Let’s revisit SEO for Small Business Websites

This entry was posted in SEO Small Business Small Businesses and tagged Search Engine Optimization for Small Business SEO Small Business Small Business SEO on by

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has been around for a while now.  There was a time when you had to have your Search Engine optimization Guru help with this.  Now you can buy SEO a la carte from your web hosting provider or even just use plugins with WordPress.

Google for Small Business
You probably know by now, with some effort you can modify just about any item that Google lists for you.  If you want to take a closer look at the methods a Pro would use:

Google My Business – Show Up On The Web · Find New Customers · Get On Google For Free Services: Google Search Listing, Google Maps Listing, Business Profile

Google My Business

 

Adwords ExpressRecently, I updated my low-volume small business website with some new tools & techniques that seem to be working right away to generate more visits. I will update you in 30 days to show more progress and how I tracked it.  The image above is from AWStats, most websites have this logging functionality built in (ask your host.)  This can be used in with Google Analytics to compare notes.

Before I started the SEO I began with updating my Blog, and I cleaned up all WordPress plugins to ensure I was running as smoothly and efficiently as possible and I ran through all the settings over and over.

I want to generate traffic to my site for the purpose of promoting my services, so here’s what I did:

  1. Wrote high quality content to make it more Google friendly.
  2. Update Plugins for Google Analytics on website
  3. Check tags and Permalinks
  4. Update Google listing

While I was updating the plugins in WordPress I realized things like “Meta” tags don’t really work anymore.  Google is smarter than that now and there are more modern ways to get your tags to Google.

Google Adwords Express – I added my business here so that when people do a search in Google Maps or Search it finds the correct information.  I found Adwords Express to be much simpler and easier to use than regular Adwords.

Google My Business – Adwords Express and Google My Business seem to overlap.  Get your business hours, phone number, and directions on Google Search and Maps — with Google My Business.  That’s their description.  Essentially it gets you similar things.

If I had to explain the difference I would say Google My Business will get you on the Map (and everywhere else), while Google Adwords will get you in Google (search.)

Google Search Console (aka Google Webmaster’s Tools) – I made sure to add my website.

I’m currently using the All In One SEO Pack plugin for my WordPress site.  It’s highly rated and does the things that I find important for SEO.  Like many other plugins, it has more features than I need but the fact that it has the most important ones and works is what is important.

All In One SEO PackSome of the things that I like about this plugin:

  • Canonical URLs – This option will automatically generate Canonical URLs for your entire WordPress installation. This will help to prevent duplicate content penalties by Google
  • Google Analytics – Just one place to enter this, that’s what I want.
  • Automatic SEO on only these post types – I can choose with links I want the plugin to SEO

Have you ever wondered about the Trends that Google Searches may go through?  Google Trends is a Google service to show you the actual trends that are taking place on Google’s Search Engine.  This might be useful for researching the demographics for your website, but in many cases it may be that your topic is of niche value which may not show a significant trend.