While more and more small Indian businesses lean towards online marketing to ramp up sales, most business owners have limited exposure to the online world. They’re often intimidated by jargon like “search engine optimization.” Luckily, small business search engine optimization (SEO) is now rightly receiving the attention it deserves.
SEO is nothing but taking certain steps to ensure that your website appears higher in search engine rankings.
Search engines play a crucial role in leading potential consumers to your business website. Always consider that there may be thousands of websites that talk about the same product or service as yours.
While most use search engines like Google to find what they need, only a few would care to scroll beyond the top few listings on the first page. Your SEO strategy should aim to get your business website listed as high as possible on the first page.
How to rank high on search engine pages
Most people look only at Page 1 of their results when they search for something online. If your website appears on Page 2, you’ve lost a potential customer already. These tips will help you on your SEO journey.
- Create a lot of useful content.
- Add keyword phrases to your website.
- Make sure your website is user-friendly.
Small business search engine optimization is a science. Here’s how to make this science benefit your small business.
1. Create a lot of useful content
The quality of your website content is the primary deciding factor for achieving a higher rank in search results. People go on the internet to find answers or information. Search engines like Google want to give them the information they seek.
Google’s spiders crawl through everything on the internet, making note of what is where.
One way to get the spiders’ attention is to regularly create content that is useful for your potential customers. The more content you create — helpful articles, infographics, how-to videos — the more Google will notice. This will help move your web listing onto Page 1, bringing more traffic to your website.
Write smart
The importance of one's web writing skills can therefore not be underestimated. You will have to learn to identify keyword phrases to incorporate into your content.
Keywords are typed into search engines by people looking to get information about something.
For example, “sarkari result” is often-searched keyword in India. This is no surprise, as education is key to a promising future.
Stating the obvious, the keywords you should use are dictated by what your website is about. In short, you must determine what words customers type in when looking for products or services you provide. This can be done by:
- Talking to your customers and finding out what they type in when looking for businesses like yours.
- Copying the keywords your competitors use by inputting their website addresses into the Find new keywords feature in Google's free keyword planner.
Learn more about finding right keywords and phrases to use on your website in this post.
2. Add keyword phrases to your website
Once you’re done identifying keywords, you have to learn to use them judiciously on your website.
Keywords have to be carefully interspersed throughout, with a different keyword for each page.
At the same time, it is important that they should make sense within the narrative. There is no sense in repeating keywords at different places on a page without any coherence.
Don’t forget your photo and video titles
The images and videos that you embellish your content with can also influence the SEO ranking of your website. A few tips:
- Use photos and videos that are relevant to the subject in question.
- Place the image or video next to the text it pertains to.
- Be sure you include the keyword in the name of each photo/video you use on that page.
The reason for this is that an image that accompanies a specific text will rank higher with regard to the keyword that it’s been optimized for. Considering that businesses usually have a stock of pictures of their products and services, this can prove to be a handy way of enhancing the SEO ranking of your website.
3. Make sure your website is user-friendly
As important as keyword phrases are in helping enhance the SEO ranking of a website, they don’t tell the whole story. Premier search engines like Google don’t just take the use of keyword phrases into account when deciding the SEO ranking of a website. They also factor in things like the amount of time visitors spend on your website.
Enhancing the visitor’s experience by improving the usability of your website is also a key factor in deciding the SEO ranking of your website. It is therefore important that your website should be user friendly for those who frequent search engines to look for products and services.
There’s one more thing search engines like Google pay attention to: security.
Not sure if your website has an SSL? Find out here.
Since last year, Google has been favoring websites with SSL certificates over those without. Not having an SSL certificate means your website is Not Secure and will be labeled so in search listings. Most people who see this warning will quickly click away. Learn how to get an SSL, including the free ones, here.
Editor’s note: Rest easy with SSL encryption from GoDaddy. This digital certificate shields all information sent to or from your website from interception or theft.
Small business search engine optimization — it pays off
To conclude, while it is good that small Indian businesses take online marketing seriously, they do need to understand its dynamics to get the best results. This especially holds true with regard to small business search engine optimization.
Once you have achieved the much-coveted ranking on the first page, your business will witness a heartening flow of business leads.
There is nothing in traditional marketing that will match up to the efficiency of a good SEO strategy.
One can quickly learn the ropes of online marketing with a healthy dose of patience and practice. As an alternative, one can easily hire the services of a quality digital marketing expert.
The time for small Indian businesses to go online is truly here.
