Understanding SEO best practices for your small business can ensure your content and brand visibility. All businesses are competing for the number one spot on Google search, and it’s essential to understand at least the SEO basics to help your content reach the right audience. At Rose & Gold, we focus on organic and paid traffic through SEO and keywords so our clients can have the best of both worlds. But if you are just getting started, organic SEO is a great place to start.
Find the Right Keywords
When developing keywords for your content strategy, it’s essential to think like your customer. What problems are they looking to solve, and how does your product or service solve them? Once you have a solid understanding of your customers and what they are searching for, you can clearly understand what terms they might be looking up. For example, your customer might look up unique shirts or bright patterned dresses if you sell unique clothing. They might be looking for bold prints or custom clothing. Once you can pick 20 or more keywords and terms, you can use a service like MOZ or SEMRUSH to further build your keyword list. This will help you develop your content tiles and strategy.
What Makes You Unique
SEO is all about standing out. What makes your brand unique? What do you offer that differentiates you from your competition? Use your market differentiators to better guide your keyword building. Eventually, you can shift into PPC for competitive keywords.
Don’t Overuse Keywords
The key to keywords is simple- create your content for the customer, not Google. There is a strategy in adding some keywords to your title, headers, and intro paragraph, but don’t stuff your content with them. It’s easy to overuse keywords and write blogs that feel like that one college essay you wrote that had the same paragraph written three different ways, so aim to gently sprinkle in keywords but don’t make them the main focus.
Build Smart Links to Your Site
Linking is important to build an SEO hierarchy on your site. It’s a great idea to have one or two internal links and one outbound link to another source. If you can create content that is hosted on other websites, your content will perform better. This is not always possible, depending on your industry, but if you can write a few guest posts to link to your own site, it will help with visibility.
Create High-Quality Content
While SEO is important, creating high-quality content is essential. Google was created to offer resources and answers to questions, so your content should be serving your audience, not just your content strategy.
Share Your Content
Get the word out there! Don’t just write a blog post and forget about it. Share it on social, add it to your email campaigns, and social media can actually help your SEO perform better.
Measure Your Results
Great, you created awesome content and found the right keywords, but what’s the ROI? Are you getting new conversions? Are you building your email list? Understanding how your content is helping will be crucial to your content strategy. More site visits, link clicks, and conversions can be tracked in your analytics, and you can also use SEO tools to track them. This will help you understand what is working and what is not.
SEO can feel overwhelming, but these SEO best practices tips will help you get started and create a foundation for a smart content strategy. If you want support on your SEO, our team is well versed in strategy, SEO, content creation, and social media. We would love to help you build a strong strategy that will help you share your content and business with the world.
