Online marketing is a huge focus for most businesses these days and getting on to the first page of the search engine results is the holy grail of small business marketing.
Unfortunately, SEO is a time consuming and often expensive strategy and to do it well involves a level of technical expertise that’s far beyond the average soloist. It doesn’t help that Google seems to change the rules as often as most people change their underwear so as soon you think you have it nailed, you have to go back to the drawing board and start all over again.
It is possible to boost your search engine rankings without the need to fork out a fortune on an SEO consultant, or spend day and night immersing yourself in tags, headers and code.
Here are a few SEO tweaks that aren’t going to take a lot of time or money but can make significant differences to your organic search presence.
- Make use of Google My Business. If you have a physical location for your business and you haven’t claimed your Google My Business listing, then you could be missing out. Google My Business is a great way to target local audiences and tap into mobile users who might be in the area and looking for what you have to offer. If you haven’t already, make sure you include very specific categories for your business, add images of your business inside and out and display your business hours and anything else people need to know.
- Optimise your images. What many people don’t realise about SEO is that Google Image Search has far less competition than their regular search engine because a lot of people just don’t bother to optimise their images. The good news is it’s not hard to do this, all you need to do is create a very specific filename for each photo that uses long tail keywords you’re targeting, and also include these as alt text – this is the piece of text that describes what your image is about to viewers.
- Use outbound links. While a lot of us pay attention to our inbound links, it’s easy to forget the outbound ones. While inbound links are definitely the priority, the sites you link to are also important when it comes to improving your search engine visibility. Linking to high-quality websites that are considered authoritative makes your site more likely to contain relevant, well-researched content and this may help boost your search engine rankings. If you have content on your website it doesn’t hurt to go back and add in some good quality links and see if it makes a difference.
While these three ideas might be surprisingly simple, they can make a positive difference to your search engine presence, especially if you are targeting local audiences and you use really specific keywords for your images.
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