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wordpress-seo-basic-small-businessIf you’re anything like most small business owners you haven’t truly taken advantage of search engine optimization (“SEO”) techniques to get your business noticed by the major search engines. Running a Google ad campaign is nice and will net you a few clients, but you miss out on a major opportunity to be noticed if you don’t have an SEO strategy. This article will familiarize you with some of the basics of SEO and give you a few tips on getting your business noticed.

Don’t Ignore the Mobile-Friendly Test

Recently, Google announced that websites which were not mobile friendly would be penalized in the search results. This means that if your website is not mobile friendly then you could be ranked below your competitors—assuming they have a responsive (mobile friendly) website, even if your website is more relevant to the search.

Mobile friendly means the site reconfigures itself for easy viewing on mobile devices. If you don’t know whether your site is mobile-friendly, chances are it’s not. To be sure, Google offers a tool to determine whether your site is mobile friendly.

Emphasize Content over Keywords

In the past it helped a site to be ranked high in search results if that site included many relevant keywords. This is why it was not uncommon to see a block of keywords in small text at the very bottom of a site.

This is no longer the case. Search engines are beginning to place more of an emphasis on content than on keywords. This means that if your website has all the keywords, but the content is lacking, it will be ranked lower than another website with good content but not quite so many keywords.

With this in mind it may be prudent to review your content and ensure that you have solid, relevant content on your website.

Conduct Research Regarding What Your Keywords Should Be

Although content is increasing in importance, keywords will still be part of the equation in determining where a website will rank in search results. Google Adwords is a free service with a number of tools available to help you determine what keywords would work best in your ads and in your site. Adwords even has a generator to help create text for your ads. If you haven’t spent any time on Adwords it would be worthwhile to do so.

Narrow Your Audience by Adding Location-Specific Keywords

If you are a small landscaping business in Florida it won’t do you much good to be noticed by someone searching for a landscaping company in Seattle. For this reason you can increase your local relevance by adding keywords to indicate where you are. For example, the landscaping business might use the keywords “landscaping business Jacksonville” or something similar.

Don’t Neglect Offline Marketing

With the age of the Internet and Google the tendency is to focus on online marketing and ignore everything else. However, if you market your business in other ways it will lead to people searching online for you, which will then push your search results rankings up.

Conclusion

This has been just a small sample of the steps you can take in performing SEO. If you put some time into it and engage in a strategic SEO analysis you will find it’s worth the time and trouble to get your business noticed by more clients.