Small Business SEO Marketing: Top 10 Tips To Rank Your Website On Google

When it comes to online business, SEO is the essential digital marketing channel to promote your business online. You can't get any business or traffic from search engines to your site if you are not considering SEO. Search engine optimization nurtures your business for more online visibility, driving huge traffic and conversion.

In technical words, online visibility resembles rankings in SERP. The more the rankings, the better, and more organic traffic will come to your site.

All online business owners desire the first page rankings in search results, as users rarely check out the second page of search results. Hence, the top 10 businesses ranking on the first page get the most business.

Furthermore, the total first-page traffic does not divide uniformly in the given 10 websites. Top ranking websites are more likely to have more traffic and conversion, consequently.

Hence, top search engine rankings are vital for businesses to drive customers.

Let's discuss the top 10 SEO tips for small businesses to rank your website on Google. 

1. Improve Your On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the most integral part of optimizing your website for prominent rankings. Google itself suggests various recommendations to optimize your website or web pages. Here are Google's SEO guidelines that you must follow to make your website search engine friendly. Below are some on-page SEO tips that you should consider.

• Make the Website Navigations Easy
• Align Your Content with "Search Intent"
• Add Business Intent Keywords
• Boost Your Site Loading Speed
• Optimize Your Meta Title and Description
• Define the Content Hierarchy with Heading Tags
• Use Short, Readable URLs
• Do Image Optimization

All these factors influence the ranking factors, and if you keep these as suggested, you'll definitely see improvement in rankings.

2. Include LSI Keywords in Content

Searchers don't always need to use the standard keywords to browse something. They might search you with some different words or phrases, and you should optimize your page accordingly. LSI keywords are the related terms or phrases of your main keywords, and Google uses these to conclude your relevance with a particular query. You can use various online tools to find LSI keywords for you. It's an advanced SEO tactic and can help you earn the top Google rankings in search results.

3. Keep an Eye on Technical SEO

Technical SEO also has a significant impact on search engine rankings, and you need to monitor and keep things right! Any error or miss optimization can interrupt the crawling, and you won't even appear in the search results. Moreover, some factors can make you look spammy. So, keep your technical SEO up to the mark to have the ranking benefits.

Follow the below recommendations.

• Ignore Cloaking
• Legit use of Redirects
• Don't Create Duplicate Content
• Keep the 404 Low and Optimized
• Never Consider Plagiarism 
• Employ SSL
• Keep the Robot.txt files Right
• Use Structured Data

4. Match Your Buyer's Intent

Understanding and matching the buyer's intent is so crucial. As no tool can tell you what's in a user's mind. You need to use your sense and empathy towards your target audience to understand their different pain points and provide them the right solution.

Do the proper research, think as a user, or interact with your audience to create a robust marketing strategy that matches the buyer's persona. Once you can match the buyer's intent, you can optimize your website best, fetching top ranking in Google SERP.

5. Diminish Your Bounce Rate

The bounce rate shows the users who visited a page of your site and return without taking any action. As Google prioritizes user experience and bounce rate shows user behavior on your site, it greatly impacts your ranking. A high bounce rate hurts your rankings, and you need to reduce it.

There are several reasons for a high bounce rate like you don't meet search intent, website taking long to load, website is hard to browse, mobile incompatibility, etc.

So, consider all these factors and optimize all these to reduce your bounce rate. A low bounce rate depicts that you are a valuable source for users, and Google increases your rankings.

6. Track Your Keyword Performance and Optimize

You can't reserve your rankings; Google always ranks the best in the top positions. So, the only way to maintain your rankings is consistent SEO efforts. You should check the performance of your keywords in search results with Google Search Console. 

If you find any rankings fall for some keywords, adjust your SEO efforts towards those prominent keywords to restore your rankings.

Moreover, you should also check for the business keywords you are ranking good for without any SEO; you can earn the top ranking for those keywords with little efforts.

So, monitor your keywords and rankings to optimize accordingly and win the top rankings.

7. Curate 10X Quality Content

Google wants you to serve the best quality content to the users. And if you bestow the valuable content to the users, Google rewards you the top rankings. Make sure your content curation focuses on the users instead of the search engine. The minute you write for the search engine, you are on the wrong track. Create well researched high-quality content while following the content optimization guidelines to earn the rankings.

If users like your content, then Google will surely increase your content authority and positions in the rankings. Never consider the content spinning, content generation tools, and plagiarism for the content curation because it is a total waste.

Make sure your content is original, valuable, and shareable to fetch the top rankings.

8. Improve Your CTR

CTR (Click-through-Rate) has no direct impact on the ranking, but it influences your search rankings for sure. The more the visitor clicks and visits your website, the better. High CTR tells Google that you are a relevant source for the users, and people prefer you. 

If users like you, Google likes you and boosts your positions in the search results.

Users see three things in a search snippet: meta title, meta description, and URL. You need to optimize all three to entice the users and make them click. All these three search snippet components should be highly relevant to the user's query, give a brief about the landing page they will visit, and ensure that they find the content they were looking for.

You should consider the best practices to optimize a meta title, meta description, and URL. For example, mind the character limit meta title (50-60), the meta description(150-160), and URL (Compact and meaningful). Moreover, insert your business intent keyword while making sure the copy is inviting. Never keyword stuff these details and focus on users for having the best CTR and rankings consequently.

9. Be Mobile-Friendly

Being mobile compatible is not recommended; it is necessary. As the most used device by people to surf the web is the mobile phone, and Google wants you to serve the mobile audience best. Google launched the mobile-first indexing algorithm, which prioritizes the mobile compatible website for indexing.

Moreover, your mobile version is indexed by Google, so you have to be best on the mobile. It will benefit you for sure, as you can reach a wide audience if you are mobile-friendly. People don't waste time on sites that don't work properly on mobiles. So, be mobile compatible and give your audience the best browsing experience to earn the best paramount rankings as a reward from Google.

10. Create High Authoritative Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the prominent ranking factors, and a strong backlink profile can help you win the rankings. Backlinks are the links from the external website pointing towards your website. Backlinks are like votes to your credibility or authority in the eyes of Google, which increases your rankings.

However, there is a matrix Domain Authority; used to scale the authority of a website. Backlinks from high DA sites are more valuable and increase your DA as well. On the other hand, links from low DA or spammy sites don't pass any value or degrade your rankings.

So, make sure you earn high-quality links to improve your rankings. 

Do not consider the paid links or link schemes to generate the backlinks. Google can easily detect these dilutes your search engine rankings. So, stay legit and earn what you deserve. 

That's it. These are the top 10 SEO tips that can help you increase the ranking in search results. SEO not only enables you to get the rankings but also increases your brand value and customer trust, delivering profitable business. So, embark on your small business SEO today and boost your business growth.

You can also take the help of professionals like this SEO and digital marketing agency to take care of your SEO and other online business needs and skyrocket your business returns.