Want to know how to improve your website search ranking in Google? Check out this straightforward 10-step guide. These are practical aspects of SEO that you as a small business owner need to know so you can drive traffic to your website. Best of all, they’re quite easy, and you don’t need any tech-related knowledge in implementing these.

 

SEO, short for search engine optimization, is a set of techniques to improve your website’s visibility in search engines. SEO is about getting your website on page 1 of a search engine results page (SERP) when a person types a search term related to your industry/business in a Google search. If your site lands on these pages, then your site has a high rank.

 

According to research, 80% of all website traffic from searches goes to websites which rank in the top three slots of an SERP. If you want your site to be in these positions, then you need to understand and implement SEO.

 

The 10 steps below provide you a practical way to rank on the first page of Google for your business in your local market.

 

1. Identify Your Audience and Primary Service

Who is your target audience? Here’s a good rule of thumb for starters: the more specific your audience, the better. Know that there are billions of searches online every day. As the new player on the block, you want to carve out a niche and establish your own presence.

 

Let’s say you are an accountant. You want to define your audience around your services. Thus, you might want to focus on young adults who needs assistance with their tax returns or middle-aged sole proprietors who need a hand with their bookkeeping.

To define your audience and drive your design and content, you need to determine two things:

One, what is your primary service? Going back to the accountant example above, you need to pick a particular service you feel you really excel at or a service area you want to develop such as bookkeeping for small-scale businesses.

 

Two, what your audience’s basic demographics? The three big ones being are age (teen, young adults, families, retired, seniors), gender, and Location. You can service multiple ages and locations. However, it is usually better to narrow it down to your primary age group and primary location, whether it’s a city or even neighborhood. Gender is obviously be a factor if you offer gender-specific service offerings.

 

2. Location

Users generally search based on location. For example, they may input “bookkeeper in Cebu Philippines” in Google. Due to this factor, Google ranks location highly, particularly for mobile search. This means you need to pick your primary market, which you will use refer to in your web content.

 

If your business caters to small or mid-sized markets like Cebu, you may want to use your city name as your primary location. For larger markets, you might consider for the province with Cebu as a secondary market.

 

Use your location in your home page title, website footer, and other major pages such as your About and Contact and About pages. Just be careful not to overuse them (e.g. overloading your content with locations); make sure it sounds human!  In addition, naturally slip in your location two or three times in a blog post..

 

3. Using the Right Keywords

Simply put, keywords are words and phrases that users put input in Google to search for something. Understanding how keywords work is critical. A single-letter difference in a keyword phrase brings up various results. Big companies and multinational corporations spend millions of dollars per month just for keyword research and advertising. Fortunately, this massive amount of money is not needed for a small business.

 

After identifying your primary audience, main service, and location, make a list of 5 to 7 simple and popular keywords which you think users would use to find you. For example, if you offer special event photography in Cebu, your list might look like the following:

 

Begin with your primary service and location:

Special event photographer Cebu

 

Then create variations:

Cebu special event photographers (A different order is actually a different keyword)

Cebu special event photographer (A one-letter difference is a different keyword)

Photographer Cebu (A lot of users use short phrases and incomplete sentences)

Special event photographer Cebu City

Event photographer in Cebu

Special event photographer Cebu reviews (many users search for reviews. It’s a good idea for your website to have a review section)

 

While your forming this list, search these keywords in Google and review what competitors come up for each one relative to your website (Note though that if you have a new website, you will likely not rank right away).

 

Click through the top ranking websites and determine in what way their content uses the keyword. This gives you a better idea of how to position your own content to rank higher.

 

4. Customized Web Design Creates Trust

A professional and personalized website design goes a long way. It also accomplishes two important things. First, you gain credibility. Think of your homepage as your store front in the Net. Outdated, poorly designed, or templated home pages causes users to spend less time on your website. On the other hand, if you have a beautiful, clean, modern design, viewers instinctively trust your site.

 

Professional design is about building trust with users so they come and stay in your site and browse further. Design also helps increase conversions; this will be explained further in Step 6.

