If you’re starting a new business, you might feel like you’re fighting a long, uphill battle to get your site ranked on Google. It is true that getting a site high up on search results can take a long time (depending on the content). However, with the right strategy, you can help speed up the process. If you’re a small business owner hoping to start tackling SEO, try these tips to get listed faster.
1.Start with a compelling product or service
There’s no 2 ways about it- an original business will naturally gain more interest and clicks than something that exists a hundred times over. While you start working on your site and your business plan, you need to do competitive research and confirm that it is a growing opportunity.
The Google Trends tool allows you to see the popularity of search terms, and where those searches occur. By cross referencing this data with what your competitors are offering, you an determine what you need to do in order to fill a gap. If there is excess demand in your market, customers will be more easily enticed.
2.Focus Your Audience
Generic messaging that targets all consumers isn’t the best strategy.Different audiences are searching for different things in different ways, and you can help reach the right people with specified content. Choose to be specific so you can target all your content, including descriptions, images, and pricing, to those audiences.
When you know exactly who you are targeting, it is much easier to do research and help communicate why your business or product would be beneficial to them.
3.Confirm Demand With Google Ads
At this point, you just have an educated guess about the potential of your business. Before you fully commit, you want to validate these hypotheses with Google Ads. Study competitor ads, then create your own to suss out interest.
Try using a/B testing for different messages to emphasize various aspects of your business. Wait for Google to tell you what works best, and you can tailor your marketing plan to those results.
4.Encourage Customers To Leave Reviews
Find a way to incentivize the few customers you have – or anyone you may have worked with in the past, to give honest reviews. Perhaps offer a discount, a coupon, or the chance to win a larger prize in exchange for reviews. Depending on your type of business, you could request these on Facebook, Yelp, Google Business, or a site more specific to your niche.
You can take these reviews and turn them into testimonials on your site, which can help with search rankings. Or, try adding them to your Google ads! Reviews help build trust and interest – we’ve all been pulled to go to a restaurant or shop with a higher level of reviews.
5.Optimize Page Resources
Your web pages and blog posts are of course important when it comes to ranking. But your images and videos can also help you get higher up in those specific search categories. Posting high-quality visual content that links back to your site can help you grow traffic in image search results alone. For each image, make sure to have descriptive file names, image alt texts, and comprehensive image XML sitemaps. Videos should always include closed captions.
6.Harness Social Media
Growing an audience on the right social media platforms for your site can help build a lot of organic traffic, which will eventually assist with brand recognition and Google rankings. Encourage any subscribers or customers to connect on your social channels, and you have a strong distribution channel for new content.
Before you get overwhelmed by these strategies, remember you can always contact us for our SEO services to help your site rank higher and gain more traffic.