As a small business owner, small business SEO is one of the most important things that you can concentrate on for your business. Unfortunately, even though many business owners have heard of SEO, they don’t make it a priority. Below are some of the most common mistakes that small business owners make that can truly affect their business.

Not Creating the Right Foundation for Small Business SEO

You wouldn’t build a house without a good, firm foundation, would you? Absolutely not! So why would you treat your small business SEO any differently?

Just like any type of program, having a good, strong foundation will be key to have success in the long term. With SEO, when you have a foundation that’s shaky it will cause problems right away. Things such as having a website with poor navigation or structure, broken links, slow page loading and rendering times and others will show the search engine that they shouldn’t be ranking you highly compared to your competition.

Not Having a Small Business SEO Toolkit to Measure Success

If you want to invest money in SEO, you are going to need a toolkit for measuring the results. When you work with a company, they are going to set this up for you. If you go with doing it on your own, you are going to need things such as Search Console, Google Analytics, SEM Rush and others so that you can measure the results.

Not Understanding It’s a Mixture of Business & Technical Skills

There’s a lot that goes into SEO and that’s something that a lot of business owners don’t understand. You have to create content that the target audience finds interesting and have the ability to tag, index, and use some of the more technical skills to make sure that your website’s content found by search engines.

If terms such as meta titles, meta descriptions, URL slugs, alt text and other things are foreign terms to you, you need to do some homework to gain a better understanding and make sure that each of your pages has been updated properly. This is the way all search engines will index and locate your pages and you must have them on all of your content.

Not Having Compelling Content to Help Small Business SEO

This is one of the biggest mistakes that people make when it comes to their website. Having a blog in your website is one of the best ways to get people to your website, keep them there while they’re reading it, and bring them back if you post on a regular basis.

You see, search engines love it when someone stays on your website longer. Of course, if you have a website where you sell a lot of cool stuff, of course they’ll be there browsing. But unless those items that you are selling have product descriptions (another important piece of content) that can only take it so far. Things such as:

• Blog posts
• Videos
• Articles

Are a good place to start. They’re short, they’re simple to read, and they can give people interesting and useful information. Now if you really want to go wild, you can delve into white papers. Really want to show people you know what you’re talking about?

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And when I’m talking about blogs and articles, I’m not talking about writing only about your great services and products, though you can do that. I’m talking about giving them tips, secrets, answer their questions! Customers love that stuff! And when you are giving them this information they are going to come back. When they come back, search engines see it and they may say to themselves, ”Hey, they really know what they’re talking about! I’m going to give their services/products a try!”

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The best way to know what kind of content a customer for your business would want is to ask yourself:

What would I want to read about if I was a potential customer for my business?

When you understand what your customers and potential customers want, it’s going to help you with creating the best possible content to suit their needs. This will get you noticed on search engines.

Don’t have the time or the wherewithal to write blogs and website content for your business? We are happy to help you with that! Check out our blog writing services here.

Not Understanding How Powerful Keywords Are

Keywords are one of those aspects of SEO that will often be overlooked. Analyzing and understanding the keywords that your competitors are ranking highly for is a good place to start. Then find the gaps where their ranking isn’t good. Finally, build up the content which will help you with placing in those areas they haven’t capitalized on.

Even though keyword stuffing isn’t valued as much as it used to be, it’s a good idea for you to still include the best keywords that you want to rank for on your pages. Make sure that you are testing different approaches such as type, frequency and others so that you can see which of them will work best for you and your business.

These are five of the most common small business SEO mistakes that business owners make. If you are looking for a way to get more business and rank higher in Google, Bing and Yahoo, then you want to avoid these small business SEO mistakes at all costs. Don’t forget to check out our Facebook page and contact us with any questions.