SEO positioning is one of the visibility tools that have become essential in recent years for small businesses. It is a strategy that, if planned well and carried out by an experienced professional, offers results in the medium and long term.
What is SEO and what advantages does it offer SMEs?
SEO is the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. It is a set of strategies aimed at making optimizations on a website in order to obtain visibility in the organic results of search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
SEO provides a greater presence of the company on the Internet and visits of potential clients to your website. In the medium and long term, we can say that web positioning is a profitable investment over time, unlike other paid digital channels.
Thanks to natural positioning in search engines, you have the opportunity to reach customers who do not yet know your brand, products, or services. For example, if you have a dental clinic and a user searches Google using the keyword “ poor dental crown ”, the search engine will return the most relevant results that best respond to that user’s search intention. If you are in the top positions, it is likely that they will end up visiting your website and asking for information.
Positioning our business in the search engines requires time and constant work, the important thing is to start as soon as possible and little by little gain visibility in the search engines. Appearing on the first page of Google is not so simple, there are around 200 positioning ranking factors that we can group into 3 fundamental pillars :
A- On-page SEO: the optimizations we make within the website itself to help Google understand what our content is about and also offer the best user experience. We can highlight the following on-page factors:
- Tracking and indexability.
- Web architecture.
- Tags (Titles, H1, H2…).
- Download speed.
- User experience.
- Internal linking.
B- Off-page SEO: the techniques that we carry out outside the web. It is focused on getting links on other sites to increase domain authority and thus improve our organic positioning. The more mentions and links we receive, the more Google interprets our site as relevant. We highlight the following off-page factors:
- Pagerank or domain authority.
- Construction of external links or Link building.
- No. of reference domains.
C- Content: It is still king, offering useful and high-quality content for the user is crucial when positioning our website. Later we will see tips that we can apply to stand out and achieve better results.
SEO for SMEs: tips to meet your objectives
1. Keyword study is essential
It is vital to carry out a keyword study to know what your potential customers are interested in, what they are looking for, and how they search. Once you are clear, you can adapt the content on your company’s website and respond to its needs. Keyword study will also help define good web architecture and URL syntax.
Depending on the user’s search intention, we can mention the types of keywords.
- Brand: These types of search terms incorporate the brand name.
- Transactional: the user is clear about the action they are going to take and searches for a site on Google for it. In these cases, the word is accompanied by terms such as “buy”, and “price”.
- Informational: the user seeks to solve a specific question. To do this, use words such as: what it is, who, how, when, where, and why…
The more searches a word has by users, the more difficult it will be to rank for it. That is why we must avoid words that are too general and look for more specific keywords (Longtail) that define the company’s activity, differentiating itself from the competition and looking for positioning niches that are not too exploited. In this way, your company will have a better chance of appearing in the top positions of the search engine.
An example would be trying to position the keyword ‘ cheap restaurant ‘ on the blog. It will undoubtedly be a term with many searches and too much competition. But if we work on the keyword ‘ cheap romantic restaurant ‘, the chances of positioning the company will increase exponentially.
To do a keyword study we can use the Google Ads Keyword Planner, an interesting tool when planning keywords, since it tells you the most searched words on a particular topic and provides you with the information you need to find the terms that best fit the characteristics of the company.
We can use Answer the Public and Google Trends to find keyword ideas to find out trends, seasonality, or how searches for a keyword have evolved over time. In the example of “furniture store” we can observe the drop in 2020 due to the pandemic.
2. Local SEO
This strategy focuses on working on SEO in the specific location where your business is located, for example, “Fertility clinic in Madrid”. When a user is looking for a service or product near your company’s area, you will have the possibility of appearing in the results by proximity. Local SEO has the advantage of ruling out competition at the national level. With the Google My Business tool you can show your products and services, updated information about your business and your customers can write reviews.
3. Link Building and Local Directories
Implementing an appropriate Link building strategy directly affects positioning, it will help us increase our domain authority. It is important that they are websites related to our same topic and of quality, the quantity is not so important. In addition to obtaining links on related sites, registration in local directories (such as Yellow Pages, Bing Places, and Facebook) is essential.
4. Attractive Titles
Users read less and less text, so we have to make it easy for them and give them small pills of the article in the titles, subtitles, and bold. This will take you directly to the part of the text that interests you most. Of course, titles and bold words must be planned beforehand to be SEO effective.
5. Beware of Duplicate Content
Although it may seem obvious, you would be surprised to discover the amount of duplicate content that exists in many blogs and that, obviously, is not going to position well, since Google penalizes the introduction of content already published on other websites.
Of course, you can be inspired by other publications, read other posts with similar topics, visit social networks, forums, etc., but everything that is published on a company’s website must be original content with the keywords planned in the positioning strategy. SEO. There are tools like Quetext that tell us the percentage of duplicate content.
6. Friendly URLs
When creating a post for your company’s blog, a URL is automatically created that you can change to adapt it to your SEO strategy. Therefore, you should know that each post on your blog can have a personalized URL with the keyword you want, much shorter and more descriptive than the URL generated by default. In this way, Google will understand the word or words you want to position much better and will value your work much better.
7. Keyword in Images
You should upload attractive images in each post you write to help positioning and most companies do it. However, a very common mistake is that the name of the photo is not usually changed once it is obtained from the image bank, so Google will not position it in the same way as if we give the photo a name that is inconsistent with the content of the post.
Therefore, an important recommendation is that the Alt of the photo or photos that you upload within the article must have a descriptive name that does not have more than three words, with the keyword that we have chosen in the post.
8. Don’t Make Beginner Mistakes
In SEO there are no shortcuts and Google is smarter than you in case you hadn’t realized. So our recommendations are to try not to fool you by doing Black Hat SEO :
- Show content to readers and other content to search engines.
- Abuse of keywords or inserting in the post that do not provide any value.
- Use software to copy content from other websites and modify it to trick Google.
- Hide text and links from readers.
The time you waste doing this could be invested in improving your content and making your SEO strategy more precise. Google will value your work and will not penalize you, so think twice before doing tricks that lead nowhere.
9. Share on Social Networks
Once the post has been uploaded to the blog, it is important to share it on the company’s social networks, this way it will have more visibility and attract more visits. Of course, the company’s social media strategy must have been worked on previously so that followers gradually increase. The Social Network buttons must be clearly visible on the blog so that users who read the articles can share them instantly on their networks if they like them.
The SEO strategy goes hand in hand with the Social Media strategy, which is why it is important not to forget the following aspects:
- Answer user questions and interact with them.
- That the content can be easily shared.
- Schedule posts to publish them on the most convenient date and time.
- Use measurement tools to improve the SEO strategy.
- Create Guest Posts on other websites to attract more visitors and thus obtain more visibility on Google.
10. Consistency and Patience
As you have seen, Google takes into account many positioning factors that cannot be seen in isolation, we must work on them together. It’s time to ask, How long will it take to position my business on Google? It depends on several factors: level of competition, established strategy, experience of the professional, visibility of the service or product, whether we are starting from scratch or it is a project with a certain authority and history, etc…
These are some SEO positioning recommendations so that your business begins to differentiate itself from competitors, but if you want a personalized strategy for your company, all you have to do is contact us. At Eye Advertising, we have SEO experts who will know how to adapt strategies to the needs of your business.
