To get your small business site in front of as many potential customers as possible, you need on page SEO. Search engine optimization is vital to your growth and success. With proper on page SEO tactics you can boost online visibility, external links, keywords, and most important of all, organic traffic.
The top three marketing tools a small business has are . . .
54 percent email marketing
51 percent website traffic
48 percent social media marketing
On page SEO can make a big impact on your bottom line, not just by increasing traffic, but by also cutting your marketing spend in half. Do you run PPC ads on Google? With stellar on page search optimization in place, you can rank page one without running ads.
Make search engine optimization a priority in 2018 with the following SEO tips for small business online growth and success.
Get Local with Your Small Business
Mobile has become the preferred search device for products and services, making it essential to have your small business listed. In fact, 50 percent of mobile consumers who will visit a store they found in local search results within a day.
When someone searches for products and services similar to yours, they will see your business, website, and also get featured on Google Maps. Leverage other local listing sites like Yelp or Angie’s List as well. The more local listings, the more your small business will appear in SERPs.
Local listings are also the perfect platform for your customers to rate and review your business, products, or services. This is more important than ever, since online consumers check ratings and reviews prior to making a decision to buy.
Make Your Small Business Site Mobile-Friendly
The New Year will usher in a few changes for on page SEO, and one of them is Google mobile-first index. This will give priority to mobile friendly, fast loading sites when a user searches via mobile. This is very important for future business growth and success, especially since most consumers are now more mobile than ever before.
A few on page SEO mobile-friendly tips for your small business are:
Make your site’s content readable on mobile devices, including the text and font you decide to use.
Avoid software that is not mobile-friendly like Flash.
Make your CTA buttons and anchor text links easy to see and not in the way of a users scrolling thumb.
Ensure your page load time on mobile is optimized and under one second.
To check these potential on page SEO pitfalls, turn to Google. Google has a number of tools you can use to check just how mobile-friendly your site actually is . . .
Google algorithms are always on the hunt for duplicate content and poorly constructed SEO titles (page titles) and meta descriptions. These issues could cause your small business website and pages to drop in ranking.
The first step to better on page SEO is to look at your page titles and meta-descriptions. You want to tell Google exactly what your page is about, and why it fulfills search intent.
Make a list of all your title tags and start looking for duplicate keywords, and subpar title descriptions pages that promote your products or services. Then get a little creative by replacing those duplicate keywords using online tools like SEMrush’s Phrase Match.
To highlight this important on page SEO tactic, here is an example from Brilliance, for product page best practices, listing a number of keyword rich options.
Time to Make On Page SEO a Priority . . .
Your small business can’t afford to ignore proper on page SEO tactics. These 100 percent free changes can decrease your need for large PPC ad spend while also providing a better user experience for your site’s visitors on both desktop and mobile. How will you make on page SEO work for you in 2018?
Nick Rojas combines 20 years of experience working with and consulting for small to medium business and a passion for journalism to help readers grow. He writes about technology, marketing, and social media for the aspiring entrepreneur. When Nick is not sharing his expertise, he can be found spending time at the beach with his dog Presto. You can follow him on twitter: @NickARojas
I’ve talked a lot about SEO throughout the 4+ years of this blog. One thing I’ve failed to shed light on is negative SEO. This will be a very short post on negative SEO but you can read more over at Moz.
What is negative SEO?
It’s an SEO campaign that is launched to HARM and not improve the rankings of website.
Who would do such a thing?
In most cases it’s a website and business owners looking to drop the search rankings of their competitors. They’re many business owners out there who will do whatever it takes to beat their competition. It’s unfortunate but it happens.
In other cases it could be an SEO company who doesn’t know what their doing or is operating on old SEO principles that Google now frowns upon.
How does it work?
The most common case of negative SEO I’ve seen deals with un-natural ways of link building. This would be adding a bunch of backlinks on low quality sites pointing to a website with the exact same anchor text. It’s the exact same issue one of our clients faced a couple of years ago when they hired what they thought was a trustworthy SEO company.
How to prevent it?
Last week I was doing some link building for a client when I noticed they had 29 00 new backlinks pointing to their site!!
Certainly wasn’t me. When I dug deeper I found all the new backlinks were spammy.
In short, there is no way to stop someone from building spammy backlinks. But there is a way to stop Google from connecting those backlinks to your site. You can use a backlink checker tool like Ahrefs to monitor your backlinks. Then you can use the Google disavow tool to disconnect these spammy backlinks and negative SEO campaign from your website.
By using Ahrefs you will be able to see the majority of backlinks pointing to your website. When you add your website to the dashboard, you can set up automated emails to be sent to your account whenever a new backlink is discovered. This is very helpful and a much easier way to monitor your backlinks.
For the longest time I avoided Reddit. The main reason is the design of the website. I’m a design snob in some ways and viewing Reddit feels like it’s 1999.
But I’m always looking for local online discussion groups to engage with and to find backlink opportunities. Surely enough I found a subreddit for Victoria BC. A subreddit is a fancy name for a group. In that subreddit I found that there were a lot of on-going discussions about everything local.
