Top 9 SEO hacks that small businesses shouldn’t miss

Imagine! When your potential buyer, searches for your product in the search engine and you didn’t show up in the search. As a result, they end up working with your competitors. Pretty annoying right!

The truth about online search is not even a person in 10 will go to the 2^nd page of google to gather information. “The best place to hide any dead body is 2^nd page of the Google”

To overcome this kind of situation, optimize your website that serves your customers. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of enhancing the quality and quantity of website traffic to your website or a web page from search engines. It is one of the effective methods of generating leads for your business. Every day thousands of searches are being performed in search engines. Today, potential buyers trust Google and the results they are showing for their searches.

SEO is of two types. On-page SEO & Off-page SEO. The practice and method that are applied on the web pages are On-page SEO. Incorporating keywords, implementing keywords in meta tags, making URLs understandable for humans, making websites mobile-friendly are comes under On-page practices.

The practice that is implemented outside the web pages is Off-page SEO. Submitting the web pages in search engines, being active in forums and that kind of activity help your website to attract new customers from various platforms.

Here are the top 9 SEO hacks to optimize your website.

1. Keywords
2. Optimize your URL
3. Make edits to your existing content
4. Fix pages with broken links
5. Maintain your business account
6. Linking your page with deep linking
7. Make your website mobile-friendly
8. Add featured snippet
9. Image optimization

1 Keywords

There are two types of people, one who wants to know what is what and the other who is serious about their searches and making decisions after searching for a product or service. For those kinds of different searchers, there are two types of keywords,

• Short-tail keyword – Used to gain information.
• Example: CRM, what is CRM?

• Long-tail keyword – Used to make decisions based on the information available.
• Example: Best CRM for small businesses, Free CRM for small businesses.

Whether they are gathering information or making decisions, our primary goal is to satisfy the visitors with the information they are searching for. Former, short-tail keyword searchers prefer guides or learning material that will feed them the information. Latter, who are long-tail keywords searchers, can be satisfied with little effort through the content. But if you want to convert your leads into customers, the long-tail keyword will help you in achieving that goal.

These tools can be used for Keyword research

• Google keyword planner
• Ubersuggest
• Keywords everywhere

2. Optimize your URL

Do links even play a role in SEO? If you have this question, let me tell you a secret.

Yes! Links do have roles in SEO. The URL is one of the most important parts of the page. Google looks at the URL to determine what a page is about. So, design your URL not only for a bot but also for the users landing on your website. Let them understand the concept of the page from the URL. Whenever you are posting an article, make sure you structure your URL. Below are the sample links:

• https://www.helloleads.io/blog/all/improving-sales/top-10-SEO-tips/ – Best practices to follow

• https://www.helloleads.io/blog/?p=123 – Don’t leave your post link like this.

Tips to optimize your URL:

1. If you are using WordPress as a content management system, you can easily edit the URL for each post within the blink of an eye
2. Include your keyword in the URL
3. Remove stop words in the URL
4. Separate each word using hyphens

3. Make edits to your existing content

We all know creating new content is a tedious process. One of the best ways to keep your website fresh & alive is to edit your existing content. By doing so, you can save a lot of your precious time.

By updating the old content, it increases the click-through rate, as everyone including us would like to read the recent post to gain knowledge for the particular topics. You can also target different keywords and meta tags for the updated content. The change in traffic can be seen over a while. Since it is a time-saving process, we can use this as one of the effective tools to increase the traffic for your site. Even removing the old content will also help in improving the performance.

4. Fix pages with broken links

Broken pages will damage the reputation and most of the visitors will never visit your website again. It is never too late to remove your broken links before your visitors find out. There are several free tools available to check the broken links on your website. Identify the broken links and remove them from your site once and for all. Not only do your visitors get annoyed due to broken links, but Google will also stop crawling your site once it detects the broken link somewhere.

5. Maintain your business account

If you don’t have a Google My Business account for your business, you are missing a major area both in SEO and in gaining new customers. It is one of the free tools offered by Google to promote your business locally. If you are dealing with local customers create your account and it will help you a lot. This business account will help you to get tractions from google maps. Maintain a healthy business account with updated pictures and content. Reviews can also help.

6. Linking your page with deep linking

Don’t leave any pages as an orphan page. Link all pages with each other. If you left any of your pages without linking, google bots will stop its crawling when it finds no links to follow. Link your home page to all other pages and also add all other major pages in your footer.

7. Make your website mobile-friendly

The Majority of the searches were done today on a smartphone. Make your site friendly for mobile searchers. Visitors always want to get the information as soon as possible. So, don’t make them wait for too long due to loading the website. Regularly test your site for mobile speed, loading time for better usability.

8. Add featured snippet

In the phase of answering questions to the users, Google tries to answer with a short snippet of text in search results. Google will automatically pull the data from the website that suits the answer for the query. To be visible in the featured snippet, make some clear and concise answers for top search queries in your content. Frequently asked questions can be framed for this purpose.

9 Image optimization

As you know, google bots can’t read the images, as they read only texts. For this purpose, include your keywords in the image alt text. While crawling the website, Bots will understand the picture by its alt text.

And also, reduce the image size before uploading it to the server, since it slows down the performance of the website. Before uploading any images, make sure to save the image name with the keywords.

We should also admit that SEO is an evolving process and not a one-time sprint to the finish line, but a long-distance race. With good content along with tips and ideas, you can attract more customers.