8 SEO Best Practices for Small Businesses in 2015

You’ve probably already been told that search engine optimization is constantly evolving. For a small business owner, this can make SEO sound big and scary and something that you have to pour hours into every week, just to stay ahead of the curve. While SEO does take a little bit of time, staying on top of your optimization doesn’t have to consume your life, especially if you’re working with an SEO expert. Looking forward to the rest of 2015, here are some of the best practices and SEO tips all small business owners should keep in mind.

1. Content continues to reign. It was Bill Gates who coined the phrase, “Content is king,” in an article written nearly ten years ago. Despite being almost a decade old (which is nearing old age, in internet-years), the statement is still true and will continue to be true, especially for small businesses. When consumers do business with small companies, they want that personal touch, they want something meaningful and valuable—that’s the whole point of working with a small business, instead of a mindless corporation. Valuable content will be your biggest asset.

2. Mobile is more important than ever. Every year in the last three years has been touted as the Year of the Mobile Device. If any year is that year, it’s 2015. Mobile traffic has already outstripped desktop and laptop traffic, which means that if your website isn’t mobile friendly, you are probably missing out on at least half of your traffic. If you don’t yet have a responsive design or a website made specifically for mobile users, get one up as soon as possible.

3. Backlinking is changing. So, it’s not really changing, but what aspects of the backlink Google favors is changing. Search engines now care far more about the content around the link, meaning that if your backlink isn’t surrounded by content that actually mentions or is even about your brand, Google’s not going to like it. In some instances, you might not even need a link. If a website talks about your brand and mentions you by name, that’s often going to be enough to count as a backlink.

4. Keyword are going to matter less and less. This is going to be hard for most long-time SEO-ers to hear, but keywords have not been a primary ranking factor for a while now. Gone are the days where you can just stick as many keywords as possible into your content and get a great page ranking. Of course, keyword ranking still matters, but search engines like Google are going to be paying much more attention to how well your website delivers what it promises. It’s mostly going to be doing this by measuring your website’s return on investment. A low ROI means that you aren’t being effective, and therefore, likely don’t deliver what you offer. A high ROI means your website is high value and works to convert page visitors into customers, clients, or patients.

5. Don’t discount social signals. Just as content is only becoming more and more important, your small business’s social footprint is becoming more and more important. This can be discouraging for owners who know that they can never compete with powerhouses like Nike or Coca-Cola, who has massive social media followings. Luckily, you don’t have to compete with those two brands, as you’re likely trying to attract customers from your local area, not all over the world. Content is closely linked to social signals, as what is likely getting the most social activity will be your content.

6. Keep your website safe. Cybercrime is on the rise, and while few people are still wary of online shopping, the danger of having your identity or personal information stolen is actually growing. Search engines are going to favor websites that have the appropriate security measures in place. Why? Because search engines want to protect their users. They don’t want to send them to websites where there information is going to get stolen—they only want to serve up websites that are safe to visit. Make sure you have all of the necessary protections in place to guard the information provided by patients, clients, or customers to your website.

7. Conversations mean more than keywords. Any freelance or on-staff content writer will tell you how often he gets requests to insert keywords like “best dentist New Jersey” twelve times into content. There are still SEO articles advising a high concentration of “exact match” keywords like this—despite the fact that they haven’t really been necessary since 2013. As scary as the prospect might be, Google isn’t just looking for keyword phrases, it’s looking at the whole of the content and evaluating its relevancy to not just the search phrase used, but the intent of the search phrase. Plus, searchers are now using more conversational phrases—mostly because they are no longer being taught in school to omit the articles and extraneous words.

8. Visuals are just as important as words. Google also isn’t going to just be looking at the words that you use on your webpage. It is also going to be looking for relevant videos, graphics, and images. The more visual your webpage is, the more likely it is to get a high ranking. Of course, that doesn’t mean you want to cut back on valuable content, it just means that you should definitely include visual elements, as well as content on your webpage. Don’t neglect one or the other.

