Businesses have a lot to worry about beyond just their marketing efforts. This usually looks like an admittedly chaotic, yet herculean effort of balancing customer/client needs, sales, accounting, sourcing, hiring, training, and so on and so forth. So asking businesses to do marketing, let alone, SEO perfectly is a pretty big ask.
Today we want to go over some easy things that businesses can do to address their SEO needs. The emphasis is on easy. These are tips that businesses can easily take on to start improving the SEO of their website.
What we are talking about today is not “hacks” or shortcuts”. For SEO success, you need to invest the time to create appropriate strategies, assemble resources and execute.
What we are recommending today are things that your business can build in its day to day, week to week or month to month to help build your SEO strength.
SEO Tip 1 - Keep Adding Content to Your Site
The number one tip is to keep adding content to your site. Content is the foundation to any strong SEO campaign.
Lots of businesses know that they should be contributing content to their social media or provide content to local forums, community gatherings or presentations. However, many businesses don’t realize that there is a need and value to consistently updating and adding to your website.
Content is one of the main 3 pillars of SEO. Search engine optimization success is highly dependent on continually improving and adding content to your site.
However, most websites are built as set it and forget it.
This leads us to one of the easiest things you can do - ensure that your website is consistently updated and having content added.
Many clients that we have worked with who are investing budgets into SEO encounter this issue, being unable to commit enough time and resources to having content added to their website.
It can be difficult at first to get content out, but the most important thing is to build the habits and processes in the business. This can be as small as getting one blog post out, to having team member contribute a photo, quick video, or short content addition to the site every day.
Businesses that succeed at SEO are those that don’t require a meeting or methodical planning to get content out, it’s just boiled down into their weekly and monthly processes. So whether or not you are actively trying to work on your SEO, the easiest way to grow your SEO is to keep adding content.
SEO Tip 2 - Contribute to the Community
Another easy way to do SEO is to contribute to the community. The community in this sense can be your local community or an online community.
The main point is to go out in the community and have your business be an active player and offer value. This can come in the form of community and non profit work, like simply volunteering for a local cause.
Or this can come in the form of guest speaking, where your business speaks and gives talks to the local community.
The reason that this is a great way to build your SEO, is because a pillar of SEO is linkbuilding and acquiring referring domains. To be successful in linkbuilding, there requires a level of networking.
Those businesses who are active in the community, who give talks, go to events and gatherings, volunteer and generally have build connections, have a much easier time building links and referring domains to their site.
LInkbuilding is easy if you are an active player in your community, because what is probably happening is that your business is probably already acquiring linking without you even knowing. Organizations and businesses love to talk about the businesses and people who are participating and providing value to them. If your business is there, they probably are already mentioning you.
If these organizations haven’t linked to your website, it’s not a problem. If you have networked and provided value, they will be more than happy to link to your website if/when you ask.
SEO Tip 3 - Leverage Local Directory Sites and Get Reviews
Directories and reputation management sites are a typical overlooked area of marketing, that many businesses do put effort, but often not enough. If you are in the restaurant industry, then you are all but familiar with directory sites, like Yelp.
Appearing in these sort of directories are a great asset for driving traffic to your website and your business. Many directories engage in SEO initiatives and therefore rank well. Therefore, even if your site does not rank in Google searches, you still have an opportunity to gain high exposure if you ranked well on these directory sites.
Remember, these directory sites do not want to offer your services, their business is to provide a curated list of businesses that someone is searching for. Therefore, they are not your competition, they can be your strategic partner and ally.
For different industries the directory sites will be different on which ones you need to be found on.
Now, we do want to note that that there are many sites out there that are built to be directory sites, but they are not all of the same value. The most important part of these sites is to ensure that you show up on those that appear high on Google searches.
So if you are not sure, Google some keywords related to your business. See which directory sites appear and those are most likely the ones that you need to ensure that you show up on.
Despite the high variance in directory sites, they often have similar formulas. Most will leverage some level of crowdsourcing reviews, so it is important to acquire and get as many reviews as possible to help buoy up your listing.
Most sites will also have some level of Ad platform, it is up to each directory and your own testing to see if investing in ads on their platform is worth it.
Conclusion
These 3 SEO tips will help your business do SEO without having to invest heavy mental energy or strategy on doing SEO. Of course, this is not to say that these 3 tips are the only thing you need to do. These just offer a good foundational point.
At some point, most businesses will have to engage in SEO and those who have invested in the above will have a much easier time to get started than those who never engaged in the above.