5 search engine optimisation tips for SMEs

Businesses of all size need web visibility. Sometimes vital, sometimes optional - this visibility is very useful to attract new customers or to manage the brand image of the company.

In this article, we will see some search engine optimization (SEO) tips for entrepreneurs & SMEs. We will not try here to know the technical details which will lose most of you, but rather to give some concrete actions, to realise to make website live and, thus, to improve its position in the search engines.

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Source: LYF

Summary

• Build a website that is adapted to mobile devices (responsive design)

• Learn SEO techniques, or delegate the work to expertise

• Make your website live

• Seek interaction

• Use tools sparingly

Build a website adapted to mobile devices (responsive design)

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Source: Udemy

The responsive design makes your website pages appear pleasantly on smartphones and offer a good UX experience. If you use a CMS like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla (which is the case most of the time today), you will easily find responsive design templates! 

Many themes are natively in Responsive Design structure. If your website is going to be developed by another company, consider clarifying this point in advance. Website traffic monitoring tools such as Google Analytics is optimised to track traffic coming from smartphones as well as from a desktop. So, it is very vital for your site to adapt the design size of all screen type.

Learn SEO techniques or delegate the work to expertise

Your visibility on the web has always been a vital part for any business. Depending on the importance of your visibility on the web you can either choose to learn SEO via tutorials or books. This is a great practise, but requires a lot of time. So if you don’t have enough time to focus on this aspect, then you can simply delegate this task to professionals. The major advantage of hiring an external professional company is that you will have a perfectly capable team for managing the technical aspects of the SEO. Doing so leaves you the space and time to handle the other points of your business, which are just as important as the visibility of the brand on the web.

Make your website live

As a business, a website must show its activity and show that there is life to move in the right direction. So, do not hesitate to update your website after a certain time-span, and this can be done through different methods:

a) Talk about your business updates or news. Create a buzz about how is your business evolving, what are your new products, which orientations have you chosen, etc.

b) It is also often interesting to show your know-how in the field or activity of your company through articles in which you share tips or where you give your opinion on the news of your field of activity. Article (in a blog, knowledgebase FAQs) are great ways to make your website live and attract new targeted visitors.

c) Finally, do not hesitate to involve your customers and partners, for example, customer reviews that can be displayed on your website.

Seek interaction

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Source: UX Planet

In addition to your own actions, your visitors can be of great help when it comes to SEO and the life of your website. As stated above, the more the content of a website evolves, the more it will be put forward. Thus, do not hesitate to seek interaction through other factors, for example:

a) Encourage your visitors to share their feedback in the comments section, and especially do not forget to respond to it so that it feels listened to and a debate / exchange of ideas is put in place, thus highlighting your knowledge and your sense of hearing.

b) Social networks are to be handled with a caution, but they can be of great help. Do not hesitate to use a SEO service delivery company that, in most cases, knows what needs to be done and implemented and what not, particularly according to the field of activity.

c) Why not forums? Depending on your sector, the debates on ideas and the exchanges of tips can take place in a forum. It is necessary to note the fact that this one will need to be moderate and maintained.

Use tools sparingly

There is a huge amount of SEO tools available. Besides the technical tools that analyse your website in order to identify areas for improvement i.e. page titles, page content, page weight, page load time. In addition Google analytics and similar kind of tools gives data analytical insights, for example, business trends, the flow of targeted traffic and the journey of visitors throughout the website, etc. Some tools even make it possible to set up an analysis of the competing websites in order to adapt its referencing:

• Google Analytics or you can it open source and self-hosted Piwik: Traffic Visualisation Tool

• Google Trends: to determine search trend

• Google Webmaster Tools: for technical analysis on web pages / website

• SEMRush / Moz: Advanced SEO tools, search trend, comparison with other domains

Related Reads: The Simple Weekly Workout to Improve SEO

These few tips are just base. Later, you will have to study the technical parts that most of the business leaders do not want to approach. First because it takes time, but also, because it is a job in its own right and that it can be complex. Thus, it is important to know the basic fundamental actions to perform. Although not technical, they can really make the difference between SEO terms and therefore positioning in the search engines.

Feel free to ask your questions or opinion in the comments section or send us your feedback.