Use these eight best practices to make sure your small business’s website has all of the elements it needs for search engine success!

Courtesy of: business2community.com

SEO with Marketing

Our goal for any campaign is to better to align as many marketing channels as possible with SEO best practices in order to better leverage all of these marketing activities from an organic search perspective. Additionally, we wanted to improve the internal communication, especially around keywords. To do that, we concentrate on the following areas of focus:

1. Internal Communication
2. Keyword Management
3. Digital Content Strategy
4. Social Media
5. PR Optimization
6. Training

Let's discuss some of the tactics that we used to successfully align each of these areas of focus with SEO best practices.

Internal Communication

Improving the lines of communication within any organization is the cornerstone of our success. Getting everyone focused on the same goals will always have a tangible effect and produce better results than would have otherwise been possible. In order to better align the members of various marketing teams, we provide them with keyword lists that are relevant to whatever projects they are working on. Some folks get the whole keyword set and some got a subset of the overall keyword list depending on their role in the company. Once those keywords had been provided, we trained each of those groups on how they could implement those keywords into the activities that they were responsible for (more about training later).

Equally important is getting this entire initiative prioritized by management and having that priority communicated to all of the teams that we were working with. Having upper level management communicate the priority of search to the entire company is critical. Additionally, demonstrating through analytics data how important SEO is to the marketing and sales efforts of the company is another key initiative.

The other piece of the puzzle is a high degree of collaboration including weekly SEO team meetings and participation in marketing meetings. These tactics are very successful in improving communication and getting everyone aligned with the goals and objectives of our SEO campaign.

Keyword Management

Segmenting keywords into campaigns based on business objectives and then within those campaigns, segmenting by keyword group is a very important part of our process. Not only does the segmentation allow for more granular understanding of SEO performance, but it also makes it easier for us to provide relevant keywords to various marketing teams. Content writers and bloggers are given keywords that were relevant to their area of focus whereas other marketers are given the entire list depending on their role. Obviously training all these folks on how to use the keywords is a critical piece as well. But the segmentation of keywords makes a big difference in the campaign.

Digital Content Strategy

Once the keywords have been identified and segmented, a content gap analysis is performed to illustrate where sufficient content is needed to address the keywords that they had targeted. Additionally, a lot of the marketing content often lives behind an authentication wall (you have to register to download a whitepaper for example). Creating optimized landing pages for this content that is targeted towards relevant keywords with content previews (snippets) helps open that content up to search. We also collaborate with various content producers to create new content (both text and video) that is aligned with company goals and marketing objectives. Keyword research is really user research that explains how your targeted audience is using language to describe your goods, services and concepts in your industry. Therefore, aligning your marketing content with those keywords means that you are talking the same language as the people you are trying to sell to which not only improves your search rankings but also improves your conversions because people understand what you are saying.

The main goal within the Digital Content alignment is to have the people who are producing digital assets on an ongoing basis get the education that they need to create optimized content from inception. In other words, our SEO team wouldn't need to optimize every new page on the site because it was built from an optimization perspective to begin with.

Social Media

Social Media is a huge area of focus for us. In addition to using social media channels like Blogging, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to extend messaging, promote content and engage our target audience, we want to use social media to create thought leadership, consistently produce new keyword focused content, and acquire new, relevant links that will make a difference in our SEO campaign. In addition to the keyword lists and training that we provide to social media teams, another successful tactic is a consistent posting schedule for all social media platforms for their content. We create what we called a Digital Asset Chart that gives instructions on how and where to promote each type of digital asset (blog post, video, webinar, etc). This way we always have a consistent approach to promoting content through social media, no matter whose job is ends up being.

PR Optimization

One of the most important vehicles for link building any company is press release optimization. By training PR teams on SEO best practices, we are able to make each release more impactful to the overall SEO campaign. The releases get more traffic because they get more search traffic, even if they live on someone else's domain. And, because they are created with relevant, embedded links that point back to our clients’ Websites, every time the release is picked up, they get new, valuable links. Obviously this tactic is only successful when you're company has something meaningful to say.

