Small Business SEO Checklist

A small business SEO checklist is a valuable tool for entrepreneurs and business owners looking to improve their online visibility and attract more organic traffic. Implementing effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategies can help small businesses compete with larger competitors online.

In this article, we will provide you with a comprehensive overview of SEO, including what it is and how it works. We will also explain why SEO is crucial for your business’s success and provide you with a helpful search engine optimization checklist that you should prioritize in order to improve your business’s ranking on search engines. Lastly, we’ll share a list of essential small business SEO tools to help you get started.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO refers to techniques that make your website and the overall online presence of your business more visible to people who are searching the web for solutions that your product or service can provide.

At its core, SEO is about understanding your consumer, identifying what they’re searching for online, the questions they want answers to, the words they’re using, and the type of content they want to read. Optimizing your web presence to customer needs is an organic approach to increasing the quantity and quality of visitors to your website. However, it takes time, consistency, and targeted efforts to successfully appear in search engines.

SEO vs local SEO

Local SEO is a type of search engine optimization that focuses on the ranking of a business in its local area. The goal is to target local audiences with keywords and content that are relevant to their geographic location.

By utilizing local SEO tips, you can effectively and affordably improve your ranking on Google Maps for “near me” or location-specific keywords.

Why is SEO important for my business?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a key component of digital marketing, and if you’re trying to market your business on a budget, it can be seen as a free way to generate traffic. Every customer query on a search engine is an opportunity for a business to be discovered and make a sale. When you optimize your website for search engines, you’re more likely to show up in search results to your target audience.

SEO ensures your content answers your target audience’s biggest questions on search engines and while doing so, pulls in traffic to your product or service.

Apart from generating leads, SEO is great for brand awareness. If you’re not showing up in search, your competitor probably is. You lose business to competition when your website, no matter how beautiful, is not search-engine friendly.

It’s also been found that pay-per-click (PPC) or paid advertising, social media and other online channels don’t deliver the kind of traffic that organic SEO can. Organic results of search engine queries receive more organic clicks than paid ads because they seem more credible to the searcher. One recent organic vs paid search study revealed that organic results get 94% of all clicks on Google, whereas paid ads were only clicked on 6% of the time

SEO also has the potential to deliver continuous returns. By creating content that is educational, serves a purpose, and incorporates keywords from search queries, you will continue to attract traffic over time unlike ad campaigns that expire after their duration ends or when you run out of money!

How do search engines work?

Search engines use web crawlers (e.g. automated search robots, like the “Googlebot”) to comb through all available content on the internet and churn out results that best answer the query you’ve punched in.

When it comes to your webpage, search engine bots will crawl it to analyze its content. This is the discovery stage, after which they determine the relevance of your content by looking for signals like the presence of keywords from the search query. Next, they check if your content is talked about a lot, referred to or cited by other websites. Your authority in certain search queries is a major factor in how your business is positioned in search results.

You must note that search engines are constantly evolving their methodology and little is known about their exact algorithm. But a few basic SEO principles will ensure your website is an easy pick for search engines and that you’re front and centre of a search query result.

The importance of keywords and what your customers might be searching for

Words or phrases that potential customers enter into search engines as a query should influence the content of your website. Identifying keywords that you want to create content around in the hope to rank in SERPs is the basic first step of SEO. You’ll learn more about using and researching keywords as you continue reading.

How to improve search engine rankings for your business

As we discussed above, a website that is search-engine friendly and ranks well in search results has to be easily discoverable, have relevant content and be an authority in that space.

There’s a two-pronged SEO strategy to earn a search engine’s confidence in your content – on-page and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO ranking factors

On-page SEO (also known as on-site SEO) techniques focus on enhancing the relevancy of your web content and tying it to the user’s intent behind a search query. The following elements of a webpage should be optimized to have search engines take note of your content:

1. Title Tag that entices searchers to click-through

This refers to the title of a webpage or the headline of a piece of content. A title tag displays as a clickable search result on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Here’s an example of what a title tag looks like in Google search results:

Place your target keyword in the beginning of the title tag as search engines pay more attention to words in the beginning because it helps them understand what your page is about.

It is recommended to keep your titles under 70 characters to avoid being cut off by ellipsis (“…”) like in the example below –

2. Meta Description that informs

The meta description is a brief summary of a web page shown below the title tag in search results. Think of it like your sales copy.

Here’s an example of a meta description in Google search results:

Google will cut off a meta description after 155 to 160 characters. Be concise but provide enough value to have users click through.

3. SEO-friendly web address or URL

Keep your URLs short, easily readable, and keyword-rich. Search engines use URLs to decipher what your page is talking about.

