30 SEO Tips Exclusively for Small Businesses and Startups

If you are a startup or a small business owner, the following few tips would prove extremely beneficial for your long run. Though you would be guided through the journey of SEO if you are hiring a digital marketing agency, still it is important for you to know the same beforehand as a company owner. 

1.       SEO is must, or else your business won’t receive any visitors from search engines. Unless you do follow an effective SEO, then search engines will not be able to categorize and rank your website for keywords relevant to your business.

2.       While we speak of SEO, we mean both on-site SEO and off-site SEO. One without the other is of no use. Period!

3.       SEO must be started right at the beginning. The more delay you make, the higher chances of your competitors to rank above you.

4.       Learn and know your competitors. Do complete research to find out what brings a particular competitor on first page with the same keyword as yours.

5.       Remember, an SEO strategy that might have worked for one business or website, might not work for you. No two sites are the same.

6.       SEO is not necessarily expensive. Big results can be achieved on small budget if you invest in good content and effective online relationships.

7.       You have to be patient with the SEO results, as they are not instant and might not be noticed for weeks and even months.

8.       Your website can never be finished. It needs to be regularly developed by adding to and improving it.

9.       It is suggested to adapt to algorithm updates to achieve good rankings.

10.   Don’t ever risk for Google penalties; this might result in significant and long term loss of visitors to your site.

11.   Set-up and use Google Search Console to find out what keywords your site is ranking for and which other sites are linking to yours.

12.   Use of Google Analytics is suggested to find the number of visitors your site gets, the keywords being searched for and the pages most visited.

13.   Google My Business is another must use, to build trust with Google and to improve rankings for local keywords.

14.   Google is a great source of traffic but you must diversify your traffic sources to not to put you in a vulnerable position.

15.   Use Pay Per Click as one of the major SEO steps.

16.   Low quality backlinks or low quality contents can result in your site being penalized by search engines.

17.   While creating content, keep people and readers in mind, and don’t prioritize search engines. Contents must interest people, and persuade them to get in touch with you and your business.

18.   Don’t duplicate content. Don’t encourage plagiarism. Remove, merge or add to pages with little content on them.

19.   Invest in contents that ensure your website to be on the 1^st page.

20.   Create videos that engage people for more time resulting in more time being spent on your site and also allow you to get links from video sharing sites.

21.   Go for visually attractive statistics, charts, graphs and infographics which people would be attracted to see, share and link.

22.   Addition of blogs and articles to be posted to your websites would make it simple and quick to add new pages of content to your site.

23.   Balance creating content with marketing content. If you create content without marketing it then people will struggle to find it, and if they can’t find it they can’t link to it or share it.

24.   A unique and descriptive title for every content takes you a long way in terms of content marketing.

25.   Likewise, description meta descriptions of every page would persuades people to click on your site instead of the other sites listed in the search results.

26.   Research keywords before optimising for them. If you choose the wrong keywords, regardless of what you do for on-site and off-site SEO, you’ll get very few visitors and/or visitors who don’t convert into sales.

27.   Google’s Keyword Tool is an excellent way to find good list of words and phrases related to the keyword ideas that you enter into it.

28.   Target for relevant keywords that would make it easier and quicker for your website to rank for them.

29.   Target keywords with commercial intent. You want visitors who are ready to spend money rather than those who are just looking for information.

30.   Long-tail keywords are good source of traffic; it’s quicker to rank for longer specific keyword phrases and more than 40% of searches are comprised of four or more words.