5 Factors Every Small Biz Must Consider About SEO
You’ve built a website for your small business and now you want to make sure people find it. It is important to know what factors help optimize your website’s ability to be found when consumers search for things that interest them.
What does that mean anyhow? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to how your website performs in search result rankings on Google and other search engines. There are many different factors that affect your performance in search engine rankings. Each search engine makes updates to the algorithms and systems they use to score online content for relevance, user experience, and malicious intent.
We’re here to cover some of the most important SEO factors that you can make strategic decisions about for your website and content.
5 Factors that Contribute to Your SEO
1) SEO Keywords
Your SEO keywords are words and phrases in your web content that make it possible for people to find your website via search engines. A website that is well optimized for search engines "speaks the same language" as its potential visitor base with keywords for SEO that help connect searchers to your site.
When you properly execute a keyword strategy for your small business it allows you to be the answer to your target audience’s questions.
When the VVITCH Digital team builds content strategies, we research around 400 words for each site and pick the top 20 for each of the following categories:
Audience, Services, & Location
Audience keywords represent the interests of your audience, what they might be searching for, their pain points, their biggest questions — pretty much anything to do with the who that your business serves.
Services keywords describe your business, the services and goods you provide, and any modifiers that make your business unique. For example, VVITCH is a human-centered digital marketing agency that offers services ranging from branding and strategy to website design for inclusive small businesses.
Location keywords are words and phrases that describe your business and include the location of your business or the location of your target audiences. For example, if you are a photographer based in New York and you travel across the country, you might use the keywords “New York photographer”, as well as “Los Angeles photography.”
When you use relevant and researched keywords, it helps you write content for your website that serves to improve your rankings and helps your audience find you online.
2) Page Metadata
Page metadata is incredibly important for SEO. Page titles and descriptions are also a great place to utilize your keywords! Many website platforms like Shopify and Squarespace will have an option to leave SEO titles and descriptions blank and allow the platform to automatically fill them with content from the page.
We recommend writing unique page titles and descriptions wherever possible. Each page on your site should have a unique URL, page title, and page description that is distinct to the content on the page and that utilizes appropriate (i.e. relevant) keywords.
In order to have effective page metadata, it’s important to adhere to the following best practices:
Utilize appropriate keywords
Vary your use of synonyms for primary keywords across pages
Use a structure, such as Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name, for page titles
Be concise, and limit page titles to 50-60 characters and page descriptions to ~150 characters
Despite how tedious it might seem, organized and relevant page metadata will help your website tremendously.
3) Broken Links
Any time that you create a link to another site, search engines recognize the connection between your site and that site. In order to help strengthen your reputation with search engines, you should only link to reputable sites.
From time to time, links to other sites may become broken, either because the URL has changed or the content or site no longer exists. This results in a 404 error, and these errors have a negative impact on your SEO.
We recommend running a check for broken links every six months using Broken Link Checker, which is a free resource.
4) Page Load Speeds
Page Load speed refers to the amount of time it takes for your site to load on a user’s device. We recommend testing your site on Pingdom, using their free speed test. When you do, note that it’s okay if your score is less than 100!
If your score isn’t what you hoped, check the Load Time — you want to make sure the Load Time is less than 2 seconds. Any longer than that and you’ll be losing visitors.
You should minimize file sizes and reduce load time if your site’s Load Time is greater than 2 seconds. This is important because not everyone will access your site from a high-speed broadband Internet connection. Many people may only have access to your site via cell data, which can often be much slower.
By reducing your page weight, you ensure your site loads quickly for all of your potential customers and helps improve your reputation with search engines, as most do not like to send users to hefty pages.
It is totally OK to sacrifice some load for valuable functionality and javascript — such as the Meta Pixel or Google Analytics.
Page load speed is also part of your site’s “Core Web Vitals.” As of 2021, Google updated its ranking algorithm to include Page Experience metrics, which takes Core Web Vitals into account!
Read more about Page Load Speeds on our blog
5) Accessibility & Structuring
We focus on accessibility frequently here at VVITCH. Creating an accessible online experience for your audience is not only inclusive, but also beneficial for your small business’ SEO rankings.
Site Structure + Headings
If you want your site to be accessible, you must use headers consistently. This is critical for your site — just like making an outline in a Word document, headers on your website are a way of outlining the content on your website. It is also important to use appropriate keywords in headings, as this helps search engines to gain a better understanding of your content and services.
When deciding to use a header, don’t just pick the heading that matches the style you want for that piece of text — think about the hierarchy of your content.
For example, if you created a webpage all about groceries, your header structure might look like this:
Heading 1 (Page Title): Groceries
Heading 2: Fruits
Heading 3: Apples
This is a paragraph about apples.
Heading 3: Pears
This is a paragraph about pears.
Heading 3: Peaches
This is a paragraph about peaches.
Heading 2: Vegetables
Heading 3: Carrots
This is a paragraph about carrots.
Heading 3: Broccoli
This is a paragraph about broccoli.
Heading 3: Asparagus
This is a paragraph about asparagus.
And you must not forget about alternative text, also known as Alt-Text, when managing your site’s structure. You can find out more about Alt-Text in this blog post.
Things to Remember:
As a small business, starting small is better than doing nothing.
SEO can get really technical. With things like metadata, bots, and crawlers, it can feel like stepping into a foreign space-age sci-fi nightmare! To get your galactic feet wet, start by writing page titles and descriptions for your site’s main navigation pages.
It’s not just about Google!
While Google is the most popular search engine, it’s important to acknowledge that not all of your potential customers will use Google. This is largely due to increasing concerns for privacy, which have led people to choose alternative search engines.
If you offer an international product or service, some of your customers may even be blocked from using Google. For example, Google is blocked throughout mainland China and Baidu.com is the main search engine available.
While many SEO experts spend plenty of time focused only on Google and its algorithms, VVITCH encourages our clients to focus on creating accessible, mobile-friendly websites full of useful and well-structured content. This ensures your content is optimized for all search engines.
Ready to apply these factors for your SEO, but not alone? Hire us to improve your site’s SEO!
Learn more about our full services for your complete small business marketing needs.
Jen Siomacco - Founder and UX Designer
Jen has worked in technology, marketing, and publishing for ten years. After years as a CX/UX designer in the corporate world, Jen was a former owner of Catalyst Wedding Co. prior to starting VVITCH Digital Agency. Now, Jen is committed to helping small businesses grow into revolutionary brands.
Brittinee Phillips - Copywriter
Brittinee has worked in marketing for a little over ten years. She has a passion and talent for storytelling. Brittinee's philosophy is that storytelling is the most integral part of the consumer and product experience, which is why she makes it a focal point in her approach to product and brand messaging.
Shannon Mackenzie - Web Content Manager
Shannon is an artist and activist who has worked in marketing and public relations for small businesses and nonprofits across the US since 2015. She is passionate about the ways a great SEO strategy makes web content more accessible.
