SEO Best Practices for Business Owners

For this week’s blog post, we will examine SEO best practices for business owners and how to make time for SEO efforts that will drive your business forward.

As a business owner, it can be difficult to make time for the little things. Especially with small businesses when you, as the business owner, have to focus on so many different aspects of the business yourself such as driving new business, informing your team of new projects, and managing tight deadlines, it may seem like you’ll never get a minute to catch your breath, much less focus on less important priorities.

But I’m here to tell you that focusing on the little things, such as SEO, can cause monumental impact within your business that will drive new business and take your organization to the next level.

That being said, here are a few of my personal SEO best practices you can implement immediately that will build awareness for your business and, most importantly, only take a few minutes to implement.

Write Custom Page Titles:

We’ve explained the importance of this one before in our SEO Tips and Tricks piece from awhile back, but the point really can’t be driven deep enough. A page title is your most important piece of real estate with SEO because it is the first thing that Google indexes for a particular page.

On top of that, writing custom page titles is easy! Simply copy and paste your page’s primary keyword and use it as your page title. When you use your keyword as the page’s title, you are letting Google know that this particular page is about this specific keyword, and it really can’t get much simpler than that. You can use this page as an example if you’d like.

Many content management systems and web-hosting sites automatically create page titles for you based on surrounding content. While this may seem like a convenient option to rely on (I’m talking to you busy business owners!), these page titles are not SEO-friendly and won’t drive traffic to your site.

Develop a Google-Friendly Content Strategy:

It’s as true as it has been since the mid-2000s: content is king. The more content you write, create, or develop, the quicker you build awareness for your already amazing product or service. Gary Vaynerchuck talks all the time about creating that content and not worrying about the immediate impact it’s going to offer you. It takes time.

Now that being said, because your overall strategy may take some time to pay its dividends, doesn’t mean getting your actual strategy into place does take time. A great content strategy is offering content that is helpful and provides value to your viewers. A great content strategy is also not through just one medium either, but as it relates to SEO, creating and developing frequent blog posts can provide a great deal of value on their own.

SEO and Google-friendly blog posts have between 500 and 1,000 total words of content. This is because 500 words contain enough content to be of use to viewers and keeping it under 1,000 words also ensures that the post is not too long and wordy. Ensuring that your primary keyword is contained within that content 3-5 times is another best practice for Google-friendly content, and making sure that these keywords are evenly spaced out throughout the content shows Google what the page is about without appearing too spammy.

For those business owners that are fortunate enough to have a content development team, passing along this bit of information takes less than a minute and can increase your organic traffic tenfold. For those business owners that are still grinding it out on the content creation side of the business themselves, we feel for you! But it is vital for your business to have valuable content, and ensuring that your content can be found through the use of these Google-friendly best practices will help you drive your business forward.

Write Enticing, Call-to-Action Meta Descriptions:

The final aspect of my best practices for SEO is creating enticing and eye-catching meta descriptions. Just like with page titles, it is likely that your content management system automatically creates a standard meta description for you if you do not write one yourself. If your CMS does not, then Google automatically does for you anyway.

The importance of writing custom meta descriptions yourself is to get people to choose your page over another. If you are unaware, a meta description is what shows up underneath the page title and URL in a search engine. Viewers read them to learn more about the page and, more than likely, decide on one page over another.

Also just like with page titles, writing custom meta descriptions is extremely easy as well! At Predictive ROI, our best practices for custom meta descriptions include using your keyword at least once at the beginning of the description in the form of a question, and then further describing your page as a call-to-action in the following sentence. You must also be sure to keep your entire description to a maximum of 23 words and/or 155 characters or less. If you don’t part of your description will be cut off in your search engine result page (SERP) and viewers will miss part of your amazing description!

Here is an example of an SEO-friendly meta description:

<meta name=”description” content=”Financial planning for retirement? Get 7 free retirement planning tips and expert financial advice to assist during your financial planning for retirement process/>

That’s it for our SEO best practices piece! If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below. Otherwise, check out the rest of our blog for best business practices and more information on driving your business forward.

Onward with Gusto!