If you run a small business, you have a million things on your plate—you might be the head of engineering, marketing, HR, and R & D, and you probably spend more time just keeping your head above water than you’d like. You don’t have time to also manage search engine optimization (SEO) on your Web site.
So, I want to give you the quick-and-easy guide to optimizing your small business for search. I want you to get the most results for the least time input on your part. If you’re like me, you can afford to spend about 2 hours a day marketing your business, so here’s how you can make the most of that time.
Use good URLs
Time estimate: 5 minutes now; 30 seconds per page in the future
From here on out, you should use descriptive, keyword-friendly URLs for all your pages. (Note that a page’s URL is the Web address associated with it.)
Having keywords in your URLs has double benefits—it makes it more likely that the search engines will show your page in the first place, but it also makes it more likely that people will click on it when it does appear. This is because that keyword will be bolded in the URL, grabbing people’s attention.
Words in the URL that match our query are bold and attention-grabbing
If you’re using WordPress, you should already be set up to take advantage of this. To confirm, first log in to the WordPress admin site (generally accessible at http://[your site name].com/wp-admin/). Then, mouse over Settings in the left-hand sidebar and click Permalinks.
Opening the Permalink Settings from the Admin menu
Your Permalink Settings should be set to something including the post name, and not a numeric naming scheme. If you’re not using a name in your permalinks, you should not fix this yourself unless your Web site is brand new—doing so will break all links that anyone has ever used to point to your site. (This may be worth having your Web developer fix in the future.)
Changing the Permalink Settings in WordPress
However, assuming you’re using a permalink structure with the post name in it, let’s talk about how you can improve your permalinks in the future.
You want your permalinks (like your page titles) to include the keywords that users would use to find the page. At the same time, you should skip so-called “stop” words—words that search engines generally ignore, like a, the, is, who, what, and why.
To change a permalink for a page, just click on the portion of the URL that’s highlighted in yellow (as in the following screenshot). Once again, note that you probably don’t want to change your permalinks after you’ve published a page unless you can be sure that a negligible number of visitors may have seen it.
Editing a permalink for a WordPress page
Link to your most important content
Time estimate: 15–20 minutes
Search engines today tend to devalue site-wide links. Stuffing your sidebars with links that aren’t directly related to that page’s content won’t do a whole lot for those pages (though it might get those pages increased visibility from humans). Instead, I suggest spending a few minutes making a list of the content on your site that is most important to you—the stuff you want to rank higher in the search engines now.
Then, take your list and go page-by-page through your site. Look for places where you could (naturally) link to that content. This might be in the text itself, or you might consider adding a “Related posts” sections.
When done correctly, this has the added benefit of making your individual pages into better resources for readers—and happy readers means more repeat visits!
Get your photo in the search results
Time estimate: 20 minutes
You’ve no doubt noticed that Google has started displaying little head shots of content authors in the search results. Those little photos can seriously increase the likelihood of someone clicking on your links when they appear in the search results.
Authorship information, as seen in the search results
If you’re using WordPress, you can get your own photo in the search results by do the following:
- Install the WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast.
- Go into the Admin menu.
- Mouse over Plugins, then click Add New.
- Search for WordPress SEO by Yoast, and click its “Install Now” link.
- Set up a (free) Google+ account and use a headshot as your profile photo.
- Copy your Google+ URL. (E.g., mine is https://plus.google.com/u/1/111777811685236512746/posts; yours will be similar, but with a different long number).
- Add your Google+ URL to your WordPress user account.
- Go into the Admin menu.
- Mouse over Users and click Your Profile.
- Scroll down to the Contact Info section and look for the Google+ field.
- Past your Google+ URL (which you found above) there.
- Save your changes.
- Make sure the Yoast SEO plugin is configured to display authorship.
- Go into the Admin menu.
- Mouse over SEO (near the bottom of the list) and click Titles & Metas.
- Go to the Home tab.
- Make sure the “Author highlighting” field is set to your user account.
- Save your changes.
- Verify with Google that you really do contribute to the site by following Google’s instructions.
Setting up authorship in the Yoast SEO plugin
Once you’re finished, you can test your changes using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. Copy and paste a URL from your site into the box and hit the Preview button. The results should look something like the image below.
