1. Ask Yourself – Is My Website Search Friendly?

If you want your business website to meet every goal you’ve set, it’s necessary to ensure it appears in the appropriate search results. However, making your personal site search engine friendly is a lot harder than it sounds.

You need to take care of various factors, including descriptive page titles, headings, image alt text, and meta descriptions. Never forget to include suitable keywords so the search engine can find out what content is present in your business site.

Remember, your goal is to make sure your website turns up in the results whenever someone performs an associated search.

2. Why Your Business Needs a Mobile Website?

Not only do you have to optimize your business website for the search engines, but also you must optimize them for smartphones and tablets. It’s no longer an option, considering how mobile has overtaken desktop as the primary source of online traffic.

Having a small business mobile website is also a good way to rank higher in the search engine results. This is possible because better the user experience your site offers, the longer a mobile visitor will remain on-site.

And the longer they stay, the more valuable and relevant your content is considered by the search engines. This makes your website eligible for a rankings boost.

3. Why are Sitemaps Important to Your Website Business?

Sitemaps are an important addition to your business website since they make every page easily discoverable by the search engines. Not only does this improve indexing results but it also presents information to your site visitors in a logical fashion.

Customer purchase journey is made easier as a result of making informed decisions. To view the best results, your site should include a page per location and a page per profit center.

4. Ensure Your Visitors Know How to Contact Your Website for Business

When you draw attention to your contact details, it prompts visitors to reach out by emailing or calling. If that’s not all, consistent contact details also help optimize the local search engine.

When people in your location search for a similar business, your site is more likely to pop up as the search engines link you to that area, thereby impacting your business’ bottom line directly.

5. Keep an Eye on Your Financial Score

Most small businesses do not keep track of their daily, monthly, and weekly numbers and financial trends occurring in the organization. However, it is vital that you spend some time staying up-to-date on the cash flow.

If you do not possess the requisite financial skills yourself, employ an accountant to do the job on your behalf. But make sure you stay in the loop at all times.

6. Know How to Optimize Website Content for SEO

Optimizing content for your business website involves numerous things, like taking your search engines and audience into consideration. To keep your audience hooked, make sure your content is informative and relevant, even when you’re describing your services and products.

Periodically update your content since the info contained within or the target market may change over time. Moreover, create different web pages for different services, locations and products for boosted conversions and improved user experience.

Keyword-rich, informative content also improves indexing results and optimizes your site. Keep the current crop of optimized content updated at all times and add fresh content to your site so you can impact the rankings in a positive way. For example, including separate web pages for separate locations improves local business awareness.

7. Know How to Speed Up Your Business Website Loading Time

Depending on the loading speed of your business website, people will take a call on whether to explore your site further or move to a different page. Keep in mind that exceeding the expected load time by even a few seconds can dramatically increase your site’s bounce rate and cost you tons of online traffic. Try avoiding such a situation by compressing your image files, limiting music and animation used in your pages, and curbing flash use.

8. Get Early Payment From Customers

When you grow a small business with limited resources, it’s kind of an uphill battle. But that is a challenge that most startups must endure.

That is why you should focus your efforts on getting buyers to pay early and probably up front. Not only does this method give you money in the bank but it also supports the growth of your company.

9. Keep Site Navigation Simple

If your users are unable to navigate parts of your website they’re interested in, there is no reason why they would want to stay. It’s that simple!
Make sure your navigation menu contains clear titles so site visitors understand which page they’ll land on and what content they’ll find there.

Ensure menu links are clickable and the main navigation is above-the-fold. A search feature is also highly recommended, especially on smaller smartphone screens.

10. Take Advantage of Strategic Partnerships

Companies are as small as they project themselves to be. If an organization develops strategic relations and outsources its non-core competencies to other partners within the same industry, small businesses can maximize their efficiency and develop value.

Offer unique services and play off your partner’s expertise. Clients don’t have to be savvy about the state of your operations as long as they get the proper goods on time.

11. Understand Your Business Aesthetic

There are many technicalities involved with making your small business website appear more professional to users. But first and foremost is the look and feel of your website.

Your site should always be on brand and have a consistent brand tone, look, and personality. Make branding your first order of business, and select the correct colors for maximum visual appeal. On top of that, it’s imperative you balance the amount of content on every with the amount of graphics.

Also create your own illustrations and designs as much as you can. Keep the appearance of the text as simple as possible so nothing distracts people from reading your business page.

12. Know How to Write a Catchy Call to Action

Make sure the calls to action on your business web pages are eye-catching and direct. Only then will you convert visitors into leads, prospects, and eventually, customers. The right call to action plays a big role in generating buzz and bringing business for your small company.

