Running a small business in 2018 isn’t easy as the competition is fierce. So, you need to get every advantage you can find. Great search engine optimization will be a huge help as it will allow your business to get noticed online. The best news is that there are many effective SEO tricks for small businesses that you’ll be able to afford even on a small marketing budget.
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4 Cheap But Effective SEO Tricks for Small Businesses
Get better mobile-optimization
According to SmartInsights, the consumers of today spend more time browsing the Web from their mobile devices than by using desktop computers. Therefore, mobile website optimization has become a necessity. If you don’t have a web designer of your own, you can use specialized mobile-optimized templates offered by website building platforms.
You can also use Google’s free testing tool that will determine how SEO friendly your website is for mobile devices, in particular.
Change your web hosting
According to Web Hosting Media, shared hosting is the best option for small businesses. When delivered by a reliable provider, it ensures great website performance and even offers some measure of scalability. Today, you can find good shared hosting services at less than $5 a package, for example, InMotion or iPage.
Switching to a better web hosting provider will improve your website’s performance, loading speed, and security. This also allows you to make some improvements to the page, like monitoring bandwidth consumption so that you can upload more high-quality videos if the package has greater bandwidth, etc.
Changing your web hosting is one of the less-used SEO tricks for small businesses, as many people don’t realize how important it is. However, the overall performance of your website matters to Google’s ranking bots nearly as much as the keywords. As small businesses can’t invest in expensive dedicated servers, switching to a better host is your best option.
Optimize your content for Google SERPs
SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are Google’s answer to a quick and intuitive search. The protocols that rank pages for them are updated regularly, so you need follow the news. Optimizing specifically for SERPS is one of the most effective SEO tricks for small businesses as these are the searches that can provide a lot of organic traffic.
The general requirements for these pages are:
- Content optimized for a specific search query, not your regular selection of niche keywords.
- Use of lists for maximum readability.
- Clear answer to the search query given in the first sentence of the text.
If you can afford it, consider advertising your business through SERPs. This will also allow you to choose what exactly you want to display on the search results page.
Master content topic clusters
The practice or organizing your content into specific topic clusters picked off in 2017, and it’s getting more popular now. HubSpot has a great detailed piece on how to do this.
This technique utilizes internal link-building for giving your SEO a boost. Search engine bots that analyze pages take such topic clusters as a proof of the relevance of your content. As this practice is not yet widespread, optimizing your website for it can give you some extra edge.