Verifying that Google Authorship is working using the Structured Data Testing Tool
Get social
Time estimate: 15 minutes
Social signals (like tweets about your site or likes on your brand’s Facebook page) play a direct role in your standing in the search engines. How big a role they play is up for debate, but you can bet your business that their role will only grow with time.
The easiest way to take advantage of this on your site is using prominent sharing buttons. I suggest offering Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ buttons at the minimum. Depending on your audience, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, or Digg may also be worth showing.
This is super easy in WordPress. In the admin menu, mouse over Plugins in the sidebar, then click Add New.
To add social sharing plugin, mouse over Plugins, then click Add New
Then, use the search bar to find a plugin you like. I’m a fan of Flare, which gives you a little floating bar beside your content (and, if you like, at the top and bottom of your posts as well). You can see it in action on my blog—scroll down a bit and watch it appear in the upper left. Other popular alternatives are ShareThis and WP Socializer.
When you find one you like, click the Install Now link to get it running on your site.
Installing the Flare plugin for social sharing on WordPress
If you’re using Flare, you’ll now get a “Flare” link near the bottom of the sidebar in the admin menu. Click on that to set up the plugin. The important options there are where your bar displays (at the top of the configuration screen) and which social networks you display (about midway down the page).
Develop a strategy for generating traffic
Time estimate: 1–2 hours to get started
This is by far the most time consuming SEO tool I’ll suggest for you. As you can probably guess, it is also the most powerful means of generating traffic in the long term.
Long-term SEO (as opposed to one-time fixes like the ones above) is all about content marketing—creating great content on your Web site, and drawing repeat visitors, social shares, and links from across the Web as a result of that content. (As an added bonus, you’ll also build trust with your prospective customers as a result of providing them value!)
For many businesses, this means starting a blog on your company site aimed at providing value to your customers. Blog about topics of interest to your prospective customers. By providing them value, you’ll draw the links you need for improving your standing in the search engines.
To see this in action, check out the Bidsketch blog. Bidsketch is a software tool for creating proposals, aimed at freelance consultants. Their blog is all about helping freelancers grow their business—they rarely talk about proposals directly, because they don’t need to. Their prospective customer base is absolutely buzzing with excitement about the great information on their blog, bringing them tons of SEO capital—links, shares, and more.
Content marketing for your business is a five-step process:
- Decide what type of content you’ll create. This may include blog posts, videos, webinars, podcasts, and more. Choose a few content types that will complement each other.
- Get your content creators on board. If you have a few employees who are experts in their domain, get them involved. Four people can easily work together to publish a new, 2,000-word blog post each week (one post per person per month). Alternatively, you can consider outsourcing your content creation to a service like BlogMutt or Blog Hands. These services will generally get you lower-quality content than you could create yourself, but if your team is too time-constrained to write a blog themselves, it may be an acceptable tradeoff.
- Plan your first month’s “editorial calendar.” Create enough content to fill your first month. WordPress and other content management systems make it easy to schedule your posts in advance, so you can easily maintain the scheduling that you want. (I suggest consistently posting one high-quality piece of content per week at the minimum.)
- Get ready to promote it. As each of your first month’s posts goes live, make sure the world knows about it. This means sharing it with your social media followers (both on the day it’s published and through later mentions), sharing it with your business connections and asking them to tell their contacts about it, and sending it to news sites in your field.
- Keep going! By having a one-month buffer from the start, you and your team can keep prepping posts to make sure you always remain consistent. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see an instant traffic boost—content marketing is a strategy for the long-term, and it could be a couple months before you see real results.
More resources
- “Fundamentals of Content Marketing” and “Creating Content for the Long Tail,” from Conversion Insights. Together, these compose my complete guide to choosing what type of content you’ll create for generating traffic, who you can get to create it, how to find inspiration for topics, and more. You’ll also learn how to choose keywords to target, informed by your strategy to capture traffic from the long tail of search.
- “The Theory of Conversion Optimization,” from Conversion Insights. Once you’re drawing in new traffic, you want to persuade them to actually buy from you—that’s where conversion rate optimization comes in. This guide covers how to formulate a strategy for each page of your site and how to test your ideas for improvements.
- “Set Up Your First Lifecycle Email Campaign,” from Conversion Insights. Once you’re growing your traffic, you should also be asking for their email addresses so you can both stay on their minds and build the trust necessary to make a sale. Learn how to plan and execute a lifecycle email campaign that will do just that.