Search Engine Optimization is a daunting thing for most small businesses to handle. Building a website is one thing – carry over your offline branding and make a clean, attractive site and the customers will find it, right? Sadly that’s not the case, and is less and less the case every day. Search Google for “family restaurant” and you’ll get more than 171 million results. Search for “family dentistry” and you’ll get 7.2 million sites. Since 90% of searchers don’t even go to page 2, SEO is a critical factor in the success or failure of your website.
For some, Search Engine Optimization is still just too scary and too nebulous. There are a lot of people who make big promises, charge a ton of money, and then simply make excuses and ask for more money when you’re not seeing results.
If you’re looking for a way to ease into SEO without breaking the bank, start by taking a look at your site and see how it performs across the following 7 factors. A few minor tweaks could pay real dividends for your business:
- Unreliable Server – If you post hours on your store’s front window saying you’re open from 9 to 5, would you ever lock the doors or close shop from 2 to 3 or some other random time? Obviously, the answer there is “No.” In effect, this is exactly what having problems or downtime with your server or web hosting company results in. People expect a website to work when they click a link to it, and as a result, search engines penalize sites that are consistently unreliable. If your server is slow or frequently down, consider a move to a better hosting company post haste.
- No Useful Backlinks (Source Quality) – Getting links to your site is incredibly important to ranking highly with the search engines. If you site has zero links coming into it, the search engines aren’t going to think you’re trustworthy. It’s very important to make sure the links coming into your site are from other trustworthy sites. In effect, a link to your site is a way for another site to give you a letter of recommendation for the search engines. The bigger and more trustworthy the source of that letter of recommendation, the more seriously it will be taken. On the flip-side, links from untrustworthy and SPAM sites can actually hurt your rankings. Consider reaching out to partners, suppliers, customers, and organizations you are part of and recommend sharing links. For a small site, even adding just a few highly relevant links can make a real difference.
- No Useful Backlinks (Anchor Text Quality) – Just getting links to your site from trustworthy sources isn’t enough, you need to have the text used to link to your site contain your site’s keywords too. Ultimately, which of these text links would your rather rank for the keywords in? “Portland, OR Auto Body Repair Shop” or “Artistic Auto Body?” A link on “Artistic Auto Body” is more common, but is not the term people are most likely to search – link text should contain keywords that will help people find you, even if they’ve never heard of you.
If you don’t have any quality links to your site, getting the next four issues corrected is a major priority:
- Entirely Flash or Image Based – We’re always amazed when we’re asked to analyze a site designed entirely in Flash or images. This is a clear sign of a “web designer” who has never studied SEO. All content in Flash and images is invisible to the search engines. To make a long story short, that’s really bad. Do you see those word clouds below the next point? To knock home how bad an idea it is, those would be completely blank for sites designed entirely using Flash or images. With few exceptions, text should always be represented in actual HTML text. If you can’t click and highlight individual words on the page, ask your site designer why they’ve built a site that can’t be found.
- No/Poor Keyword Strategy – Check out the two images images below. The method may be slightly unscientific but making a word map of all your site’s content goes a long way in showing you what your site focuses on. Both images are from body shops. The first shows a poorly optimized site (can you tell what they do by the biggest words?) and the second shows a well optimized site (the biggest words are the top keyword for the industry “Auto Body” and their city name). Not having any keywords on the site or not focusing on the most useful words for your business can greatly impair your site’s search engine visibility.
- Ineffective Title Tags – Title Tags (the snip of text at the top left of your web browser for each page and the top line of Search Engine results) are important, maybe even the easiest and most important on-page area of your site you can optimize. A well optimized title, supported by the content on the page, can make a huge difference in your rankings. When you look at your site’s title tags do you see “Home” or “Welcome,” or just the name of your business? Is it going to help your business to rank for the term “Home” or “Welcome”? My guess is “No.” A title tag should include your top keyword targets, both in your industry and geographically, and they should also be unique to each page.
- Duplicate Content – Duplicate content can take many forms. There is content that is literally copy/pasted the same from page to page, causing your site to look rather SPAMMY. Another form is having duplicate content in the search engine’s eyes because you link to the same page using different link address (example: “yourdomain.com/index.html” OR “yourdomain.com/” OR “www.yourdomain.com/index.html”). Although all three go to the same page, the search engines view them as three different pages, which can cause some problems. The video directly below this point shows you a fix for this issue. The most harmful form of duplicate content though is have the same exact content on multiple websites without any re-directs set up to forward one domain to another. If “yourdomain1.com” and “yourdomain2.com” are identical, Google is going to have some trouble deciding which one to rank you highly for. Worse yet, they may think you’re trying to scam the system into better ranks, and will likely slap you down by making both sites hard (or impossible) to find.
These are all extremely critical aspects of a business’s online presence. We place a lot of emphasis on treating your web presence as if it is your brick-and-mortar store location. There are some things you’ll need to do differently on the web but the same common sense and business savvy decisions need to be made on the web. Ultimately, it’s all about getting people to find your business and then making everything about the site/store as user-friendly and intuitive as possible once they get there.
If you’re not sure how well your site is performing in the above areas, or would like a more in-depth analysis that covers several dozen key SEO concepts, just request a free SEO analysis (note that we’re linking on one of our target keywords, “SEO Analysis,” rather than just “click here”…) and we’ll gladly give you some direction.