 

Second, design and trust matters with Google when it comes to SEO for two big reasons: bounce rates and time on page. These are two more technical terms but in short they measure who quickly someone abandons your website (an indicator of low visitor trust) and how long they browse in your store.

 

In short, the slower the bounce rate, that is, the more people who walk in the store and at least look around and the longer they stay in store, the higher Google ranks your website.

 

As a bonus, Google also likes deep and hierarchical sites. Let's say you have an Our Services section on your home page. Google likes it when you link this to it's own Our Services page, which then of course will list more about each service and with each individual service perhaps even getting it's own dedicated web page. This takes most website owners longer to develop all this content but even more important than deep content is ensuring your content worth reading.

 

5. Content Worth Reading

There is a long know saying in the SEO world, that being: Content is King. It's survived over the years because it really is true. While Google can correlate words within your content quite well it's still no human, however, what they analyze and weigh heavily as we've already talked about is how long users stay on your page.

 

In short, humans stick around if the content is good. Consider Google's sole mission in life is to present the most relevant answer to a users question. If your content provides the best answer wrapped in a design that is trustworthy and easy to read, you get ranked higher.

 

While this all may sound overly simple, in practice this is where most small business websites fail. Many business owners are busy servicing clients (rightfully so), aren't overly techy and generally don't value spending time writing good content for their websites.

 

This, however, is exactly your biggest advantage. The reality is writing good, engaging content is hard and takes effort and chances are your competitors don't spend the time to do it. This in turn becomes your biggest opportunity for ranking higher in Google. So let's turn now to the topic of blogging.

 

6. Blogging

Blogging is more than just a hip thing to do, it's likely the most important tool to increase your SEO in any particular market. This is because Google not only looks at your content but the frequency of your content. Blogging is the framework for frequency.

 

But what do you blog about? This is where most business owners get stuck but the answer is surprisingly simple. First, never hard sell in your blogs. Not only will you quickly run out of things to write about but hard sells are a turn off. Consider that users are typically seeking to learn something, so your posts should be focused ideally on education.

 

To that end, you should be blogging about informational topics within your service and industry. Your best option if you are just starting out is to blog about the items that you are passionate about. Blog about things you get frequent questions about from your clients or teach someone the basics about your industry.

 

Tips For Blogging

  • map out 3-4 blogs at a time that build on one another
  • shoot for 500 words, longer is typically ok if it's not too wordy and well organized
  • work in 2-3 of your keywords into each post
  • don't stuff in keywords unnaturally or overuse them, you can loose ranking for this
  • ensure your content is original, re-posting content will also reduce your ranking
  • consider your primary audience (your customer and Google)
  • soft sell at the end, but keep it short
  • break up content into shorter paragraphs
  • the more images, illustrations, videos or audio clips the better
  • your blog post title matters a lot, consider your keywords

 

How Much Should I Blog

That really depends on how competitive your market is. The larger the city or the broader your service and audience, the harder and longer you will have to work to rank, but a good rule of thumb is once per month for cities under 100,000 people, two times per month for cities/metros up to 1,000,000 and four times per month for major markets with a large amount of competitors.

 

Again, the way to win online is finding a niche. Focus on a particular neighborhood, audience and service offering and you will do better.

 

 

Who Am I Blogging For

Naturally, you are blogging for your would-be customers BUT you are also blogging for Google. Yes, you are blogging for a robot. What this means is that it needs to be natural enough in grammar and flow to really provide value for humans but have the right mix of keywords and industry specific content for Google to associate you more with a particular set of keywords.

 

7. Conversions & CTAs

So you have defined your audience, primary service, location, researched your keywords, have a professional design, written some great content for users, even started blogging, now what?

 

The goal of website, at least for a business is to drive a business transaction. Typically for small businesses this is in the form of creating warm leads who fill out a contact form but it could also be an online sale (our focus will be on the former).

 

We recommend having call-to-action buttons (CTAs) at the top, middle and bottom of every page. This is typically in form of in your header and footer and one spot on each page. The idea is as you create value you are also giving users an opportunity to reach out to you.

