SEO For Small Businesses

Small Business SEO SEO seems to get more complicated and long winded every time Google rolls out another update, changing the rules and sending a lot of small businesses scrambling and throwing their hands up in despair at the constantly shifting goal posts. The industry can seem hopelessly confusing and arbitrary, especially for those who haven’t the time to stay on top of every current development.

Fortunately, there are some solid and time-honoured tactics which never change as they focus entirely around Google’s pledged focus on user-friendly and content-driven search marketing.

Don’t Get Bogged Down In Onsite SEO

Yes, you need to keep your site structure sensible, optimise your meta data and make sure your site loads at a sensible speed. That doesn’t mean you need to spend every five seconds frantically checking things on Pingdom or fretting over every inch of your meta data. Find a decent SEO firm to run an assessment and do a site tune-up and then move on to bigger things. It is shocking how many small businesses get stuck at this fundamental point and fail to progress any further.

Content Is Critical

Content is king, lord high master, emperor and many other such titles – what does that mean though? Essentially, your website needs to be engaging for real users – it needs to have interesting and original content that people will want to look at. As long as you’ve got this you’ll find people flocking to your site, converting into customers and boosting your SEO – after all, engaging content is far more likely to be shared and linked to.

Content Is REALLY Critical

Just to drive this home further – content marketing is the best way to earn backlinks to boost your domain authority. Whatever you do, don’t go out looking to buy backlinks as these are worse than useless and will damage your site. Create quality content which is funny, informative, controversial or otherwise useful and engaging and you won’t need to fret over backlinks – they’ll naturally accumulate.

Quality, Not Quantity

If someone offers you any kind of automated software designed to “boost SEO without any work” then run a mile. Google has stated time and again that they despise SEO automation because it produces poor end user experiences and artificially affects rankings (usually resulting in a dreaded Google Slap when the next update comes round). Focus on building good, high quality content and the links will follow.

There’s really no reason to be scared of SEO, even as a small business owner. Google is a computer programme, not some sort of eldritch sorcery, and if you feed it the proper sensible data if needs then it will naturally give you favourable results. Focus on content, ignore the shortcuts and build a community of recognition around your brand which is based on content, content, content! SEO success will follow – and your business will benefit.

If you’re baffled by blogs and lost in links, pick up the phone and call 0330 555 4680 today to find out how Cornish WebServices can help you build a sensible and sustainable set of online marketing to include SEO, PPC, social media and more.

PS we build beautiful websites too!

Published on 07/12/2012

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