Top 10 SEO Tips for SMEs That Boost Rankings & Brand Value

Is your brand as recognizable as General Motors or Apple? If not the likelihood of your potential customers knowing you by your brand name is negligible. This is true for every SME irrespective of its industry as you would face competition from dozens of other rivals. In the digital age where your online presence is as important as your physical presence, you need to always aim for increased online visibility. Search Engine Optimization is your answer to this and ignoring it means no or minimal traffic from the search engines. If you are starting with your SEO campaign, here are 10 tips that would boost your rankings and add to your brand value.

Avoid DIY Route

If you have built your website using online tools, you may be encouraged to try optimizing the website yourself. There are a number of online tools and tutorials that promise you the moon. But you need to keep in mind SEO is a skill testing exercise and here you need to have a reputable SEO consulting services company by your side.

Good Website Is The Genesis of SEO

Your SEO campaign would fail if your site isn’t up to the mark. A professional SEO services company would review your site and suggest changes to derive optimum results. Start with a well-laid out site which is informative and engaging. The coding should be clean and W3C compliant.

Research Keywords is Vital

Keywords act as hooks and bring in traffic to your website and hence you need to research on them meticulously. Consider your competition, location, linguistic background of your target audience. Search engine algorithms don’t like spam and hence you need to identify a few potential keywords and focus on them rather than targeting every other keyword related to your business.

Build A Sitemap

Your website is nothing but an assortment of interlinked pages. You would expect traffic in different landing pages and here sitemap becomes the key. Having a proper sitemap allows the search engine bots to index your site faster and this improves your rankings.

Install Webmaster Tools

Knowing the health of the site is one of the key ingredients for SEO. You need to know if there is a crawl error, malware or any other issues with your site. Install Google and/or Bing Webmaster Tools and you would get to keep tab on the pulse of your site.

Bank on Analytics

You must know where are the users coming from, where are they going, what keywords are they searching and how much time they spend on your site. This allows you to cash on your Strengths and iron out your Weaknesses. Install Google Analytics as it offers all these and much more.

Mobile Friendly Website

With the world going mobile, Google and other search engines give a lot of marks to websites that are mobile friendly on the Search Engine Rankings. If your site isn’t mobile friendly it’s time for you to revamp it into one.

Focus on Local Search

Few businesses in the world are truly global. Most of them are either country or region specific. Here local search becomes important as you want your target audience to visit the site. Local listings, region specific TLDs and name of cities, countries in your marketing content boosts your rankings.

SEO Doesn’t Get Over

Marketing is a continuous exercise and there is no end to it as long as you are in business. Don’t approach your SEO project as a one time affair. Your competitors would always work to outsmart your campaign and you should follow suit. Remember higher ranking leads to more visibility and translates to higher sales.

Don’t Try Outsmarting Search Engines

Last and most importantly never fall into the mirage of trying to trick the search engine as it can invite penalty and permanent disfranchisement from the search engines or in other words catastrophe for your online visibility.

These are some of the fundamentals that would help you rank high on the search engines and add value to your business.