4. Content that search engines love

There are several other on-page SEO factors to rank high on a search engine which is based on the contents of your page. Optimize your web page copy with the following elements:

• Include multimedia: With images, video, audio, infographics, and other forms of multimedia, you engage your audience to stay longer on your page without bouncing off to another search result. A longer dwell-time gives google a user-interaction signal, helping your content rank better.
• Add links: Search engines want to see you as an active member of the web, and they comprehend your web page through the internal and outbound links that you include. Within any piece of content that you publish, add links to 2 to 3 existing posts and pages from your website. Also, insert links to authoritative external pages that talk about the same topic.
• Use keywords: Ensure your target keyword is present in the first 100 words of your web page or an article. You can repeat it in your subheading. But steer clear of keyword stuffing to avoid being penalized by Google. When you load a webpage with too many keywords, you are seen as manipulating your SERP ranking. Google recommends focusing on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
• Long-form content: Long articles, with a word-count of 1000 to 1500 words, tend to rank better for your target keywords than shorter content.

5. Site and page speed

The speed at which your site loads has recently become an important ranking factor on Google. This is even more important because potential customers are more likely to leave your page if it takes too long to load, which can result in lower conversion rates. Tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, and WebPage Test can help you measure the performance of your site and individual pages. 

6. Optimized images

Google Image Search can be another source of traffic and lead-generation. Your image file names and alt tags should include your target keyword. Alt tags are essential to help search engines understand and describe the context of an image on a page, and they’re also essential for accessibility purposes (for example, alt tags can aid potential customers that have visual impairments and require the use of a screen-reader). 

7. Mobile-friendly design

Google’s ranking algorithm uses the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site and show snippets of it in search results. Having a responsive and mobile-friendly design is important for on-page SEO – so it’s important to make sure your using a business website builder that supports that.

8. Make social sharing easy

Social sharing helps in building brand awareness and creating a buzz. Include buttons to different social media channels on your web page to allow users to share it easily on their news feed or profile page.

Off-page SEO ranking factors

Off-page or off-site SEO refers to everything you do outside of your website to better your SERP ranking. Off-page SEO tactics are geared towards improving the perception of your site’s quality in the eyes of your users and search engines. You want the search engine and user to trust you as a popular, relevant, and trustworthy authority in a particular subject. Your website can accomplish this through backlinks, which get created when an external website links out to yours.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website. They are a great way to show search engines that your content is popular and relevant.

Backlinks from high-quality websites have a significant impact on where you rank on a search engine results page (SERP), and it’s important to monitor the quality of these links because Google will penalize you if too many low quality backlinks from spammy sites or if you try to purchase links from “link farms”.

How are backlinks measured?

Search engines measure your backlink profile based on 3 major factors:

• Number of inbound links to your website
• Number of unique domains that link to your website
• Quality of those links

6 essential SEO tools for your business

There are a number of top SEO tools for startups you can use to help your business rank on Google. Here’s our 6 favourite SEO tools for small businesses in Canada:

1. Moz Link Explorer

Moz builds tools that make SEO, inbound marketing, link building, and content marketing easy. The Moz Link Explorer tool lets you check the backlink profile and Domain Authority of any site.

2. SEMRush

SEMrush is an online visibility management platform that offer a host of tools to audit your SEO, help you discover keywords, analyze backlinks and more.

3. Majestic SEO

Majestic is a UK-based company claims to have the world’s largest link intelligence database in the world. You can use their link intelligence tool to monitor where your backlinks are coming from and which content on your site is getting links.

4. Ahrefs

Ahrefs provides a number of tools to help you analyze your competitor’s search traffic and see the exact keywords for which they rank in organic search. You can get keyword suggestions, check backlinks, and also uncover which content on your website is performing the best.

5. Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a Chrome Extension (browser plugin), that works on Chrome and Firefox, shows you free search volume of google keywords, cost-per-click (CPC) and data on your competition on multiple top websites like Google, Amazon, YouTube, among others.

6. SEO Meta in 1 Click

SEO Meta in 1 Click is another Google Chrome extension that allows you to check your meta data and key SEO information like title tag, description, headers etc in one click and can be helpful for quickly identifying easy SEO opportunities on your business website.

Start optimizing your business website for search engines 

Whether a customer shops online or at your storefront, they’ll definitely spend considerable time researching various options before spending their money. As a young business with a small advertising budget, the financial returns of implementing SEO to generate organic leads and building trust in your brand are manifold.

Using the SEO practices we discussed, aim to strike a balance between content that’s relevant and improving the credibility/authority of your website. But remember, SEO is not just about content and search engines, it’s also about improving the user experience of your site.  

Whether your business is a sole proprietorship or a corporation, a key factor to success and making it profitable is to ensure you are optimized for search engines.