SEO For Small Businesses in the UK : 5 Easy Ways to Improve!

You might think that your small business doesn’t really need to focus on search engine optimization because your business is mainly offline. Well, the majority of businesses in the world are either online or are looking to go online. That is why you need to make sure that when people are searching for a builder, a baker, accountant, plumber or hairdresser in your area, your business is one of the first ones to show up! And search engine optimisation is the way to do it!  In this video, we’re going to be giving you

5 easy ways that you can use SEO to improve your small businesses ranking today!

1. Think locally

Instead of trying to optimize your small businesses website in a way that appeals to the entire world, focus your energy on making sure it appeals to your locality. If you provide a local service, the only people that really make a difference to your small business are the ones that can actually get to your store, which would be people in your area! So, imagine you have a hairdressing business, instead of just using single keywords like “hairdressers” on your website. You should instead use longtail keywords that are relevant to your locality like “hairdressers in North London”. This way, whoever searches for a hairdresser in north London, should be able to see your business pop up on their search! This is exactly how you’re going to harness local clients online!

READ ALSO: 5 Ways To Get More Leads For Your B2B Business 

2. Verify your online presence on search engines

Whenever you search for something on a search engine like Google, you see some of the top relevant businesses pop up. Some businesses have complete listings in Google and other business directories. This way when people search for generic terms like builder near me, or car hire services in Manchester, your business is likely to feature in the search results. This makes it quick and easy for your business This is why you should spend time listing your business in Google’s directory and other directories and make sure that your listing is complete! Add everything from your contact details, your business hours, and even a few pictures that are relevant to your page! The more information you have on your listing, the most “trustworthy” your service looks!

3. Encourage customers to leave reviews 

There’s nothing that convinces people to spend their money on something as well as a recommendation. Word of mouth is always better than trying to sell your services on your own by just saying “we’re great at what we do”. In fact, Displaying an Online Review can increase your conversion rate by 270% You should ask your customers to leave a review on your Google business or other directory pages, which will be the first thing people see any time they Google the name of your business. They could also leave reviews on your social media accounts or on your website itself. The more reviews you can gather, the better your business tends to look overall! It makes potential customers feel more at ease about hiring your company for a project than if they didn’t see any reviews at all!

4. Get active on social media 

This may seem like a strange thing to say when discussing SEO. But nowadays, social media platforms act just like newspapers did back in the day. If you want to get people’s attention, there’s nothing better you can do than to create a social media account on every single platform and get active on it. When you’re regularly uploading on social media and engaging with your audience, they’ll get to know your business on a personal level, they will feel like they can reach out to you using the platform they feel most comfortable on. Just make sure all of your profiles look professional and have all the information your potential customers will need to know about you! This will ensure that you look available and presentable at the same time! Having a social media account makes your business more discoverable when potential customers search your business. For example, if you have an Instagram account with the relevant keyword for your business, like Painter in north London, this will make your business Instagram page discoverable when users search in google using these keywords. Therefore, Social media accounts will also create the trust that your business is legitimate and adds more information about your small business online. It also makes your business more discoverable.

5. Add blog pages to your website 

The thing about small businesses is that you’re probably not going to be the only one fighting for that one spot on the search engines. It’s likely that you have a lot of competition. This means that to get more traffic to your website you need to try to rank for as many keywords and items as you possibly can. Now, this isn’t really possible if you have a regular, static website you won’t be able to use a lot of keywords in it because you’ll be working with a very limited number of pages. But, if you add a blog to your website, you can have a dedicated page for every single keyword or item you want to rank for! You can even have several blogs about the same keywords to improve your chances of being ranked! This is by far the easiest way to improve your ranking organically! And that’s a wrap for the top 5 ways you can improve the search ranking of your small business! Have you tried any of these strategies? Let us know in the comments below!