SEO Training

This is another cornerstone in the success of this SEO campaign. Empowering people within the organization to make their own contributions to the SEO campaign is a huge priority for us in any engagement because ultimately it's easier to scale across a large organization than trying to have one SEO team do everything. We conducted training for the following groups of people:

• Content writers
• Bloggers
• PR Team
• Social Media Team
• Internal SEO Resources
• Management
• IT

And depending on which group we were training, we covered the following topics:

• Keyword Research
• On Page Optimization (Content Optimization + Meta data + Page Titles)
• PR Optimization
• Social media / SEO best practices
• Link optimization (Internal and External)
• Site wide optimization (Technical Issues)

By demystifying SEO across various groups within the company, we were able to align all of the groups against the goals and priorities of the SEO campaign.

By aligning all of these marketing groups with those goals and aligning their activities with SEO best practices, we have been able to help many clients achieve significant gains in organic search. Hopefully this model can provide a template for others to follow to achieve similar results.

Google Panda Update SEO Survival Tips

Google Panda 2.2 is looming to drop sometime soon, and with it, increasing levels of apprehension in the small business community on fears of further collateral damage to organic search traffic. As a speaker at SES Toronto this year, I had the distinct honor of accompanying Dave Davies,Thom Craver and Terry Van Horne on a panel to discuss the impact of Google Panda, and long-term strategies for SEO success.

Diversify Your Traffic

Much to my own amazement and to that of my peers on stage, many in attendance at SES Toronto felt that they received significantly more traffic from Google organic search than any other source, and that SEO traffic converted much better than other sources.

As a general rule of thumb, no more than 40 percent of your referred traffic should come from Google because any significant change is bound to have a negative impact on your bottom line. When you consider how long it can take to notice and recover from an SEO penalty for even small mistakes (such as server downtime, bad navigational links, forgotten redirects, etc.), putting all your eggs into one basket substantially increases your risk.

Normally I wouldn't disagree with a large group at SES, but to say organic traffic converts better than other sources indicates that very few attendees are properly optimizing their paid search campaigns. Why? Paid search marketing has several distinct advantages over organic search traffic that should yield higher conversion:

• Product: Guaranteed exposure to only those products and services you want to promote in search results. Match keywords to exact product offerings and watch conversion skyrocket.
• Price: In this case, it’s not the price of the product or services offered, but the price your business pays for the traffic itself. Don’t forget to factor in all the time and effort invested into ranking for keywords in organic results, and how often changes may be required.
• Promotion: While you can change the content surrounding your products, you may not have the same amount of creative license to change that content as quickly for mainstay (SEO targeted) pages versus paid search landing pages, nor will you necessarily have control over which pages Google chooses to display in results pages for any given query.
• Place: Distribution of your product won’t change, but distribution of your product in organic SERPs may be highly elastic versus highly-controllable paid search campaigns.
• People: Perhaps the most important component is your inability to control and target behavioral cues in search queries using SEO. It doesn’t get much better than the complete control that multiple keyword match types, negative match keyword lists, and advanced query performance reporting affords a search marketer.

My final argument about why organic search traffic may not convert as well as other sources? Visitor intent.

Visitors coming from organic search results for the first time are extremely hard to convert, and it can take several repeat visits, if your content is good enough, to finally convert them sometime down the line.

Measure Success Using Actionable KPIs

I love data, but much of it is useless and not actionable. In terms of useless SEO metrics, here are a few:

• “Average position” and “Impressions” as provided by Google Webmaster Tools are useless metrics because Google varies position by geographic locale, personalized results (when logged in), and likely past-user behavior (not logged-in cookies).
• “Visits” and “Page Views” and even “Average Time Spent” as measured using analytics software aren't as useless, unless used alone because webmasters have little control over how much traffic search engines send them.

