How can small businesses benefit from using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques for their websites? Let us count the ways.
* You will get higher rankings on search engine results pages, making it easier for you to catch the attention of potential customers. Imagine that your website is the first or second to appear on the Google results page when someone does a search for a topic related to your business. This would make it more likely for a lead to click on the link to visit it than if it was lower on the page, where it might be ignored altogether.
* More traffic means higher conversion rates. When more people visit your site, you have a wider pool of potential customers to offer your products. And since they are likely to be local customers, they are more serious about seeking you out, whether online or at your physical address.
* You have more ways to make your presence felt on the results pages. Apart from appearing on the main results, you can also have a local listing on top of the results as well as a local pay-per-click ad. You can appear on three separate places on the page, giving you more chances to catch the eye of leads compared with national companies.
Here are some simple SEO tips that you can use right away to help make your site more search-engine friendly:
* Use local search terms. For example, locals may use the nickname of the town as a search term so you should use this in the content, contact information, meta tags, link text, page titles and other key places on the site.
* Make sure you provide full contact information on the site, including the street address with zip code and map as well as phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Apart from having a separate Contact Us page with this information, consider placing it on the footer of every page as well.
Take care
Brendan