5 tips for increasing your website’s SEO value and user experience.
When it comes to establishing a brand presence online, small business bloggers can take a few tips from me. I learned my share of SEO tips and tricks and how to deal with small business clients just like you. For most small business owners, time is of the essence. However, it takes a good deal amount of time and effort if you expect to compete in the search engines. The following five essential SEO tips for business bloggers will help keep you competitive online while increasing your website’s SEO value and user experience.
1. Content is king
The reality is that search engines base your entire search engine ranking on your content. They can’t see your pictures or your fancy flash banners, but they can see all of the unique content that goes up on your website. Plus, the more useful and relevant that content is to your audience, the better your search engine ranking and the better the user experience is for your visitors. Remember, having the right SEO keywords in place might be valuable to the search engines, but don’t forget that you want actual people to come to your site to buy your products and services. Without human beings, your business would soon dry up – so ensure you’re writing for search engines as well as humans.
2. Optimize your current content wherever you can
You probably have videos, audio recordings, and images on your site, right? Are those videos and audio recordings transcribed? And do all of your pictures have captions containing SEO keywords? Well, they should! What are you waiting for, be sure to transcribe everything in text form so it’s search engine scannable–and that goes for all interviews, conversations, video promos, user testimonials, etc.
3. Show some personality
The fastest way small businesses can turn off customers is by using too much marketing speak. Why? Because you come up sounding robotic or artificial! Your customers want to buy from a human being so be sure to infuse some personality into your blogs and web copy. You can still showcase your authority in your industry and keep things conversational. Think of the way you would speak to a client coming into your store – and use that voice – professional yet friendly. If you can, weave a personal story or product review wherever you can. Don’t be an open book about your personal life, but talk about personal ways that your product or services help actual people to humanize the user experience.
4. Use Geo-targeting for local search
If your carpet cleaning business is located in Athens, Georgia you hardly want potential customers contacting you for quotes from the next state over now do you? You can prevent mix-ups like this by associating your small business with a geographical location (i.e., neighborhood, city, state) by geo-targeting. This SEO tool benefits those searching for you locally (which over 60% of consumers do in search engines).
5. Improve website load times
Have you ever found a small business website site in Google, and clicked on the link, but the site took forever to load? Maybe you even got frustrated and looked elsewhere before it finished loading? If the load time of your small business site is slow, your customers are probably looking elsewhere. Plus, Google has introduced points for speed when it comes to search engine ranking. So it’s about time you deal with that huge banner or huge images on your site that takes forever to load. Improve your customer’s experience by reducing image sizes or by using a caching plugin to speed up your load times.
About The Author
Caeden M MacGregor is a staff writer for Prestige Marketing, a Vancouver internet marketing company that specializes in blogging on viral marketing, social media, and internet marketing tips and techniques.
Matthew is the President of Infront Webworks and is a New England native now calling Colorado Springs home. Matt attended The University of NH where he pursued a BS in Natural Resource Economics & Business Administration. Aside from Infront; Matthew has owned and managed two other online agencies based on the seacoast of New Hampshire and been a key player in multiple technology mergers & acquisitions. When he’s not bathing in technology, online marketing & business; he’s probably spending time with his wife and daughter, boating, skiing the trees, hiking or cooking..he is a foodie for sure!
