If you’re a small business owner, there are a lot of things to think about when it comes to your website. In addition to making sure your site looks great and provides valuable information to visitors, you also need to make sure it’s optimized for search engines.
Fortunately, optimizing your site for search doesn’t have to be difficult. By following the steps in this SEO checklist, you can make sure your site is as search engine friendly as possible.
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Keyword Research
The first step in optimizing your site for search engines is to do some keyword research. This involves identifying the keywords and phrases that people are most likely to use when searching for information about your business.
There are a number of different ways to do keyword research, but one of the most effective is to use Google’s Keyword Planner. This tool allows you to find out how many people are searching for specific keywords and phrases, as well as what the competition is like for those keywords.
Once you’ve identified some valuable keywords and phrases, you can begin incorporating them into your website content. But be careful not to overdo it – too many keywords can actually hurt your search engine rankings.
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Optimize Your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
One of the most important things you can do to optimize your site for search engines is to make sure your title tags and meta descriptions are accurate and appealing to potential visitors.
Title tags are the text that appears in the browser tab for your website, and meta descriptions are the short snippet of text that appears under the title tag in search engine results pages. Both of these elements are important for attracting attention from potential visitors, so make sure they accurately reflect the content of your site.
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Optimize Your Site for Mobile Devices
In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people accessing the Internet via mobile devices. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you’re missing out on a lot of potential traffic.
Fortunately, optimizing your site for mobile devices is relatively easy. You can start by making sure your website is responsive – that is, it adapts to the size of the screen it’s being viewed on. You can also use tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check your site for mobile-friendly errors.
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Optimize Your Site for Local Search
If you’re a small business owner, it’s important to make sure your site is optimized for local search. This involves including location-based keywords and phrases in your website content. As well as adding a Google Maps widget to your site.
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Publish High-Quality Content
Last but not least, one of the most important things you can do to optimize your site for search engines is to publish high-quality content. This means writing informative, interesting articles that people will want to read.
In order to rank well in search engine results, your site must be seen as a valuable resource by both humans and robots. By publishing high-quality content, you can make sure your site is seen in the best possible light by both groups.
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Implement the Google My Business Plugin
The Google My Business plugin for WordPress is a great way to build your online presence. It allows you to put all of your business information in one place and optimizes it for search engines. If someone searches for your business name on any of the major search engines (like Google or Bing). Then they will immediately see (among other things) your physical address, phone number, website URL, email address, link to map location, and photos of your business right at the top of their web browser. Further down on the results page there may also be reviews from customers who have left feedback about your company’s products or services.
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Think Local (As Well As National!) When Optimizing Your Site
When it comes to optimizing your website for search engines, it’s important to think both locally and nationally. That is, make sure you’re targeting the right keywords and phrases, as well as optimizing your site for local search.
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Use Social Media to Promote Your Site
Social media can be a great way to promote your website and increase traffic to your site. You can share links to your articles on social media. And use social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn to build relationships with other bloggers and website owners.
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Use External Links Strategically
External links are another important factor in Small Business SEO. When you include a link to another website in your content are telling Google that that website is a good resource, and deserves to be ranked on the same page as you. Plus, these links can also pass authority to your target website, which means it will benefit from the association with you.
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Don’t Use Generic Article Templates
When you write new posts on your site, use unique titles and content that has never been published before (or not in some time). It’s true that search engines like Google are getting better at recognizing duplicate content; however, this is still an issue. Even if search engines don’t penalize you directly for duplicated content on your own site. They may rank lower sites with more original information higher than yours when evaluating results for a particular keyword or phrase.
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Update Your Site Regularly
One of the best ways to keep your site in good shape for search engines is to update it regularly. This means publishing new articles on a regular basis, and keeping your old content fresh and relevant. You can use a tool like WordPress’ editorial calendar to help you plan and publish your content on a regular schedule.
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Monitor Your Site’s SEO Performance
Finally, it’s important to monitor your site’s SEO performance on an ongoing basis. This means using tools like Google Analytics to track your website traffic. As well as checking your site’s search engine rankings regularly. If you notice that your rankings have dropped or that you’re no longer getting the amount of traffic you to. Then it’s time to investigate and make changes to your SEO strategy.