 

Two things will help you maximize the amount of leads you can capture online. First, dare I say, is content and pagerank as this naturally drive traffic quantity and sales is a numbers game.

 

Give Something Of Value

Second, is giving something of value in exchange for a users contact information. This can be small but you need to recognize that a user giving you their information is a highly personal action which they know comes with a follow up sales email or phone call.

 

This again, is where having a credible Grand Rapids website design (notice our use of keywords here for our own website SEO) is super important. People aren't going to give you their contact information if you website looks sketchy.

 

For example, you might offer a PDF download of your pricing, or a free eBook with tips and information, or even offer a free consultation or discount on a service. At Folio, we offer a free website design as a way to provide value up front.

 

So think about what you can offer of value and offer this to your online visitors on your contact or lead capture page. It should be noted that all your CTA buttons through out your website should all link to this one single page.

 

Finally, Google tracks conversions as well. Naturally, if a users fills out a form this is a sign to Google that they sent a user to a relevant website and this in turn helps your page rank.

 

8. Social Media

Perhaps the greatest amount of confusion online today is what the heck to do with social media. What platform should you be on? Is it worth my time? How do I do it?

 

For small businesses, we recommend being on Facebook and if your industry leads itself to visuals (travel, photography, baking, physical products, etc), instagram and pinterest. Twitter is more optional based on if you personally like to tweet.

 

But back to what the heck to do with it. Once again, it comes back to content and also time. In a smaller business, social media is less needed. As you grow it provides a why to not only engage with your audience but to show them that you are a real, credible, active and local firm.

 

Social Media: Things To Post About

  • educational tips are best
  • product photos if well shot
  • office/production lines - people like to see the magic behind a product
  • occasional discounts - keep this limited
  • community or industry events if relevant
  • holidays/seasons/months if you have a nice illustration

 

Social Media No Nos

  • anything political
  • overtly personal information
  • cheesy quotes (quotes can work if done well)

 

Time, Money & Effort

Social media takes time to figure out and is different for each company. I would highly recommend you purchase basic equipment such as a decent camera (like a canon rebel) to ensure your quality is high and you may consider hiring a professional design company or marketing firm to assist you as you grow.

 

The short of it is that social media is hard. Better to keep it simple and do it well. Overall, our opinion is that most small businesses will gain more from a well managed website than social media.

 

9. Back Links

You've probably heard about back links at some point if you have done any SEO research before. In short, it's just a link back to your website from another external website. While it's a technique that has been around for a long time, it still holds a lot of weight in Google.

 

As you are finding out, website take time, money and effort to create, especially content. To this end, if another website owner is willing to take the time to write something about your company and link to your website, this referral is a powerful way for Google to gauge authenticity and authority.

 

In short, the more back links the better, BUT... the quality of the link matters too. There are lots of companies that market 'directory services'. While these can have minor impact on your ranking, you really want links from other credible websites.

 

Links from other companies in your industry, other bloggers, local or especially national news outlets, industry associations and social media posts are all a valuable source of 'SEO juice'. While back links are extremely valuable, they are one of the harder items on this list and typically occurs over time as the popularity of your business grows.

 

10. Set A Simple Goal

You made it to step 10! Nice work! Now it's time to set some goals. This will help you stay motivated to periodically review your rank position, competitors, audience and so forth. We recommend:

 

  1. Define your audience, location and primary service
  2. Determine what set of keywords you want to rank for
  3. Ensure you have a professionally designed website
  4. Blog at least once per month and include these keywords 2-3 times per post
  5. Ensure each page has a clear CTA which links to a contact form
  6. Ensure your contact form gives something of value in exchange for a visitors contact information

 

Cebu Website Design

Could your current website use a facelift? Do you need help with professional photos of your office or team? Perhaps some help getting started with blogging?

 

Folio Cebu has been helping small business owners in Cebu, Philippines build brilliant websites since 2010. We're the only firm in Cebu to strictly focused on website design and you can get started with a free website design.