The Six SEO Habits of a Successful Small Business
First and for most, search engine optimization (SEO) is not something you do once and forget. Many small business owners fall under the impression that their website came with SEO.
Folks, your website didn’t come with SEO.
Your website may have been built properly and thus is friendly to search engine crawlers, but that’s one hell of a tiny tip to the gigantic SEO iceberg.
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy that requires countless hours of research, writing, testing, and tweaking.
To get the highest possible Google ranking, you need to develop not just good habits, but the right kind of habits.
Since the development good habits are key to success for any Entrepreneur, I thought it would be a good idea to share with you the six best SEO habits successful small businesses have in common.
Assuming your website was built correctly, your technical SEO is sound and you’ve already included your most important keywords in your:
- Page titles
- Heading titles (heading structure is correct)
- Meta descriptions
- Alt descriptions
- Anchor text
You may have installed Yoast SEO for WordPress and all of your posts/pages are “Good” by Yoasts standards.
SEO Habits of a Successful Small Business:
1. Set & Review SEO Goals
Your goal for this quarter might be to move from position 100 to the top 50 – depending on the keyword, this sounds like a reasonable goal to achieve. Having the goal helps you to create the action step necessary to begin your SEO campaign. Make sure the keyword that you are targeting is one that people search for. Use the SERP’s free Google keyword research tool.
Setting the goal, establishing a plan of action is important, but so is reviewing your goal. How often do you visit your goals? Almost every Entrepreneurial book I read, recommends reviewing your goals daily.
Add your SEO goal to the list of goals you have for each year, quarter, monthly, weekly and daily goal sheet. As you review your life and business goals, you will constantly get reminded to a few minutes of extra work per day to achieve your goal.
2. Review Your Editorial Calendar
Create an editorial calendar around the keyword that you selected to win and make sure all content you write should focus on not just the keyword, but make sure the content you publish is valuable to your customers.
When you look at your calendar, pay attention to holidays, special months, and other relevant times of the year for relevancy. For example, if you the Christmas holiday is a major part of your business, you need to have your ideas scheduled now. October is fire prevention month, November has Thanksgiving, Black Friday, … You get the point.
3. Google Search Console Checkup
How does your rank change from week to week? You could use the most affordable SEO approach and track your keyword in a spreadsheet or you could spend a few extra dollars on a service like Ahrefs.
Ahrefs allows you to set this up and it will deliver this information to your inbox, daily, weekly or monthly. As much as I love Ahrefs (I use their services), I find it better for beginners to make it a habit to check their Google Search Console regularly. Using GSC regularly will help motivate you to keep going and the most important thing here is to create a habit that will help your SEO in the long run.
Don’t freak out or get too excited if your position changes dramatically. I noticed this happens after changes. It’s like, Google sees a change and overreacts initially, however after a few days or weeks, it averages out.
If you don’t know how to setup your Google Search Console account and need one on one help, shoot me an email and I’ll help you out.
4. Speed Check
Just like you go to the doctors for a checkup, check your website and make sure it’s running at full speed. To perform a free speed test, I use both Google’s Test My Site and Pingdom.
The speed and overall health of your website can worsen over time, so it’s important to check it and make sure it’s not hurting your technical SEO.
Do yourself a favor and run a free speed test on your site. If your site underperforms send the report to your developer and they should be able to take care of it.
Should you not have a developer on staff or know one personally, leave a comment and I’ll forward it one of my trusted developers.
5. Read and Update Your Content
Re-read your last three blog articles and look for opportunities. In blogs, much of what we say correlates with previously written articles. Add two to three links to other parts of your website. Internal linking is a good strategy. If you have blog articles that correlate with your services pages, link to your services pages and vice versa. The point is to help your customers find relevant information on your site that they may not have found on their own.
You’d be amazed at the amount of content you could add to your site. Make a date with yourself to review your top most viewed pages and re-read the content. Make an edit and add helpful information that your customers might find valuable.
Your re-read weekly schedule should look like this:
- Week 1: Top 5 landing pages of Google Analytics
- Week 2: Top 6-10 landing pages on Google Analytics
- Week 3: Top 11- 15 landing pages on Google Analytics
Depending on the size of your site will determine your schedule, but you get what I’m saying.
6. Social Media Consistency
Social media plays a large roll in your off-page SEO. The bigger your profiles and the shareability of your posts will give you a boost to not only your SEO score, but it will drive traffic to your website. Consider using an application like Buffer to schedule posts for each week. This way your social media accounts will start to grow on autopilot.
Do not expect overnight success in SEO. Search engine optimization is a long-term strategy that with compounded daily activities will set you up
The Six SEO Habits of a
Successful Small Business: Conclusion
To rank well in search engines you must adopt the six SEO habits of successful businesses to maximize your SEO efforts.
- Set and review SEO goals frequently
- Review your editorial calendar
- Utilize free SEO tools like Google Search Console or paid tools like Ahrefs
- Run speed and checkup regularly
- Re-read and update your content accordingly
- Be consistent with social media posts
Don’t assume your website will rank well without hard work. Any changes you make to your should be to add value to your customer’s lives so it’s important not to lose touch with your intended audience.
If you feel like I left out a habit that you find to be important to your business, please share in the comments below.