7 SEO Tips to Get Your Small Business or Nonprofit Discovered Online
A successful business starts with traffic. Traffic essentially means awareness, or, eyeballs on your business. There are many ways to get your business or nonprofit in front of new people. Some require a financial investment, like ads, or a time investment, like cold calls, outbound sales, and the like.
Others, however, require knowledge, strategy, testing, and execution, but are low or no lost, like organic social media and search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your website to increase its visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). By implementing SEO best practices, you can improve the quantity and quality of traffic to your small business or nonprofit’s website from search engines.
Here are 7 SEO tips to get your small business or nonprofit discovered online.
Conduct Keyword Research
Keyword research is the foundation of any SEO strategy. It involves identifying the keywords and phrases that your target audience is searching for and optimizing your website content accordingly. Use keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to identify the most relevant and high-volume keywords for your niche. Once you know what your ideal customers, donors, and constituents are searching for, you can begin to make decisions that will impact the rest of your social media strategy.
Optimize On-Page Content
Now that you know what keywords resonate with your target audience, you can use that information to optimize your on-page content. Optimizing your on-page content involves ensuring that your website content is structured in a way that is easy for search engines to crawl and understand. This includes optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and ensuring that your content includes relevant keywords. Also, make sure that your content is high-quality, engaging, and informative.
Let Your Keyword Research Inform Your Content Strategy
In order to include as many keywords on your site as possible, we recommend letting your keyword research inform your ongoing content strategy. With a blog, you can write posts regularly that speak to specific keywords and phrases. For example, our team chose the keyword ‘SEO tips for small businesses’ and wrote this blog post to speak directly to it. Staying on top of search trends and creating content regularly is key to a maximizing this part of your SEO strategy.
Improve Site Speed
Switching gears, site speed is a crucial factor for both user experience and SEO. Google considers site speed as a ranking factor, so it's important to ensure that your website loads quickly and without issue. You can improve site speed by optimizing images, minifying CSS and JavaScript files, and using a content delivery network (CDN) to deliver your website content.
Build Quality Backlinks
Another SEO strategy includes building quality backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website. They are an important ranking factor for search engines, and they can also drive referral traffic to your site. To build quality backlinks, focus on creating high-quality content that other websites will want to link to. You can also reach out to other websites in your niche and offer to guest post or collaborate on content. While there are many services out there that will build backlinks for you, we recommend thoroughly vetting your backlinked sources and weaving link building into your SEO strategy. Your reputation is incredibly important, and low-quality sites linking to yours can damage it!
Utilize Social Media
While not commonly recognized, social media can actually help your SEO strategy. Social media can help you build brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and improve your search engine rankings. Share your website content on social media platforms, engage with your followers, and encourage them to share your content with their followers. Search engines, like Google, will recognize that people are spending time reading your content and deem it as important, thus boosting your rankings.
Monitor and Analyze Your Results
This just might be the most important part of your SEO strategy. SEO is an ongoing process, and it's important to monitor and analyze your results to determine what's working and what's not. Search trends change frequently, as do consumer trends, so keeping yourself in-tune with these changes is key. Use tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track your website traffic, keyword rankings, and backlinks. Use this data to make informed decisions about how to optimize your website for better results. Or, allow our team to do the heavy lifting for you!
As you can see, SEO is a complex and ever-changing field, but by following these tips and tricks, you can improve your website's visibility and ranking on search engine results pages, thus driving more traffic and generating more, higher quality leads.
A professional agency, like Avorio Marketing, can help your organization build and execute an impactful SEO strategy that works cohesively in tandem with your overall marketing strategy. Book your free consultation today!
