3C Digital

Digital Marketing for Small Business

SEO

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Small business SEO checklist

Small Business SEO Checklist

  1. Know your keywords
  2. Know your target audience
  3. Make a list of your long tail and short tail keywords
  4. List your small business in local directories
  5. List your small business in online directories
  6. Set up a blog on your site
  7. Update your blog with content relevant to your small business

Try not to yawn or drift off to a daydream just for a second as we talk about SEO for your small business. Yes, we know, it’s not the sexiest of topics — nor is it the easiest to understand. But if you want search engines like Google to find your small business, you need to have a strategy for SEO. In this post, we will break things down for you as much as possible. We’ve compiled an easy-to-understand checklist for you to read and follow. Don’t worry if you haven’t done all of them. It’s good to have a starting point for these things.

Know your keywords

Keywords are important for your small business. Yes, you’ve been told to find out what they are but it’s always too hard. Basically, you just need to answer this question: What will potential customers type into Google to find your small business? These words or phrases are the keywords you can use for your small business. Of course, you won’t know these words if you don’t know your own business or your target audience so you need to sort that one out first. It’s best if you know your short tail keywords and your long tail keywords, too. To give you an example, our keywords would be ‘digital marketing small business’ or ‘small business content creation’ or ‘small business SEO’. List down what your keywords are before hiring someone to optimise your site. It’ll make the whole process easier.

SEO guide for small business

Join local directories

Don’t underestimate the importance of adding your small business to local directories in your area. Each local directory you list your small business in helps to push your ranking online. You don’t have to be on all of them, because there are hundreds out there. Just pick around five to start with. We recommend you start with the free local business directories in your area. Then add to sites like My Google Business, Yelp, Pure Local, Yellow Pages, Star Local, and True Local to start with. Make sure you have things like pictures of your small business shop front as well as your products/services. Add your address, phone number, website and office hours. It’s a lot of work but it is worth doing.

Add fresh content

Now for some bad news. SEO is not a set and forget kind of thing. When you hire someone to ‘do your SEO’ it doesn’t mean the job is finished when they’ve added all the keywords you want to add. Google loves fresh content and because of this, you’ll need to keep updating your site with relevant information about your industry. How do you do this? A blog is a good place to start. Don’t be overwhelmed, you don’t have to post every day. As we mentioned on our post about why your small business needs a blog, it’ll give you street cred aside from improving your SEO. If you don’t know what to post, find professional content creators like 3C Digital who can help with keywords, choosing topics and writing them for you. Delegate this task if it’s not your strong suit. That way you can focus on what you do best – running your small business.

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How to fix your website’s orphaned content

It is a given that your small business website needs a good solid SEO behind it so people can find it when they look on the Internet. But SEO isn’t something you just set and leave. There are several levels to it that you need to think of. One of these things is orphaned pages and post. In this post, we will talk about orphaned content and how to fix them.

What do you mean orphan?

Orphaned content, be it pages or posts, are the ones without links pointing in and out of it, therefore making it hard for search engines to find it. We all know linking posts and pages to each other helps search engines crawl through your site. You want Google to find your posts. Like we said before, SEO is not something you just forget when maintaining your site. It has to be constant and it has to happen each time you add a post on your site — no matter what post it is. Regularly check that you’re addressing the orphaned content. You don’t want to write all those amazing content only to leave it undiscovered.

Website checklist

How do I fix orphaned content?

Here at 3C Digital we use Yoast Premium, which makes it easy for us to know what we need to fix as we go along. Of course, if you don’t want to pay for the premium versions, you can use Yoast for free. The features will be limited but it still works. Go to your SEO plugin and see what pages and posts have been flagged as ‘orphaned’. You will need to individually check the post/page and add the relevant inbound and outbound links. Add links that are related to that post/page. Make sure it’s not some random post that has nothing to do with the text you are linking it to. You want your post to be helpful to your readers, not annoy them.

Do I need to give all orphans good parents?

It may not always be possible to fix all your orphaned pages (or necessary for that matter). For instance, website pages like Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions or Terms of Use may not have outbound links and may be left orphaned. Also, some content like events that are only happening this year and may not be relevant after that, won’t need to be fixed. It really depends on each post. You’ll have to use your judgment on some of these contents. Or ask your agency to do the thinking for you.

One last thing, make sure you check your website’s backend regularly to see if you have posts or pages that are orphaned so you can fix it quickly. Otherwise you’ll end up with a backlog that’s going to be too overwhelming to fix in the future.