SEO Tricks For Business Owners Like You

In your competitive contractor, retail or B2B industry, any advantage you can get over your competition is crucial.

This is especially true for the web. After all, the Internet is the first place people go when looking for your products and services.

And when people hit your website, you want to keep them there.

Without proper search engine optimization (SEO) customers will never find you in the first place. This makes it impossible for them to do business with you.

Here are SEO tricks we use at WEB ROI to help your small business maintain and keep high search rankings on Google.

Content

1. Post long content

If you’re blogging on a regular basis, great! Keeping your blog up-to-date is a smart way to share what’s going on in your industry and help Google rank you higher.

But just short posts aren’t going to cut it.

According to a study conducted by BuzzSumo and Moz:

Most published online content is less than 1,000 words in length…

…but…

Content that’s at least 1,150 words long get the best ranking in the search engines

With short posts, there’s not enough information or content to tell Google that your blog (and, by extension, your website) is worth ranking high.

So those brief, 5 line updates you're putting on your website? They aren't going to deliver anything for you because Google (and other search engines) will simply ignore it.

Conversely, long posts which are poorly written won’t do it either. Google will simply ignore it and not rank it.

The sweet spot is to have lengthy content that’s well-written and provides people with valuable insight when they click to read it.

(And if you're wondering, this blog post has a tidy 1,168 words, including this part you're reading here).

2. How and where people interact with your website matters

Just having a website isn't enough to give it a high SEO rank. It can't just be there. It has to load and work properly. However and whenever people want to visit it.

If people can't access your website properly whenever they want, it gets buried in the search engine results.

This is the how:

Google employs something they call “user signals” to track what people do when they visit your website.

There are many ways to measure website interaction, but the most commonly relied upon and tracked “user signals” are:

Click-through rates (CTRs): The percentage of people who click on a particular link. For example, if 100 people see the link and 25 people click on it, the CTR is 25%.

Bounce rate: How many people immediately leave your website after seeing just one page. You want this number to be as low as possible.

Time on site: How much total time a visitor spends on your website.

This is the where:

In 2016, more people surf the web from their smartphones and tablets vs. their desktop and laptop computers.

The natural thought may be that people tend to spend less time looking at a small screen while on the go.

Google doesn’t see things the way. The “user signals” it uses to measure and rank websites are just as important on mobile devices as they are on desktop ones.

If people aren’t spending time on your site via their mobile devices, it’ll impact its desktop ranking. And vice versa.

3. Optimize your website for voice search

Do you use voice search on your smartphone? If you do, you're not alone.

In 2014, 41% of adults used voice search features like Siri, Google Voice Search, SoundHound and Cortana more than once a day.

Why is voice search so important? Because it’s almost always about local queries such as:

Weather forecast
Restaurant reviews
Traffic updates
Movie times
Directions

These vocal searches will inevitably extend to your business. It’s important to make sure your website is optimized for voice searches with:

Targeted long-tail keywords
Writing your website in the same way your customers talk
Answering commonly asked questions

For example, if you're a landscape supplier in Burlington, you'll want to voice optimize your website for the following phrases:

"Triple mix topsoil delivery in Burlington"
"Who delivers aggregate stones in Burlington, Ontario"
"Affordable Burlington interlock stores"

These may seem like they're all over the place, but if it's how people use voice search, then your website needs to be able to answer those questions.

4. Know what people want and then give it to them

Humans haven’t quite figured out how to read minds but Google’s gotten pretty close and expects your web content to be able to as well.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you type in “how to get to downtown Toronto”, you’d expect to see a map and a list of directions.

If you saw an article about downtown Toronto attractions, that doesn’t match your intent. And it doesn’t help you either.

Google and other search engines have gotten so smart and complex that they can predict the context and intent of a user's search.

In the very old days, Google would serve up results which just had the keywords in them. How and where they were used didn't really matter.

Not so much today. Those keywords better lead to a webpage which provides an answer. Otherwise, Google will never serve up your content.

And potential customers will never see it.

Bottom line: make sure your content answers your customers’ questions.

5. Being #1 in Google is just one part of it

Google is the dominant search engine. While sources and reports vary, approximately 88% of all web searches take place on the almighty Google.

For years, the goal of SEO experts was to rank in one of the top 3 spots in Google for any relatively popular search term.

And with good reason too. A #1 ranking can deliver 31% of all desktop clicks for any search term.

That’s a big number. But it’s not the whole story.

In addition to organic search results, Google fills up its search results page with other information too, like:

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads
Social media marketing results
Product carousels
Maps and local listings

Even though you’re ranking #1, there’s still a bunch of other things that are competing for clicks, attention and business.

Your business needs an SEO plan. Let us build a very strong one for you.

Any website that has aspirations of being successful and generating plenty of leads must have a strong search engine optimization plan.

Making sure your website is optimized is the first advantage you can get over your competitors because it:

Gets you found first
Answers all the questions your prospective customers have
Works on mobile devices
Makes it easy for them to contact you

And it can also help your business grow by as much as 30% in just one year.

Start by contacting us for a FREE consultation.

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