SEO Tips for SMEs with a small budget

SEO Tips For SMEs

seo tips for SMEs

 

For a small business, SEO can prove to be a tricky thing to master. For those SMEs that know the power of SEO and the effect it can have on their organisation’s website, it can prove to be an effective weapon in the battle in the consumer battleground of online services.

But, what if you’re not a “tech-savvy” SME business owner and want to improve your website and increase your online profile? What do you do? Here are some tips…

The Basic SEO Tips for SMEs

These tips may begin to sound like a relative inconsequence, especially when the first point is a section titled ‘the basics’ but bear with me, these do count!

  • Google Analytics

Ensure that Google Analytics tracking is implemented on your website. If this isn’t implemented, you won’t know if the changes that you make are affecting web traffic levels.

  • Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an essential tool and registering your website is one of the first things that must happen. It provides insights into improvements, errors, and keyword opportunities that can potentially provide the edge over your competitors. Along with Google Analytics, insights into behaviour, what queries users are searching and what content displays within search results for a particular query are extremely useful to know if you want to improve your business’ website.

  • Map Listings

Now, at some point in the past, there may have been a time when someone mentioned in passing to you that “creating a listing on Google My Business will help people find you”. So you got halfway through creating that listing, forgot about it, got distracted and it remains unfinished and not much use at all…

Claiming mapped listings can be considered an easy win. Why? Finishing that account that you started or claiming previously created/existing listings on both Google My Business and Bing Places is a surefire way of helping your business’ search presence, especially in terms of local search.

Mapped listings appear above organic results e.g.

Ensuring that listings (for all of your locations if more than one) are correctly optimised for the business name, type, address, contact details, and other relevant information is essential. It also encourages your customers to leave reviews of your products or services, building trust and authority.

  • Local Citations

Citations are brief entries for businesses on sites like Yell and DMOZ. They include your name, address, phone number and sometimes your website. Ensuring that these citations within locally sourced directories are correct is also important for uniformity and displaying the correct information. They are also a simple and cost-effective way of acquiring links to your website.

On-Page

We have important on-page SEO tips for SMEs. On-page covers various areas of website-related. Ideally, you want to be able to amend any problems that exist or occur.

Firstly, you want to appeal to your audience – if you’re selling a product, you want to be able to make that product appealing through the website or if you’re providing a service, you want to make that service interesting. Why should people choose you over your competitors?

You want to make sure that users find you. Optimising, through keyword research, your content for search terms related to your product or service is, therefore, essential. Obviously, the more competitive the search term, the harder it is going to be to rival big companies. Therefore, you’re going to want to optimise your pages with keywords that are less competitive and have longer tails.

So, a quick rundown of on-page elements for you to concentrate on: –

  1. Content – good content is vital for your customers in terms of search (if optimised correctly) and good content is linkable!
  2. Meta Tags – an optimised page title and description separates the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Character limits for search engines range between 55-60 for titles and 150-160 for meta descriptions.
  3. URL Structure – having clean, precise and structured URLs is vital for both search engines and users and is an integral part of technical SEO.

A good URL = http://traffordbuilders.co.uk/building-services/extensions/

A bad URL = http://lbarrow.co.uk/l-barrow-son-builder-in-moston-more/

Mobile Friendliness

Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is an important part of appealing to users and also search engines. As a business owner, you probably make searches through your mobile device

on the move every day, so where your business is concerned why not ensure that your customers can find and access your website through that platform?

Social Media Marketing

Social media is an opportunity for SMEs to get their name out there. Promoting engaging content and engaging with followers is a helpful way to build brand significance. Don’t forget, that you’re creating and building an online presence and encouraging your customers to leave reviews of your products or services builds trust signals associated with your website.

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