The emphasis should be put on measuring actionable KPI’s segmented by traffic source such as bounce rate, micro and macro conversion rates, revenue, and visitor loyalty.

Want to get really sophisticated? Try testing out multi-source attribution and start assigning real dollar values to each one of your traffic sources touch points.

Build a Community

The group was decidedly split on the influence of social media on Google Panda, due in part to a tangent discussion on how Google might one day leverage social signals from Google +1. As it stands, Google currently uses Twitter’s “fire hose” feed and some signals from public pages on Facebook to influence rankings, the former weighing much more heavily in substantial, but short-lived SEO boost.

Google’s modus operandi seems to have always been to show up late to a party, build their own dance floor, and either win people over, or buy out their best competitor (YouTube, DoubleClick, Postini, Urchin, etc). In much the same respect, it will take time to see whether Google +1 gains enough momentum and critical mass to make a sizeable dent on the hundreds of other “favoriting” sites like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and StumbleUpon, to name a few.

Don’t look to social media to build links for SEO because the best links come from establishing earned media from a community of loyal brand ambassadors. Talk to your visitors and customers, engage communities, and start practicing the art of building personas. Through careful research, webmasters can hone into communities online that serve the best bang for their buck, and those might not be in any of the top social websites.

If you invest time into building a community, your business isn’t as likely to be as hard hit by changes to search algorithms such as Google Panda.

WebCertain: Optimizing for Yandex is Much Different Than for Google

Rules for SEO are largely the same from market to market around the globe — but there are some nuances to consider when trying to optimize for such search engines as Yandex, Russia’s most popular, SEOmoz says. A video interview with Andy Atkins-Krüger, the founder and CEO of international SEO firm WebCertain, gives some insight.

For example, Google does not use machine learning on its natural search to anywhere near the extent that Yandex does, he says. Yandex's algorithm was created by what human assessors think of web pages, who set those as targets. Then the algorithm tries to achieve those targets. "Now what that means is that if you've got a set of results and in those results there's a kind of a certain approach that should theoretically get you to the top of those results, and you launch a site that matches that format, then the algorithm is going to say, 'Oh, no, that's not what we wanted,' and it will shift. So as an SEO, you're in a fairly difficult position because it's going to move around all the time," says Atkins-Krüger.

Growing SERP Real Estate by 2 or 3 Lines

There are six underutilized ways a site can increase its Search Engine Result Page real estate by two or three lines, writes David de Souza, founder ofMatchingDonations.org, for the SEO Book blog. he says.

These are:

1. Dual Rankings. If more than one of your pages is relevant for a search query on any given page, Google will group these listings together. For example, if a site is listed in the second position for a certain keyword and on the second page of Google in position 11 there is a different URL that also ranks for the same keyword, building enough links to push the secondary listing to page 1 will cause Google to automatically promote it to position 3, he says. "To achieve dual rankings, build both internal and external links to the lower ranking page using the anchor text of the keywords for which you wish to receive dual rankings."

2. Meta Description. "I often see websites using just a few words for their meta descriptions, resulting in only a single line in the SERPs. By adding a few more words, a website can take advantage of the second line that Google allows them for describing their site."

3. Forums. These not only get up to 4 additional listings in the SERPs, they also stand out and catch a user's eye compared to a regular listing.

4. Rich Snippets. They not only enhance rankings, and improve your CTRs but also increase the size of a listing. Here is where Schema.org will come in handy: it provides webmasters with a shared collection of recognized rich snippets supported by search engines.

5. More Results. Google will display an additional line under a listing if the site is a good source of relevant information. "You can increase the probability of Google showing this extra line by having a diverse set of content on your site, interlined with relevant anchor text."

6. Sitelinks. Google generates sitelinks automatically, you can’t do anything specifically to receive them, de Souza says. "To improve your chances of receiving sitelinks, you should follow the best practice of using informative, compact anchor and ALT text for any links to your site."

