what will best maximise your business' search engine optimisation ranking. 

8. Improve Your Page Loading Speed 

Google recognises when a website's speed is too slow, which then lowers your SEO ranking. That is just one reason why you need to improve your page loading speed. A slow page loading speed negatively impacts the number of visitors your site has. It is proven that over 50% of visitors will leave a site if it takes over 3 seconds to load. These negative site visits will end up impacting your business' SEO.  

9. Start Blogging 

Nowadays, most businesses are starting to use blogs as a tool to improve their search engine optimisation. As stated earlier, posting relevant and updated content drives individuals to your website, and blogs can help individuals stay on your website for a while. Your blogs can also allow you to gain loyal readers who will ensure that you get traffic to your website each day. You can also include images in your blogs, which as previously stated, can improve your small business' SEO. 

10. Hire an SEO Specialist 

After these steps, if you are still struggling to improve your SEO ranking, hire an SEO specialist. They can help you, improve your SEO and drive more traffic to your new and improved website. 

If you need any advice regarding your SEO or have any questions regarding your next marketing strategy, why not get in contact with a professional at Marketing Eye today.