In today’s market, the Internet is everything. It connects your business with consumers, which provides your small business the means to grow and thrive in your community. The Internet’s critical role is why search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to small businesses.
While many small businesses are open to adopting SEO, they often follow some bad SEO practices. These missteps, which range from keyword stuffing to link farms, all have a negative influence on your SEO strategy. That results in less traffic to your website, as well as less revenue for your company.
How can you stop your small business from making these mistakes? With these five steps:
1. Start an SEO bootcamp
Whether you’re a family-owned business or a fresh start-up, you want to create a bootcamp for learning SEO. It’ll provide you, as well as your team members, with a strong foundation for developing an SEO strategy.
As a digital marketing tool, there are plenty of free SEO resource online, including:
- Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO
- Backlinko’s Definitive Guide to SEO
- HubSpot’s Comprehensive Guide to Local SEO
- Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors
- And more!
When you’re compiling your SEO resources for your bootcamp, check their published date. Due to routine algorithm updates by Google, as well as other search engines, SEO is an ever-changing field. You want to make sure that you’re reading up-to-date materials — not outdated ones.
By referencing the latest starter guides on SEO, your team can avoid some of the most common bad SEO practices, like keyword stuffing. You can also build some critical SEO skills, like researching keywords, developing title tags, and more.
To make your SEO bootcamp accessible to everyone on your team, such as remote workers, consider uploading the bootcamp to Google Drive as a Google Doc. Later, you may even think about making a Google Slides presentation to introduce your team to SEO.
2. Develop a review system
No matter how experienced your team becomes in SEO, it’s essential to install some checks and balances. Instead of your team writing and publishing content for your company blog, for example, require that someone else on the team reviews and edits the content beforehand.
By taking this additional step, you can catch spelling and grammatical errors in your content. In addition, you can spot bad SEO practices that newer team members may have, such as keyword stuffing or including irrelevant keywords.
Implementing a review system also maximizes your team’s knowledge of SEO. They can educate fellow team members about SEO missteps, as well as practice what they know daily. The result is a small business with a smart SEO strategy.
3. Monitor the performance of content
Due to the continued changes to SEO, it’s worth tracking the performance of your website and webpages. You can monitor the performance of your SEO strategy through Google Analytics, as well as Ahrefs.
Ahrefs is one of the most valuable tools for assessing your SEO success. It’ll show you several pieces of helpful data, including the number of organic keywords you’re ranking for — it’ll also provide this information on a page-by-page basis, which lets you re-assess your SEO approach for certain webpages.
While not a preventative to bad SEO practices, monitoring your content’s performance strengthens your SEO strategy by allowing you to respond to drops in rank or traffic. If you skip tracking your website, you miss out on the benefits of SEO, from more profits to more leads.
4. Stay up-to-date on SEO changes
Another way your small business can prevent black-hat SEO practices is by taking an active role in the industry, as well as remaining a lifelong student. Many of the websites mentioned earlier, from Moz to Search Engine Land to Ahrefs, maintain blogs that discuss every aspect of SEO.
Encourage your team to subscribe to these blogs — or use a tool like Feedly to access these news stories on your phone or desktop, without subscribing. Aim to check the news on a weekly basis to receive updates on the latest changes, strategies, tips, and more.
An additional resource that’s worth subscribing to is Think with Google. The blog, which Google operates, provides insight into search trends, case studies, and more. As a small business, it can provide your team with ideas for fine-tuning your SEO strategy and remaining aware of bad SEO practices.
5. Work with an SEO agency
One of the best ways to prevent black-hat SEO practices is by partnering with an SEO agency. Based on their experience, expertise, and reviews, you can trust that they’ll deliver a white-hat SEO strategy that drives the results you’re looking for as a small business.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest the time to learn SEO, however. It’s valuable to build an understanding of what SEO is and how SEO works, as it can help you compare agencies and choose the one that’s best fit for your company.
As your team collaborates with an SEO agency, their background in SEO can help them understand an agency’s choice in targeting certain keywords, revamping select webpages, or recommending broader changes.
Whether you’re overseeing your SEO strategy in-house or outsourcing it to a trusted partner, becoming familiar with SEO offers several benefits to your business. That’s why you want to take these five steps for preventing bad SEO practices.
SOURCES
https://findbestseo.com/blog/your-startup-and-seo-audit
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
https://backlinko.com/seo-this-year
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/local-seo
https://searchengineland.com/seotable
https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/en-us/blog/26-02-2018-the-ultimate-guide-to-bad-seo-practices
https://findbestseo.com/blog/12-tips-how-create-seo-content-your-small-business