Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a cost-effective, fast-acting strategy for businesses, particularly small businesses. Problem is: SEO is an evolving strategy, which means more than half of the millions of articles you come across on the internet may contain outdated, generic content.

More than 80% of modern shoppers conduct online search, majorly with Google, before making buying decisions. Needless to say, attention to detail in marketing your content, specifically its SEO elements, is imperative to improving online visibility.

Without further ado, we’ve put together a checklist of SEO tactics to help you improve your small business website’s ranking on SERPs (search engine result pages) in the current digital age.

Keyword Research

Whether it was SEO five years ago or SEO today, keyword research remains a timeless first step in this digital strategy. However, the length and format of commonly used keywords in any industry has changed over the past few years.

Choose incorrect keywords, and no matter how trendy your website’s design is, no matter how informative the content, your efforts will go to waste if your target audience never makes it there.

Following are the factors that determine the correctness of SEO keywords:

–       Relevance

The targeted keywords should be extremely relevant to your business’s products/services. It’s simple: the higher the relevance of keywords, the higher the percentage of website leads.

–       Competitiveness

A small business’s SEO strategy involves keywords that comply with ongoing, short-term trends and are not targeted by bigger businesses in their industry.

–       Volume

One of the evolutions of SEO is the move from short to long-tail keywords. For starter, these phrase-like keywords cover more terms that users are likely to search for. Also, the rise of voice-based search means that users conduct online search using complete sentences (“Hey Siri…”).

–       Commercial Intent

The secret to attracting the right traffic at the right time is to make sure that your content catches user attention during the right stage of the buying cycle. Intent is everything; ideally, you want to attract user who have made up their minds to spend money.

Responsive Web Design

Website design is a tad more expensive service than most online businesses, but a one-and-done solution to contribute to the success of your small business SEO strategy.

Why? In addition to keywords, factors such as page load time and bounce rate affect how Google ranks your website on SERPs. In a world where 60% of internet access is primarily mobile, users want your website to be appealing on their smartphone and tablet devices. An expert web development service can provide you with the virtual architectural excellence you need to drive your SEO efforts.

Onsite & Offsite SEO

Onsite SEO is simple enough; it’s the SEO strategies applied to the content on your website, from blog postings to landing pages.

What most marketers ignore when opting for SEO services is their offsite content. We’re talking social media accounts, guest blogs, even customer feedbacks. Facebook alone receives more than 22% of the global internet population, and unlike most social platforms, it’s the one that attracts user attention towards text-based content.

Don’t miss out on this “popular” part of your SEO strategy, otherwise referred to as link building. A professional digital marketing expert such as Global-marketing Inc that offers both social media management services and SEO can enable a smooth flow of traffic between your onsite and offsite content.

Title Tags & Descriptions

20-40 words—that’s how long a typical title description is, and yet a large number of businesses fail to pay attention to creating any.

A title description is specifically formatted to provide users on a search engine page a short description of what they will see when they explore the website. The keywords for your SEO strategy should be present in these descriptions, ideally in the beginning.

Reputation Management

This is a rarely-need but no less important step for small businesses to know about. No, reputation management SEO is not just for failing small businesses. Often, a simple error in content can put your website in an unfavorable light on search engine, a situation you can rectify with reputation management SEO strategy. The idea is to dilute the content that has your business’s name in a negative light with content doing just the opposite.

Google Places Registration

Every aspect of a local SEO strategy is about targeting people within a short radius. We’re talking as minimum as a 5-mile radius, and to make sure you can effectively appear on your customer’s radar, you need to register with Google Places.  This means providing Google with your country, state, city, neighborhood, street address, contact number and even hours of operation.

The next time a consumer uses voice search to ask for “[insert service category] near me”, your business can conveniently pop up on top of the SERP list on their smartphone (right-side of the desktop search engine page), accompanied by an extension to Google Maps location.