Starting a new business venture can be a daunting task, but well worth the risk if you manage to succeed. Today we live in a digital world, surrounded by search engines and social media. Most of us live our lives online in one way or another. We check Facebook to see what our friends are up to or we may check LinkedIn to connect with a past work colleague.
This is true for businesses as well. For today’s businesses to succeed, they must have an online presence. A large part of that is having a website for your business that makes it easy for both potential and current customers to learn more about your goods or services. But with the billions of websites that are currently on the internet, how do potential customers find your website?
The answer is search engines like Google or Bing. Getting on the first page of search engine results pages can be a large undertaking for new small businesses with limited funds. That is why many choose to outsource their SEO work to industry experts like Sure Oak. This article will help you get started on optimizing your business website for search engines by giving you 6 easy to follow search engine optimization tips. These tips can help your business website get better rankings on search engines.
Just be aware that SEO is a process, and it can take anywhere from 6 to 12 months to see results. Be weary of websites that offer #1 Google rankings for a price! It simply is not true, and it could end up getting your site unlisted from search engines.
6 Top SEO Tips For New Business Sites
Tip #1: Find The Right Keywords
In the search engine world, keywords are everything. What are keywords? They are search terms that users enter in search engines to find what they are looking for. These very often are not limited to single teams like “SEO”. Keywords can also be phrases like “chicken feed Austin” or "Texas SEO agency".
Search engines are getting smarter every day. In fact, today’s search engines must be able to recognize whole sentences due to voice technology like Siri or Google Home. Keywords like “where can I buy chicken feed in Austin” are becoming more pervasive.
To get your site to rank on search engines, you need to identify how your potential customers will most likely search for your company. Try to come up with 10 to 12 keywords.
New websites start out with little to no authority with search engines. This is because search engines do not know about you. Ranking for single- or double-word keywords will be impossible until you gain authority with the search engines, so do not include these in your initial list of keywords that you would like to rank for.
Armed with your list of keywords, you can begin to develop your business website in the right direction. The rest of the SEO tips listed in this article all depend on having a solid list of keywords available.
Tip #2: Optimize Your Domain Name
If you have not purchased a domain name yet or have recently purchased one, then this tip will be of tremendous help to you. Brand new domains have their SEO work cut out for them because search engines like Google have never indexed them and there obviously are no links from other sites to the new domain. This means that you are starting out with zero authority. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but something that you should be aware of.
When you purchase a domain name, you have several options available to you. You can get one that matches your business name. This is what a great number of businesses do. This makes it easy to tie your website to your business and will eventually help your website rank for people who search for your business’ name.
From a search engine optimization perspective, you could get a domain name that matches the primary keyword that you would like to rank for, if that domain is available. As an example, if your primary keyword is “best chicken feed in Austin Texas” then you could try to find a domain that is “bestchickenfeedatx,” or something similar. Google loves to see keywords in URLs, so this is something that will help you rank.
Tip #3: Start With Awesome Content
Long gone are the days of writing web pages that are stuffed with keywords in an unnatural way just get high rankings with search engines. Today’s search engines can easily recognize great content that engages readers. Your site must have great content from the beginning.
But what is great content? This is content that is a sufficient length to fully explain your subject matter. It has a mix of content that not only includes text but may also include photos, infographics, and/or videos. Your content should be easy to read and not full of technical jargon. Finally, your content should be separated into logical segments with headings. Try to avoid lengthy paragraphs because most readers on the internet have a short attention span and will quickly get bored.
Ensure that the content on your page aligns with the keywords that you have chosen. For example, let us say that we want to add a page to our website describing our chicken feed and the keyword is “chicken feed Austin.” You will need to make sure that your keyword or a variant of your keyword is in the title of your page and at least one heading. Ensure that your keyword shows up a few times in the text of your page. This will help search engines understand that you want this page to be found by anyone searching for “chicken feed Austin”.
Tip #4: Organize Your Site Correctly
Search engines gather data from your website by crawling it with a bot called a search bot. These bots will scrape your content and index the data into the search engine’s database. The key to making sure that your site is easily crawled by these bots is organizing your site correctly.
To properly organize a website, you will need to separate it into sections. Typically, this results in sections such as: Our Services, Our Products, About Us, etc. If you sell products online, organize your products into categories and have pages specifically designated for each of these categories. If you have a blog on your website (which we highly recommend because it is a great source of content), then you should have your posts separated into categories as well.
The awesome part about this is that it not only makes it easy for the search bots to index your site, but it makes it easier for visitors to your site find what they are looking for. This results in more engaged users who stay on your website longer, which is another signal to search engines that your site is authoritative for the search terms used and they will want to rank your website higher.
Tip #5: Consider Using A Content Management System (CMS)
Developing a website using HTML code can be a long and technically challenging process to undertake, not to mention how hard it would be to update the website. Luckily, we live in a great world in which Content Management Systems exist.
A Content Management System is software that you can install on your web server that can make creating and updating your site as easy as using a document editor. Arguably, the most popular is Wordpress. Using a CMS like WordPress can make it a snap to create your website.
They are also easily extensible using plugins and themes. These plugins make it possible to extend your Wordpress based site to fit your unique business needs. Since this article is about SEO, I should mention that Wordpress has several SEO plugins available to help you ensure that the pages and blog posts you write are search engine optimized.
Tip #6: Outsource The Work
As I mentioned earlier, search engine optimization is a process, and it can take 6 to 12 months to see any results. You must work on your SEO efforts daily to constantly improve your search engine rankings.
Unfortunately, for new businesses or even established small businesses, you might be more focused on the day-to-day running of your business. This does not leave much time for you to work on your SEO efforts, which will make them fall by the wayside.
Thankfully, there are small SEO agencies like this SEO Austin company that specialize in helping other small businesses with their digital marketing needs. Like anything with business, be sure to shop around and find the SEO agency with the most value at the best price.
Go With An SEO Pro
As you can see, search engine optimization is something that is hugely important for your business. If you follow these top SEO tips, you will have a great start to getting your new business website listed with search engines.