What I also found is that many people use the Victoria subreddit for business recommendations. And this is your chance to use Reddit as a means to get local SEO backlinks for your website.
Before I explain how, DO NOT spam your local subreddit with a bunch of backlinks to your site. Engage in other discussions and add value to the community. You’ll get kicked out fairly quick by moderators if they notice you only post backlinks.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s help you find a local subreddit.
Search For A Subreddit
The first step is to search for a subreddit. By far the easiest way is to do a Google site search. If I was going to search for a Victoria BC subreddit, I would Google:
“site:reddit.com Victoria BC”
You can also use Reddit search bar located at the top right on the front page.
Now that you have found your subreddit, go ahead and search some terms that people use to describe your business. Use the same search bar within Reddit, but make sure you are in the subreddit before you do your search.
Otherwise, feel free to do a Google site search again. If I was looking for mentions of SEO, I would Google this:
What happens when you do find a thread where someone is looking for your service or business?
How To Link & Two Benefits Of Reddit Backlinks
When you happen to find a thread where someone asks for a recommendation or is looking for your business, be sure to state you are the business owner and give your elevator pitch. Don’t oversell yourself.
When you do comment, make sure to link back to your website. Follow the formatting for links in the image below.
If I was to link back to this site, I would format the link like this:
By engaging with your local subreddit, you are in a way networking. The more active you become, the more trust and credibility you build. This is the first benefit.
The second benefit is that you get a high quality dofollow backlink. Backlinks aren’t the top factor when it comes to local SEO and better rankings. But it’s still important.
I’m sure hardcore Redditors might get annoyed about me posting this. But again, be sure to engage with your local subreddit. Heck, even keep an eye out for opportunities to recommend friends. Just DON’T spam!
This is the final post of our page speed improvement series. Today’s post will discuss content delivery networks vs dedicated hosting servers.
For high-loaded websites, CDN or Content Delivery Network and dedicated servers are normally used. In this post, I’ll go through both servers and compare their advantages and disadvantages, their variations and a few tips on which one to choose between the two hosting options.
What Is A CDN?
CDN works by serving content to end-users with high performance and high accessibility. The networks of CDN serve most all web contents such as videos, text, and URLs.
How will CDN help with your website?
Through CDN service, there are a lot of internet nodes being designed to share web contents. So after browsing your website, it will then send data from the closest data centre to the users. In this manner, CDN helps in reducing the latency or failure that is due to networks, web server, etc. Various CDN’s utilize P2P technology in caching files to produce top performance.
CDN vs. Dedicated Server
Since CDN is already ideal, why should we need dedicated server? What are CDN’s weaknesses compared to the traditional dedicated server? Well, read on.
Performance
Rationally, CDN can guarantee 100% uptime because it is being served by numerous servers; but, it is also possible to have slowness due to the configuration of the network. Using dedicated server, the performance will depend on data centre network and server hardware configuration. Since there is a dedicated bandwidth allocation, there will not be too much latency present.
Security
For many CDN service, security poses the biggest concern. Since it’s going to send data from your website to various locations or servers, it is difficult to have everything protected particularly when it pertains to sensitive information on the website.
Then again, a dedicated server is going to offer maximum security to any data since everything is being kept on one device. Provided that the single server is properly secured, data leaks are not possible.
Reliability
Today, you can find a lot of CDN service providers on the market but, there is a huge difference in their service quality. A CDN can be built through 3 or 30 nodes. A good CDN service provider has data centres on various places such as Microsoft Azure, but it is not possible for many CDN service providers as they just have a few servers from various DCs and don’t have much access to the network material. A dedicated server is completely controlled by a team with complete access to different configurations, has control over resource allocation and security protection and updates.
Support
If issues do happen, the CDN support will examine each node to get it fixed, and the process may take quite a while depending on the complicacy. A dedicated server is supported by the dedicated server service provider, given that the server is still up and they can access it. Means, unless it’s a MUST, they don’t have to bother your server provider for problem fixing.
When should you choose CDN or dedicated server?
Ideally, a good dedicated server is more costly compared to CDN services; particularly there are CDN providers such as MaxCDN which are only about $120 per year. On the comparison mentioned above, we have learned that a dedicated server is in fact much better than CDN when it comes to performance since it’s driven by the dedicated resource.
So it all comes down to how much you’re willing to spend. We’ve found for our clients websites and ours, the results in page speed improvements have been great despite having a shared hosting account with a CDN in place.
People who visit websites prefer web pages that load quickly. According to experiments by Google, a slight delay, even just hundred milliseconds, can create a negative impact. But, what does “page speed” certainly mean? Today, in this six-chapter detailed speed optimization guide, I will tackle about page speed and explore why a quick loading page is vital.
Numerous benchmarks and research papers have proven that improving the speed of your website is one of the highest ROI and most inexpensive investments. Fast page speed is important for a lot of reasons. First is to provide first-rate user experience. If your website has a better user experience, then the chances are visitors will spend more time on your website thus the chance of buying from you increases.
