It’s common for small businesses to struggle with marketing. With limited time and budgets, it’s hard to dedicate resources to growing your own customer base and industry reputation, even if you are the best at what you do.
Small businesses can overcome these limitations through the power of 3 important letters: SEO.
This can range from minor to drastic website overhauls and creating a “bank of content” that your customers can consume. What is true of it all is that optimizing for search can be as simple or complicated as you want it to be and small changes can have outsized results.
Most marketing professionals know what search engine optimization is, but it’s easy to overcomplicate the matter. Ultimately, it’s about demonstrating the expertise you have so that the right people discover and hire you.
Here are four top tips to quickly boost your visibility online and get more customers for your business.
1. Use Plain Language
Keywords are a major topic in SEO, but it can be more powerful to explain things in the clearest terms possible than to inject industry jargon.
When you work in the business on a daily basis you can quickly view jargon as the norm. The high-level, technical terms can be off putting to those who don’t know the industry. Instead, use plain language to explain what you do for your customers. It removes barriers and makes finding keywords much easier.
Before you begin writing or editing any of the words used on a website, try writing:
- What your business does
- Why people should hire you
Use the language that your ideal customers would use when trying to solve their problem. And keep things simple. This will help you come closer to the words people use when they search. In turn, the information will be clearer and the site will feature keywords that are meaningful to your customers.
2. Write Descriptive Title Tags
Title tags are descriptive text that should tell people what to expect on a page. They are an important part of SEO and help with ranking. Whether visitors see it in their search engine results page (SERP), or while hovering over a tab before navigating to it, this should inform them about what’s on the page.
Site visitors should be able to clearly understand what you do and who you are, for this reason, the same guidance for clear, targeted language applies here.
Search engines also use these title tags to understand what your business does and match your site to the searches of your potential customers.
3. Put the Right Stuff on Your Homepage
Many businesses use their website’s homepage merely as a visual display of what your business does. A lot of choose form over function, but you want your homepage to work for you and get you more customers. More often than not, your homepage is going to be the most visited page on your website and therefore will be the page with the most backlinks. So if people are landing on that page, you should give them something to do.
Outside of providing basic descriptive information about your business, the homepage should provide people with the right opportunities to explore your website.
In SEO terms, this is done through hyperlinked words called anchor text. This text should feature keywords that indicate what the person will see if they click the link, and it should be more descriptive than just the typical “Click Here.”
A call to action, or CTA, is the term for the anchor text on a hyperlinked button, which a person clicks to do something, like “Learn More,” “Apply Now,” or “Contact Us.”
When designing your website you should think carefully about what people might come to your website to do and provide them with a pathway directly on the homepage.
4. Focus on Your Users, not Search Engines
Even if your goal is to improve your visibility on Google/Bing or any other search engine, you should first think about making your website useful and usable for real people. When you prioritize clear language, intelligent navigation, and valuable content, it yields results. Even Google , with its recent updates, is beginning to adopt this approach to prioritising information that people want/use rather than regurgitated information.
If you own/operate a small business, you can’t be everywhere at once. But an optimised website continues to work for you around the clock to get your business more customers.
For more information, contact EPR Marketing.
