SEO Principles: 5 Enduring Strategies For Small Businesses

If your SEO efforts have thus far been less than fruitful, you may want to reconsider your current strategies. With search engines making frequent changes to their algorithms, it can be difficult to maintain rankings using “trendy” or fleeting strategies. Replacing these techniques with enduring and long-lasting strategies will help your business find success.

Seek Out Local Citations

Citations play a key role in local search rankings. What does this mean for your business? Essentially, local search results provide you with an opportunity to rank for challenging keywords, such as “pizza.” With local results becoming more prominent in the search results, it is vital for small businesses to seek out local SEO opportunities. This consists of listings or directories that include your business name, phone number and address. It is also important to ensure that your citations include the correct information.

Create a Google+ Local Page

Any local SEO company will tell you that creating a Google+ page for your business should be an essential part of your SEO campaign. Google’s local search results include links to the company’s Google+ Page as well as any Google reviews customers have left. In fact, Google has implemented a new bar at the top of the search results page that displays local relevant businesses according to their Google Reviews ratings. In other words, the higher your company’s ratings are, the higher it will rank. Creating a page for your business is crucial and is something that will provide your company with benefits for years to come.

Invest in Quality Content

What is a website without content? Even a small business needs to ensure that their website is providing some kind of value to their visitors. The only way to accomplish this goal is to invest in quality content. From your company’s mission statement to the posts in your blog, you need to ensure that you are providing your visitors with information that answers their questions or piques their interest. Regardless of any updates search engines make to their algorithms, quality content will always be valued and given more weight.

Take Advantage of Social Media

There is evidence that social media signals play a role in search engine rankings. Ensure that you have created accounts on the most popular social media websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+. In addition to providing you with SEO benefits, these websites will also offer you with a chance to interact with your customers or potential customers. In turn, your followers will be more likely to spread the word about your company or share your best content.

Encourage Customers to Leave Reviews

Reviews are an integral part of local search results. When customers have a positive experience with your company, encourage them to leave a review of your business. There are many prominent review sites around the web, and each one can play a role in the ranking of your website in the search results.

With the vast majority of web users relying on search engines to find businesses and information, using SEO to improve your company’s rankings will play an integral role in the success of your business. Implementing strategies that will withstand the test of time will ensure that your company not only achieves high rankings, but maintains them as well.