An effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy can be essential in your small business' success, and you can do it even on a tight budget.

What is SEO?

SEO is word of mouth gone digital for the Internet era. Simply put, SEO is a set of techniques to help your website gain more visibility on the search engine results pages. A well-defined SEO strategy can help your brand gain exposure and drive targeted traffic relevant to your business to your website.

Staying Relevant

The major search engines change and update the way they rank websites, so you need to keep up with the changes to maintain your search engine rankings. The idea behind search engines is to give users the most relevant search results.

It's essential to ensure that your website has a relevant and targeted content strategy and is well structured for design.

How can You Improve Your Business SEO?

Firstly, you need to know why you want people to come to your website and what actions you want them to take there. Do you want them to buy a product or service, opt-in to an email list, or fill out a quote or contact form?

You can do many things to improve your SEO, but we'll focus on the basics. My SEO Sucks!, see website will give you detailed advice on SEO strategy.

Tips for improving your SEO:

• From a technical perspective, keep an eye on your website's sitemap, indexing, site crawl, and scheme markup. If your business does not have an IT specialist to assist, then you can look at WordPress plugins.

• Always check the readability of your content and that there are no duplicates before publishing. Make sure that your content pages have keywords in their meta title tags and descriptions. It would help if you also used relevant keywords in the anchor texts of your internal links.

• Start writing a blog. It's an easy way to get more backlinks and add keywords organically. Regular fresh content also means search engine indexers will visit the site more often, increasing the site's ranking.

• Create a sitemap for your website using one of the many free tools available. Submit it to Google through the Search Console and then add it to your website's root folder.

• Optimize your site for mobile devices, as the number of mobile searchers is always increasing. You can use the free Mobile-Friendly Test tool from Google to determine how well your site is optimized for smartphones.

• Invite your customers to leave reviews, as most people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. It also gains the trust of potential customers when reviews appear on SERPs.

Conclusion

There's a lot you can do to boost the SEO of your small business, even if you're on a tight budget. Learn as much as you can about free tools, use them to your advantage, and publish new content on an ongoing basis. Over time, you will find your visibility will increase, and your website will climb the SERPs.