As a business owner you’re probably dreaming of having more traffic arrive at your website. However, as a small business owner you’re also probably wondering where you can find time to do some SEO for your website. Here you’re not alone – only about 28% of small business owners (one in four) do anything in this regard.
There could be several reasons why you’re not doing anything here, it may be because you:
- Are worried that it’s too technical
- Don’t trust the advice you’ve received in the past
- Feel leery about changing your website to please a search engine algorithm bot
What Google and you Have in Common
Regardless of your reasoning, it’s important to understand that Google is watching how people interact with your website today. They use this, along with other search engine ranking signals (e.g. proper on-page setup), to determine your placement in their SERPs. This is because Google cares how your visitors interact with your website, as such they look at things like:
How long people spend on your website: The longer visitors stay at your website, the better you’ll do in the SERPs. This is something that Google’s algorithm monitors and remembers. If you manage to consistently keep people at your website for a long time you’ll be viewed favorably. It’s important to understand that this happens on a page-by-page basis. However, the way each page does influences how well your site does overall.
Improving your click-through rate in SEO means encouraging people to click through to your site from the SERPs. This is another thing that Google tracks, moving those sites that are considered “more clickable” up in their SERPs.
It’s important to take notice of how often your visitors are returning to your website. Leading SEO professionals believe that this is another consideration in Google’s algorithm. It’s hard to define what a good percentage of return visitors is but HubSpot recommends aiming for about 15%. As always, your main goal should always be to outperform your competition instead of worrying about a numbers game here.
Google is placing a lot of relevance on mobile-based information. With this in mind, things like driving directions to your local, brick and mortar store will play an important role in your website’s SEO.
You also need to get people to interact with your website. This is why you’ll want to have social share buttons in plain sight.
How to Make Google Happy
There are some relatively easy things you can do to make Google like your site better. This includes:
- Make sure your website loads quickly – in two seconds or less.
- Have an attractive design that’s easy for visitors to scan and understand.
- Embed a few videos, quizzes, or polls as these will keep visitors on your page longer.
- Maintain a strong focus on the content your page promises to deliver.
- Include driving directions to your local, brick and mortar storefront.
- Encourage your visitors to leave a comment and share your website on social media.
- Don’t just focus on Facebook and forget about all the other social media platforms. Include Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram too.
- Invite your visitors to use Feedburner to subscribe to your RSS feed. (Since Google own this site, it’ll play an important role in your SEO.)