4 Effective Tips to Improve SEO Ranking for Your Small Business Marketing

Search engine optimisation is still relevant in 2016!  Incorporating the best SEO practices into your website content is vital to being found by your ideal customers (or buyer personas) and ranking well in the search engines. In fact, search still is the #1 source for content traffic generation, beating social media by more than 300% (Source: IronPaper). 

 It is indeed the preferred choice for consumers and decision-makers to finding solutions to problems, looking up product information, and locating nearby stores.

Implementing solid SEO tactics into your content does not have to be complicated.  However, it is important to your small business marketing onlinestrategy.   Here are four quick yet effective techniques to help boost your SEO ranking, thus improving visibility and traffic to your site.

#1 Boost the visuals in your content 

Blog content with an image per every 75-100 words receive double the number of social shares than articles with fewer images (Source: Hubspot).  Visual content like videos, infographics, slideshows, and photos have an amasing effect on engagement, enriches the user website experience, and helps maximise your online reach as you provide multiple ways for viewers to connect with your content.  The beauty about including visuals in your content is that you use keywords for your image file name, alt tag title, description and caption.  This tactic signals relevancy of your content to the search engines, improving SEO. 

#2 Make sure your websites are mobile-friendly

Since April 2015, Google has favored sites that were mobile optimised and began penalising sites that were not by dropping their ranking in mobile search.  You see, more Google searches take place on mobile devices than computers in 10 countries including the U.S. and Japan, for example.  Because of this rapid growth in mobile search usage, it’s important that your brand takes the necessary steps to ensure your site is positioned to capitalise on this mobile traffic!

#3 Include outbound links

Studies continue to show that including outgoing links have a positive effect on SEO, ranking content higher than those that did not use outbound links.  Adding these links to your content greatly enhances your brands message and provides visitors with credible sources to read.  It also reveals that you’re active in your niche industry, staying abreast to the current news and trends.  This builds your credibility, positioning your brand as the “go-to” source. 

The key to linking other sources in your content is to not overdo it.  Have just enough where it enriches your content yet doesn't distract people from easily flowing through your post.

#4 Create quality-rich blog content

Content is still king!  The success to your inbound marketing strategy lies in creating relevant content that resonates with your audience, addressing their problems and offering solutions.  As you draw quality prospects to your content, you boost your SEO in the process as visitors will tend to stay on your site longer, indulging in your value-rich content.  The more time viewers spend on your website, the better this improves SEO ranking as it shows the search engines that people are engaged with your content. 

With that said, longer posts with 2000+ words actually rank higher in search results than content with less words.  Long-form content gives you the opportunity to naturally plug-in your keyword more often, provide greater value to your audience, boost outbound links, and of course, gets readers to spend more time on your site…all key ingredients to honing your SEO strategy.  Thus, consider creating a content strategy that supports this word count.

Implementing these SEO tips into your online marketing will help to improve traffic generation and increase brand exposure for your small business.  The key is to remain consistent in your content production so you always have value to share with your audience and creating more opportunities to drive traffic to your website. Much success!.