Basic SEO Tips for Small Businesses in 2017

As a small business owner, there is probably a high chance that you are still baffled about SEO and exactly what it entails – with companies probably ringing you on a regular basis, boasting their services and claiming that they’re the best. Although this may be annoying and make you want to run as far away as you can from SEO as possible it is important however that you understand its importance and see it as a primary focus for 2017.

Whether opting to use a SEO Manchester agency, or planning to compile an SEO strategy yourself – here are a few helpful tips for all small businesses to consider this year:

White Hat Link Building – Last year we saw many people claiming that link building is dead, however this is not the case at all, and link building is still much alive. Black hat link building may be dead, however white hat link building is incredibly important for 2017 and it is vital that you put more energy into this area than ever before – focusing on link relevancy above everything else, and being sure to remember the term “quality over quantity”.

Sitemaps – if your website still does not have a sitemap in place, it is vital that you correct this right away. Unsure what a sitemap is? Sitemaps are essentially pages in which list and link to all of the other individual pages on your website – This makes is easy for search engines to crawl websites, and allows for fewer clicks to have to be made when searching for a particular page, which is always a bonus.

Keywords – If you look back a few years, people could get away with allsorts in regards to content – and having any old content on a web page was simply enough for some to get the rankings that they wanted. Over the years however this has changed drastically, with Google’s algorithms constantly adjusting to better account for the interest of searchers.  Keyword research must be conducted regularly to ensure that content caters for what people are searching for when looking for your products/services – including both basic-level keywords and long tail.

User Intent – Contrary to what many may think Google does not just have one huge master algorithm; instead it has hundreds of smaller individual algorithms that need to be considered. With algorithms regularly changing, and being introduced, it can sometimes be impossible to keep up – therefore people should simply focus on their users instead – after all, if your website is good to your users, there is a higher change of the search engines being good to you.