15 Search Engine Marketing Tips for Your Small Business

If you want to be found on online by your small business customers, then your have to make sure you have a search engine marketing strategy in place. Read on for our 15 ways to revive your SEO game today.

We all have our own beloved lines in literature. Phrases that have become our friends. Those pairings of words placed in such splendid fashion that they halt our eyes from progressing and propel our thoughts to wandering. These are mine:

Great writing charms you. It calls you by name. It grips your soul by the throat and leaves you no choice but to take notice.

Except here’s the catch:  writing, to be great, needs reading.

Within the communication model, there are two sides. There’s the sender and the receiver. The source and destination. Without both parts, communication is dead…or never fully brought to life in the beginning.

And these days, webpages are such burial grounds for communication.

Is your website housing dead copy? Your pages may be filled with strong, compelling messages and arresting images. You may have hired the Kerouac of writers and the Leibovitz of photographers, and then splashed their content across your website. But if no one’s reading it—if it’s not being discovered—then it’s useless.

It’s time you helped search engines to easily find you. Pump life into your webpages by fixing these common search engine marketing mistakes across your website.

1. NO PAGE TITLE. Your page title is arguably the most accessible and impactful SEO (search engine optimization) element that you have control over on your website. Without a title, your web page will be virtually impossible to find via search engines, and won’t catch the attention of any searchers. Your page title should include your business name and one or two relevant keywords.
2. PAGE TITLE LONGER THAN 70 CHARACTERS. If your page title is too long, it will get cut off in the search results and lead to lower click-through rates. To avoid truncated page titles, your page title should not exceed 70 characters.
3. NO DOMAIN NAME IN PAGE TITLE. For the purpose of brand recognition, it’s important to include your domain name in the page title. Google will select the best title it wants to include in your search snippet, and if it is confident in your brand name, it will include your domain in the title that searchers see first.
4. DUPLICATE PAGE TITLE. Duplicate page titles alert to Google a negative index control over your site, which will result in lower ranking. Instead, make every page title unique to other pages on your site.
5. NO KEYWORDS IN PAGE TITLE. Creating content that performs well in search engine results requires a competitive analysis of keyword research. While having the right keywords in your page title will help drive more traffic, strive to make your page title look natural and avoid using too many keywords, a common search engine marketing mistake.
6. NO META DESCRIPTION. Crucial to SEO, the meta description summarizes your page’s content, draws attention from the searcher, and ultimately generates click-throughs.
7. META DESCRIPTION LONGER THAN 150 CHARACTERS. Keep your meta description to 150 characters or less, including only the most crucial information that conveys your message while keeping it short and simple.
8. NO KEYWORDS IN META DESCRIPTION. Your meta description should at least contain your focus keyword, pushing Google to highlight your description in the search results and making your link even more inviting to the searcher.
9. NO H1 TAGS. Considered the most important heading in HTML, the HI tag is typically the title of your post and the largest text that stands out on your page. It is one of the major ranking factors for search engine marketing.
10. MORE THAN 10 H1 TAGS. We strongly recommend including only one H1 tag in your post. While search engines can crawl multiple H1s, having only one will alert Google that you’re focusing your search engine marketing efforts on one keyword phrase or sentence, making that keyword more powerful.
11. NO KEYWORDS IN H1 TAGS. Include your primary keyword in your H1 tag, so that you can target the exact topic for which you wish to rank.
12. IMAGES DO NOT INCLUDE ALT TEXT. Alt text is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user’s screen. This creates a better user experience for your searchers and enables images to do SEO work for your content.
13. TOO MANY IMAGES ON ONE PAGE. It’s more important that your web page loads fast, than to have large, beautiful images on your page. We recommend including 2-5 well optimized and high quality images that load quickly and are tagged with proper alt text.
14. PAGE LOADS TOO SLOWLY. A page that loads too slowly will result in a high bounce rate and poor SEO results for that page. Optimize your images, videos and content to enable your page to load as quickly as possible.
15. NO CALLS TO ACTION ON THE PAGE. If you’ve drawn people into your webpage with good copy, the final search engine marketing tactic is to end with a strong call-to-action. This is your chance to motivate your audience to take real steps towards becoming a customer or client, and can be the main factor between a lead and a conversion.