7 SEO Tips for Small Business Owners: Boost Your Rankings

If you’re a small business owner, people are searching for what you do on Google. Unless you show up, you’re missing out on customers or clients. SEO is how you do that, and the basics are quick and easy. Follow these tips to rank your small business higher in no time.

1. Claim and Optimize Your Google Business Profile

If you only do one thing as a small business owner, make it to claim and optimize your Google Business Profile (GBP). A Google Business Profile helps users find and learn about your business in Google search and maps. It’s free to set up and lets you share important details about your business with customers, like its phone number, opening times, and offerings.

But here’s the real beauty of Business Profiles: People don’t have to search for your business to see your profile. They can appear for broader searches like “pizza restaurant near me.” This makes them a powerful way to attract new customers searching for what you do.

Here are the basics of optimizing your profile:

• Set the right business category and type
• Add opening hours (and keep them up to date!)
• Add contact details
• Add photos
• Add your products or services

Learn more in our Free Brand Building optimization guide.

2. Get Listed on Relevant Directories

People don’t always turn to Google to find small businesses. They also search popular business directories and trusted review websites. Even if they do search Google, they’ll often end up browsing a popular directory anyway because that’s often what ranks.

For example, I was recently searching for a cat sitter for an upcoming vacation. I started my search by typing “cat sitter near me” into Google. But I soon ended up browsing a niche directory because that’s what all the top results were. Long story short, if you’re not listed on popular niche or local directories, you’re losing out on second-hand search traffic and customers.

Here are a couple of ways to find the best directories to get listed on:

Search Google: Head over to Google and search for “[what your business does] in [location],” then add your business to directories that rank on the first page.

Find the directories your competitors are listed on: Most directory listings also link to your website, which means you can use your competitors’ backlink profile to find relevant directories.

3. Fix Basic SEO Issues on Your Website

Having technical SEO issues can hurt your rankings, so it’s worth checking that your website is technically sound and fixing any major issues. The easiest way to do this is with an SEO audit tool like Ahrefs’ Site Audit. You can use this free of charge with an Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) account. Just sign up, follow the steps to crawl your site, then filter the All issues report for Errors.

For advice on what the issues mean and how to fix them, hit the tooltip.

4. Do Keyword Research & Create Pages for Your Products or Services

People often search for specific products or services rather than what your business does. For example, they might search for “bathroom remodel near me” instead of “plumber near me.” If they do this, Google tends to show pages about that service, not plumbers’ homepages. You might struggle to rank for these terms unless you have these pages.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Brainstorm all the products or services you offer.
2. Paste them into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer (make sure to select the country you’re in).
3. You’ll see the keywords sorted by their estimated monthly search volumes from high to low.

This should give you a good idea of relative interest in the products or services you offer and the pages you should prioritize creating.

5. Give Searchers Useful Product and Service Information

Having pages about your products and services is one thing, but you also need to make sure they tell searchers what they want to know. If you know your customers well, you can probably get halfway there easily. But it’s always best to do a bit of research.

For example, if you’re a local boiler engineer, having specific information about the brands and types of boilers you service can help searchers and save time.

6. Build a Few Backlinks

Backlinks are a known ranking factor. The only problem is that high-quality backlinks are far from easy to get. For small businesses, taking advantage of existing relationships is a good starting point.

Here are a few ideas:

• Give suppliers testimonials.
• Publish client spotlights.
• Pitch stockist pages.

Replicate your competitors’ best backlinks by plugging their site into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and checking the Backlinks report.

7. Ask for Reviews and Respond to Them

Google advises small business owners to remind customers to leave reviews and reply to them to build trust. The easiest way to do this is to create and share a link to your Business Profile with customers. This can also help with your “map pack” rankings, according to BrightLocal’s survey.

Don’t limit yourself to asking for and replying to reviews on your Google Business Profile. Many customers also trust other websites. Google your business name and look for other review sites in the results to identify important platforms for reviews.

SEO is crucial for small businesses to attract customers searching for their services online. By following these steps, you can improve your search rankings and visibility.

Ready to enhance your SEO strategy and attract more customers? 

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