SEO vs. SEF

Not every website that has a good URL structure is search engine "optimized." A good URL structure might be defined as something that resembles this:

www.example.com/category/product-name/

A poor URL structure (for search engine "friendliness") would be something like:

www.example.com/IWCatProductPage.process?
Merchant_Id=1&Section_Id=691&Product_Id=1439522&
Parent_Id=302&default_color=BLACK&sort_by=§ioncolor=&
sectionsize=

The above bad example comes from an actual top Internet retailer's website.

Creating a better URL structure certainly does help. But does that make the site "optimized" or does it merely mean that the site is one step closer to being search engine "friendly"?

There are many technicalities to developing a search engine "friendly" website. For the purposes of this column, I'll speak pretty high level on the search engine "friendly" factor, then get down a little deeper into how it can become search engine optimized.

SEO + SEF

When you commit yourself to building a website that can do well in the search engines, you must first ensure that the website's foundation is sound -- that it's search engine "friendly."

Many enterprise-level content management systems are a horror when it comes to SEO, churning out URLs like the one mentioned previously. Some are so locked down that you can't gain access to the structure to modify to make it more search engine friendly, leaving you unable to:

• Handle canonicalization issues
• Rewrite URLs
• Add breadcrumbs
• Change headers
• Optimize images

Do some research on the platform. See if other websites are able to rank well in the search engines running on a similar solution.

Make sure that you understand the details of the platform. Do you have to pay extra to get the exact same solution that the ranking websites are running on?

Also, make sure that the websites running on the solution aren't using a cloaking system, which are somewhat popular with large e-commerce websites. If the URL showing up in the SERP is different than when you navigate directly through the website, there's a good chance the website is using "good" cloaking.

Another place to check is the website's robots.txt file. Type in the website domain, followed by robots.txt (e.g., www.example.com/robots.txt). If you see that they are disallowing (from the search engines) basically "everything" on the domain, there's a good chance that they are doing "good" cloaking, and using one of these systems.

Once you get past that, in order for you to ensure that you are actually building a search engine optimized website, you must make sure that you've done some keyword research, competitive analysis, link analysis, and checked the overall structure of the website. My bet is that the Web designer/IT guy hasn't done any of this.

Content is King

When you do keyword research, especially for a website that you're in the midst of building, you want to determine the keywords that are relevant to your business, searched often, and -- here's the kicker -- that you have some degree of authority on, or a reason why the search engines might think that you're a quality result to show in the rankings.

Do you have a page on your website that's actually focused on the keywords that you think are important to your business? Amazingly enough, a lot of websites fall short here. You simply don't have the content (sometimes not even so much as a mention of the keyword) on a page.

Keyword research and competitive analysis are best done in tandem. Find keywords that have popularity/search volume, and then determine if you have any chance for ranking for that keyword. If the answer to both questions is "yes," then you need to determine a strategy for that keyword.

Information Architecture/Keyword Mapping

Once you've developed a list of keywords to target, find a place for the content/pages to exist.

Remember, usability is an important part of this process. Don't just build a bunch of pages, link to these "doorway" pages in the footer of the website, and think this adds value to the user experience.

You want to add value to the user experience, as much as you want to add value to the search engines. Both usability and SEO can work toward common goals.

Blog Posts/Tips and Advice

A lot of times, the best way to create the content (especially for those websites in which your target audience is doing a lot of research) is to create a blog. You can take advantage of industry news by writing quick blog posts against "new" news, you can ask questions, and then provide answers (e.g., "what to do about a broken air conditioner").

This type of helpful content doesn't really make a lot of sense for a corporate website, so you have to find areas of your website in which you can be a little bit more human in your use of the English language. Find out how people are searching, and develop content for those searches.

A lot goes into the SEO process. It isn't possible to get into everything that you should be doing for your particular website in one single column. The purpose here is to illustrate some things that you might be lacking by solely believing that a search engine "friendly" website structure is going to equate to a search engine "optimized" presence.

Resource by searchenginewatch