SEO for Small Business Websites

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is essential if you want your website to rank high in the search results. Higher ranking means more traffic to your website, and ultimately more leads and sales. At EMA, our team follows SEO best practices to assure your website content is more useful, engaging, and search engine friendly so your pages will rank higher in the search results.

‍Fact “Internet users who accessed search services through search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo is approximately 236.5 million and will reach 239.1 million by 2020”-- Source Statista.com

SEO for Small Business Websites

As a small business owner you're probably asking yourself, what can I do to make my website rank higher in search results? Although this may sound like a straightforward question, the answer is anything but simple.

Here's How Search Engines "Rank" Your Website

You launch your new website and Google visits it to "index" your site. It is then compared to other sites in the same industry that talk about the same things others in your industry talk about. Google then "Ranks" your website, which determines where it will show up in the search results. Think of "ranking" in this way... Google gives you a score and awards you a "spot" in the search results based on where it thinks you deserve to be placed (e.g. 3rd page, 2nd position etc.).

SEO Best Practices

Each page on your website should provide useful, sharable content that is specific to a given topic. The pages should include the following:

Title Tag - This is the HTML tag that shows the “Title” of your web page.
URL - This is URL of the page (e.g. https://www.your-domain.com/the-page-name)
Page Content - This is all of the content on the page including; text, photos, images, videos, etc.)
Alt Text on Images - This describes what the photo or image is about or its function. Visually impaired users with screen readers will be able to tell what the image is.

What are the Most Important SEO Ranking Factors?

Although there are hundreds of ranking factors, here is a shortlist of the ones we believe to be the most important:

An accessible and secure website
Fast-loading pages
Mobile friendly
How old your domain name is, and how much authority it has
The page content is high-quality, useful, sharable, and optimized
The website follows SEO technical best practices
Provides a good user experience
Pages contain links to other relevant internal pages and external sites
Social signals - Social media visibility considered by search engines
Accurate business information - Name Address Phone (NAP)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Small Business Websites

On-page Ranking Factors

Here is a shortlist of on-page ranking factors to consider:

Website is responsive and easily accessible on all devices (mobile, desktop and tablets)
Website content is unique and contains valuable information for the target audience
Web pages are "sharable" on connected social media channels
The website should provide users a great experience (eye-catching images, easy to read and navigate etc.)
Contains keywords that target search "Intent" (targets what the user is actually looking for)
Website is optimized for search engine crawlers
All core metatags, schema markup, rich snippets are in place

Free Business Report

Not sure how your business is doing online? Get your free report in 60-seconds!

free report