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Digital marketing is different for a small or midsize business (SMB) compared to a big enterprise. Smaller businesses have to compete against bigger companies, with fewer resources, making strong digital marketing that much more important. Small or midsize business search engine optimization, or SMB SEO, is one of the most effective methods of marketing to stay competitive. And there’s even more good news. SMB SEO can be accomplished in quick, bite-sized tasks that add up to make a big difference.
Whether you are a complete beginner, looking to add to your expert skills, or something in between, read on to learn about six quick SMB SEO hacks you can do today.
Put Your Contact Info Front and Center
Take a look at your website. Is it easy for potential customers and other leads to get in touch with you the moment they think they have an interest in what you are offering? If they have to hunt down your contact information, and especially if they cannot find it, you can forget about making the most out of their visit. If your contact information is not visible, you are not alone — one study from SMB DigitalScape found that six out of ten SMB websites are missing either a local or toll-free telephone number on the home page to contact the business.
This SMB SEO hack is incredibly simple but incredibly effective. All you have to do is ensure that your contact information is available without a hunt, think buyer enablement. If you can put your number at the top of every site in large font, you’re reiterating that you want people to contact you and making it easy for them to do so. Attaching your phone number to your other content also helps with local SEO.
Look For Broken Links
A big part of SEO is links. The more people link to your site, the more trust and authority search engines like Google give you, which means your site will rank higher. And, when your site ranks higher, more people are going to visit it and link to it. You can see how links are such an important strategy! But if the external links to your site are broken, returning 404 error pages, you are losing authority with every click.
Luckily, the fix is fairly simple and fast. Tools like Google Search Console scan your site and see where the 404 pages are being linked from. All you have to do is use a redirect to push that link to a relevant page, and you are back in business.
Convert to Rich Snippets
You may not know what a rich snippet is yet, but we guarantee that this quick fix will change the way people interact with your site.
Whenever people search via Google, the resulting links come back with a bit of information underneath the main title. That is a snippet. The typical snippet is made up of a page’s title tag, meta description, which is often automatically generated, and the page URL. These snippets can be less than compelling.
A rich snippet, however, can include all kinds of extra information that can encourage searchers to click to your site. These snippets pull structured markup from your site, including reviews, product prices, or contact information. While it won’t make your page rank higher from an algorithmic perspective, this information can increase organic click-throughs.
Spend some time looking through Schema’s structured markup information, then adjust your existing pages using the information you find. If you use WordPress or another content management system with structured data plugins, it becomes even easier.
Get Your Name into Local Directories
This SEO hack simply requires a bit of research into local sites and directories that would make sense for your business to have a listing and an email sent or signup completed for each. From review sites like Yelp to local press listings or business directories, having your website included in these pages adds those ever-important backlinks and resulting link authority.
Make sure your information is consistent across every directory to make the most of this SEO move. You should also scan for existing, automatically generated listings you can claim as your site’s owner.
Create Some Evergreen Content
SMB SEO can be a long game, rather than a focus on time-critical information (which, of course, still has its place!). Take a bit of time to create evergreen content that builds link authority, generates clicks, and keeps those keywords relevant outside of any specific time frame. For example, blog posts that are how-tos, interviews, or case studies about your business or industry tend to stay pertinent for months or years.
Check Out the Competition
This SMB SEO hack will not have an immediate impact on your business, but the information it gives you will help inform your future SEO strategy in a big way. Setting up your own SEO might seem daunting, with a lot of formal planning and research. But you can take a bit of time and check out the competition and how they are using SEO in a completely informal way.
Simply think about the businesses in your locale or industry that are doing well, attracting the type of customers you want to bring into your site. Visit their pages and note the words and content they use frequently. The odds are good that this is the SEO driving visits.
You can also research the other way around. Visit Google, type in the keywords that seem the most relevant or interesting to you, and see what comes up.
When you move onto formalizing your SMB SEO, keep those keywords and content types in mind. We’re here to help you make the most of your website. Get in touch online, call us at 973-317-8765 or email [email protected].
