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SEO is not a short-term game with easy step-by-step implementation, but rather, you must have a solid strategy, willingness to execute, and patience.
SMEs often have a hard time improving their SEO because of the overwhelming competition in the market and lack of resources.
Nevertheless, improving SEO is not all that daunting a job; however, without proper supervision, it is very difficult to obtain fruitful results.
Steps To Improve SEO For Small Businesses
Here are 8 tips that you can check off of your list to get an enhanced SEO of your online website –
1. Prioritize CTR Of Your Highest-Ranking Pages
The title tag of your webpage acts as the headline of any published article. The job of the title is to entice the user to click through and visit the page.
The ratio of people who click a specific link to the total users who just visit a page is called the clickthrough rate (CTR).
If you can create a title tag that convinces people to click your page over the others, you have successfully taken the first step to generate SEO.
The ROI is significantly enhanced if you rephrase a poor title on a high-ranking page, considering people would view that page and read along.
You can utilize these tips to improve your title tags and modify it to become more alluring –
- Include power words – Power words instill emotions in people and make your title more appealing. However, too many power words can often render the idea ineffective.
- Add curiosity – Curiosity is a strong copywriting technique. Allure someone to quench their curiosity by clicking and going through your content.
- Write Short Titles – Google starts to cut off title tags in the SERPs beyond 50–60 characters. Create title tags that are subtle and sweet.
2. Optimize The Page Speed
In 2010, Google revealed that page speed is considered as a ranking factor. With mobile-first indexing, the importance of page speed has increased.
This simply means that slow pages are extremely bad for business and SEO. You need to boost the load speeds of your most hit web pages online.
It will help if you enable browser caching. Use a plugin such as W3 Total Cache to conveniently enable caching. This enables your users to load your page much faster.
Hosting can highly effect you website’s loading speed. You can use Bluehost, Dreamhost, Mangomatter, Hostinger etc.
3. Refresh Content
It should come as no surprise that regularly updating or rewriting content is necessary once the total number of hits on your page begins to decrease.
DIscover pages with diminishing traffic by peeking into your Google Analytics. This would help you target pages that are losing their lustre and need content updation.
It should be made clear that updating doesn’t always imply rewriting the entire content. It is dependent on your target keyword, as-well-as its competition.
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4. Fill Gaps In Existing Content
People search for identical things in many unique ways. Google knows that and ranks a nearly-similar set of results for various keywords.
It would be best if you cover one topic in extensive detail by including all the subtopics under one umbrella topic. This would automatically lead to more traffic directed to your target page.
This is based on the idea that Google can identify the topical relevance of any content better through the co-occurrence of different words as-well-as phrases.
One of the greatest ways to discover relevant subtopics for your posts is by looking at what the top-ranking pages for your target keyword are ranked for.
5. Replicate Backlinks From Obsolete Pages
There are tons of webpages out there that lack quality and have become obsolete over time; however, they still hold some decent backlinks.
You just need to have better content to use that replicated backlink. If you regularly refresh your content, you already have a better webpage for that backlink to be used.
All you need to do is to discover these low-quality webpages that house lots of links and get the viewers linking to them to link to you instead.
6. Augment Pages With Internal Links
Internal links are nothing but links from one page on the same domain to the other. When used tactically, internal links can boost the performance of pages in any search engine.
This is because internal links fuel the flow of PageRank around your website. In general, the more internal links a page holds, the higher its PageRank. PageRank has been confirmed as a Google ranking factor.
Thus, if you can include some internal links from decent, high-authority pages to the pages that demand a boost, then this process might thrust their performance in organic search.
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7. Cater To Broken Backlinks
Broken backlinks are usually broken inbound links from other websites.
They usually occur because:
- You deleted or moved a page that had backlinks;
- The linking site committed an error when linking to you.
If many sites are linking to you, but your pages seem to be broken, not only are you missing out on potential referral traffic, you’re also losing the “link equity” from such broken links.
8. Employ Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are basically when Google displays a full or partial answer to a question directly in the search results.
According to a study, featured snippets receive about 8.6% of clicks. If the page lacks featured snippets, the #1 ranking result will receive 26% of all clicks.
This implies that the featured snippet is taking clicks away from the #1 featured result. Thus, you need to devise a way to win the snippet.
You might already have a couple of pieces of content that are ranked on the first page for queries alongside featured snippets. After that, all you need to do is optimize these pages to grab these snippets.
Go through the internet and view snippets that you don’t own. Analyze the competing website and understand why they own the snippet and not you.
Some of the issues with their solutions are –
- Your content doesn’t adhere to the format that internet surfers want to view. If the ranking page has a numbered list, but not yours, that could be a reason why you don’t own the snippet.
- You have structured markup issues. Google uses HTML markup to understand how your content is structured. If you lack appropriate markup, Google cannot identify your content and display it on a featured snippet.
Final Words
All these tactics can elevate your rankings in the search engines. However, you shouldn’t expect your rankings to skyrocket overnight.
SEO is a long-term game, to start SEO business for beginner you need patience and perseverance to be on the top. By checking the above-mentioned points on your list, you would be able to set high benchmarks by optimizing your SEO like a pro.