13. Speak to the Existing Customers

Planning to increase site revenue? Your existing customers are the best bet! It’s a lot easier to upsell clients who already know your work, your service and product quality, and have already incorporated parts of your services into their business.

Building a rapport with clients and being considered a trustworthy partner is possible only if you plan to listen to them. This will help you analyze the challenges easily through alternative or new products.

14. Wisely Include Lead Capture Forms

Don’t make the mistake of including lead capture forms only on the contact page! Test the placement in various spots on your web pages, by asking questions or guessing where the customer might want to offer feedback.

It’s a time-consuming process to improve and maintain your small business website, but it is all worth the time and effort spent. Not only does it provide more online visibility and exposure, but it keeps your site visitors hooked and converts potential customers easily.

The post 14-Point Guide to Improving Your Business Website in 2019 appeared first on SEO Los Angeles - Formula Internet.

Google’s released a step-by-step video on how to evaluate a professional SEO and determine whether or not they are the right service provider for your business. If you’re looking for information on how to avoid hiring a bad SEO, this is the video is for you.

In How to Hire an SEO Maile Ohye breaks down what a true “SEO” is in the eyes of Google, and offers tactics to shake the shiesters and find a legit SEO consultant that will guide your business to improved traffic and business growth.

Watch the 11:37 long video below:

Some highlights:

The whole point of the video is to help business owners AVOID hiring a BAD SEO. So what does Google consider a bad SEO?

“One who you might pay a lot of money without positive results; or even worse”

“One who implements shady practices on your website that result in a reduction in search rankings”

Google’s say on SEO success:

“If you want longterm success there aren’t any quick magical tricks that SEO will provide so that your site ranks #1”

“Its important to note that an SEO’s potential is only as high as the quality of your business or website.”

“Successful SEO helps your website put your best foot forward so that it ranks appropriately.”

“Successful SEO also looks to improve entire searcher experience – from search results to clicking on your website and potentially converting.”

Straight from Google:

“In most cases, SEO will need four months to a year to help your business first implement improvements and then see potential benefit”

“In the majority of cases, doing whats good for SEO is also doing whats good for your online customers.”

Signs you’ve found a promising SEO:

“An SEO that doesn’t seem interested in learning about your business from a holistic standpoint – look elsewhere”

“A good SEO should feel like someone you can work with , learn from experiment with, and who generally cares about you and your business not just getting your site the highest rank.”

Some Examples of How an SEO should handle branded and unbranded queries:

“For branded queries –  your website is providing a great experience that allows customers who know your brand / website to easily find exactly what they need and potentially convert. They might recommend improvements that help the entire searcher experience from what they see in search results to when they click on a result and use your website.”

“For unbranded queries an SEO can help you make sense of the online competitive landscape.They can tell you things like here are the types of queries that would make sense for your business to rank but here is what your competition has done and why I think they rank where they do.”

Much of my stress comes from proving immediate value to my clients and making sure they know they made the right choice when they hired Formula Internet. Most of my clients come to me as the 3rd, 4th, even 5th SEO!! So the pressure is there for me. I pride myself on our ability to make quick and impactful changes. It was nice to see some of my practices highlighted in a positive way:

“An SEO will provide recommendations for how to improve rankings for these queries and overall user experience.”

“A good SEO will try to prioritize what ideas can bring your business the most improvement for the least investment, and what improvements may take more time but help growth and the long term.”

And gems like:

“One of the biggest holdups to improving a website isn’t their recommendations but a business making time to implement the improvements.”

“Make sure that your entire organization is on board else your SEO improvements may be non-existent regardless of who you hire.”

I feel like “SEO” is such an overused word. Many people contact me they tell me they need SEO and are clueless about what SEO actually is. Paid Search is SEO. Dark Posts are SEO, anything that has to do with marketing online is SEO. Even people who are very clear on what SEO is are still working with people performing outdated techniqes.

So this video does a lot of the education that I do on a 1 on 1 basis. With so much noise in SEO it’s tough for business owners to know exactly what they are looking for, and this video does a great job of clarifying what an SEO’s true objectives are.

SEO isn’t about crafty technical trickery.

“SEO is about building a technically sound website that has the content your clients are looking for, is easy to navigate and has a clear, definable objective.”

From full search experience from clicking on your result in the SERPS to completing an action – sale, signup, etc.

It’s nice to know where you stand with your practices, performance benchmarks, etc. So this video is good feedback for us, as well as super useful for people thinking about hiring an SEO agency or consultant.

The post Avoid Hiring a Bad SEO with Google’s Official “How to Hire an SEO” Video appeared first on SEO Los Angeles - Formula Internet.