Many small businesses may not know the importance of having and maintaining a website. In fact, 46% of small businesses in the U.S. do not have a website and are missing the opportunity to spread brand awareness and appeal to more potential customers. Those that do have a website, may not take advantage of ongoing SEO for their website to attract customers and stay relevant. Regardless of the industry or niche, if your business involves customers, you should have an online presence-and SEO drives people to your website to get more attention and promote your business to reach your goals. With 75% of users never scrolling beyond the first page of search results,
Although a small business will not have an unlimited budget to invest in SEO services, we have created an SEO checklist for small business to get the most out of your website and online activities to ensure better search engine rankings, generate more business leads, and take advantage of all that digital marketing has to offer.

1.Utilize Local Search

Make use of location for your business or define a primary location that your website serves, integrate Google maps, and create webpages for individual areas you serve. According to a Google survey, 50% of those who used their smartphone for a local search visited a store within a day. Customers will be able to find your business if you provide correct local search and maps information, which boosts its relevancy.

2. Know Your Customer

Create a customer profile or persona for your business and use that information to plan your SEO strategy. This can give you a place to start when targeting specific demographics or locations and yield better results, as it shows you know your business and consumer. Once you have some analytics data, you can optimize this profile to better appeal to your core customer demographic. Install and use Google analytics to understand more about your audience such as their age, gender, city, the device they use, time spent on each page and so on.

3. Utilize SEO Tools

SEC and digital marketing tools are available on Google and other websites to assist small businesses in optimising their websites. Many specialists utilise these tools to enhance online traffic, rank higher in search results, and analyse trending searches and themes with diverse demographics, despite the fact that it might be intimidating if you are unfamiliar with SEC or marketing. Check out Google Console, which may help you better understand your site’s search traffic and performance, as well as improve your ranking in Google search results.

4. Integrate Keywords

While there is no reason to spam irrelevant keywords throughout your website or blog posts, you should try to include words related to topics your business covers. A marketing company or London SEO expert can help you create a list of topics that are relevant to your industry and appear frequently in searches related to your business. You can use the Google keyword planner tool to find keywords that are relevant to your business. The keyword planner tool is an integral part of Google Ads as well. By including keywords, you ensure that people can find your website on the first page of the search result when they search for products, services, or topics related to your business.

5. Adjust For SEO

Make your website page titles, descriptions, and URLs SEO friendly. This means writing an accurate and descriptive title for each page with correct grammar and spelling, in addition to adding descriptions to each page that provide context and help users to better navigate the website. Meta title length should be around 60 characters, and descriptions should be about 120 characters. This ensures that most people viewing the content can see what your page is about and Google properly picks up keywords and important information. Use keywords within meta tags. Different descriptions and titles on each page, whether for a product, service or information, can be optimized to garner the most web traffic and ensure the best results for your business.

6. Remember Voice Searches

With an increase in voice searches, making your website content voice search friendly is incredibly important. Sid and Alexa are voice assistants that individuals use for mobile searches and on devices like the Amazon echo. Tailoring your web content for voice searches can cast a wider online net to increase the number of visitors it receives.

7. Off-Page SEO Matters Too

In addition to on-page SEO, promote your website or brand through link building, social media, and social bookmarking. These steps can raise brand awareness, get people interested and excited about the service, product, or information you provide and lead to more business. Off-page SEO is part of having a comprehensive online presence and leading people back to your website.

8. Get Google My Business

Creating a Google My Business account makes it easier for your website or business to rank in Google search results. It also creates a repository of information on your business for potential customers to view, which increases your rank and credibility. Other business listings to consider include Yahoo Small Business, registering with Bing for location accuracy, and local directories.

9. Respond To Reviews

Reviews, whether positive or negative, may often make or break a company. Before connecting with a company, customers want to see what others have to say. They feel more confident in their decisions after hearing from others who have had similar experiences and encounters with the organisation. Even if it’s only a simple “thank you,” respond to every review you receive. Responding to unfavourable reviews to determine how to resolve any issues that resulted in a terrible experience is part of this. People like it when businesses show that they care about their clients and are prepared to make amends or make the best of a bad situation.

10. Stay Social

Promote your business on social media and create accounts for sites like Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedln, and any other social media networking websites that make sense for your business. Social media helps potential customers or searchers find your website and learn more about your business and the services or products you have to offer.

11. Add Local Citation Fixing

On each page, all of the information about your website should be the same (such as name, phone number, location or address, etc.). These (NAP) criteria are one of the most important local ranking determinants. Maintaining consistency with this information makes it easier for customers to find your business and ensures that they have the information they need to call or visit you. Additionally, Google uses information from your website to display contact and business information in search results.

12. Be Mobile Responsive

Ensure your website is easily viewable and interactive on the mobile web. Today, smartphones have as much processing power as desktop computers and many people search online via mobile due to the ease of use and accessibility. With more mobile web searchers than ever, having a website that functions flawlessly and shows up in search results is essential to getting the attention or mobile users. To help you ensure mobile compatibility, try Google’s mobile friendly test tool. Google began migrating sites that follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing as of March 2018, which means they use the mobile version of a webpage page for indexing and ranking, to better help primarily mobile users find what they’re looking for.

13. Create Good Content

Write original content to inform potential customers about your product or service. You can do this in the form of regular blog posts, social media content, updates and information on your website that provides industry advice to readers or potential customers.

14. Audit Your Website

Find and fix any problems on your website to improve your trustworthiness and ease of navigation for website users, as well as your chances of ranking well in search results. To give a better user experience and ensure that search engines can scan your page properly to pull relevant information for searchers, address misspelt words, incorrectly placed material, and repeated content. This function can be performed for you by SEO content professionals through a website audit, which will improve your user experience as well as your search engine ranking.

15. Give It Some Time

Digital Marketing Agency is a top growing web design and London SEO Agency.SEO takes time to develop; it is not a quick fix. However, if you don’t use SEO tools appropriately, it can seriously harm your website’s traffic and company. Your competitors are all investing in SEO, and you simply cannot afford to do so. Now is the moment to invest in SEO for your small business and website if you haven’t already.