Another reason to augment the loading speed is for good search engine ranking. Effective April 2010, a website’s search engine ranking is based on its upload times. In short – if all other aspects are the same – fast websites have a higher ranking compared to slow websites.
So if you have a slower site – what can you do to improve it? I will provide you valuable tips that you can implement right away.
Slow? How Slow?
Google engineers have found out that the hardly visible page load time is about 0.4 seconds is sufficient enough to make users search less.
Nowadays, online businesses have all the available resources that they need to provide content in an instant, however, to control and balance these resources; they will require a website that is speed-optimized that provides the finest user experience.
And what happens when they don’t?
One out of four visitors will leave a website loading takes more than 4 seconds. About 46% of users don’t return to websites that are performing poorly. Owners of the website have about 5 seconds to accommodate visitors before they think of abandoning the site. A 1-second delay in loading time could result to $1.6 billion in yearly losses for many online businesses like Amazon.
About 47% of online customers expect less than 2 seconds of page load time before they consider leaving – 40% will abandon the website if they are waiting at the third second, long before a performance analytics tool detects their presence in the website. Two seconds is the average peak loading time for conversion – which is faster that many websites around the world.
And what happens when they speed up?
Acceptable Website Performance – The Neuroscience and Rhythm
The occipital lobe of the brain can store visual info in the form of sensory memory in the speed of 100 milliseconds.
According to Goggle researchers that a loading time that’s less than 100 milliseconds provides visitors the impression of an instant site reaction the same with how the visual sensory memory processor of the brain functions in surges of 100 milliseconds. The memory store is emptied after 0.1 seconds as the photoreceptor cells found in the eyes convey more info going to the occipital lobe.
To maintain a continuous flow of thought, a 1 second loading time for a page is sufficient enough – users will feel more in control during their browsing activities, and the mental strain isn’t intensified except if the website doesn’t respond as intended.
Visitors will barely stay if there is a 10-second delay. Visitors will feel impatient, frustrated and feel abandoned if there is a delay and they will tend to stop going back to such sluggish websites again.
Reasons Why Your Website Is Loading Slow
How a website performs is always important. A website that performs well improves user experience enormously. This will result in visitors returning to your site, staying for a long amount of time and converting. A well-performing website can be typically seen high in the search results due to the fact that the indexer is experiencing minimal issues with it. And, mobile devices are becoming more vital today that a site can’t manage to perform at a slow rate and without the right improvements.
Below are lists of the most basic mistakes:
Speed optimization is completely neglected while building the website
A lot of businesses don’t think that their website has to be optimized during its development. They only think that it needs optimizing after their website is live and they don’t get the desired organic traffic. By that time, the website will be so intricate that a systematic optimization will need them to essentially start all over. It is ideal to have websites optimized while it’s in the development stage. This will help save time and resources.
Cheap web hosting service
Cheap web hosting service is only cheap at first. With millions of websites, the space for web hosting is crowded enough. Ordinary web hosting services offer cheap services at the same time compromising quality. They are able to do this by hosting a number of sites on a single server. This approach slows down web pages a lot that the revenue loss is greater than the reduction cost.
Too many plugins and widgets
Do you want to have a website that’s well-designed? Just remember, add-ons that sometimes come in as widgets or plugins can weigh on the performance of your website. The addition of a widget can add a 2-second loading time to your page. And, plugins that stream huge date to do difficult operations can greatly affect your site. In the end, these add-ons can even lessen the web page’s functionality.
Advertisements
Advertisements can slow things down. Your page is going to load a lot of stuff from the web to show it to your visitors, so make sure not to overdo it. If you try to make profits in this manner, it may cost you more.
Designs with large hi-res images
Attractive and fine-looking themes may come at a price. Using images with high-resolution may make your site look great. However, it may significantly slow it down. Website owners and developers may be tempted such endeavor and often makes sense. But usually, they end up costing bandwidth and make you lose clients.
Websites not optimized for mobile users
Almost everyone today is using mobile devices, and it’s imperative that your site must be mobile device friendly. Sites that aren’t optimized for mobile device users normally experience from problems such as videos that are non-playable, bloated graphics and inappropriate cross-linking. Furthermore, Google has recently defined that to lower the PageRank of sites without mobile optimizations. And that is something to consider for website owners.
Wrapping it up
Though the issues mentioned above are very obvious, I have witnessed numerous sites experiencing the same issues and problems. Vital factors such as site speed, design, and usability suffer due to time or money matters. So it’s very important to begin with the basics and do some research.
Do not neglect the idea of optimizing website load speed. In today’s digital world, so you can be successful, you must deliver in a fast manner. Visitors will not stay long; you have just a few seconds to catch their attention. So begin optimizing the speed of your website now and you can reap the benefits anytime soon.
My next post will be on the difference between hosting accounts and what server you choose is important to website load speed.
To get your small business site in front of as many potential customers as possible, you need on page SEO. Search engine optimization is vital to your growth and success. With proper on page SEO tactics you can boost online visibility, external links, keywords, and most important of all, organic traffic.
