Search Engine Optimization Challenges in the Upcoming Year

SEO can seem a scary proposition to small business owners. There are many factors to consider such as content, organic search, paid search, coding, and more. The challenge lies in creating effective SEO practices that will help your business rank online. Read on to find out more about these challenges and opportunities to make your website optimized for search rankings.

Creating Content

Small businesses are betting on content marketing and many want to increase their content efforts. The challenge? Content writing can be daunting as it is time consuming and you don’t want to post just anything on your website. The solution? Perhaps it would be a good idea to set up a timeline throughout the year for updating content. That way, you can work on it daily, weekly, or monthly and it won’t seem nearly as overwhelming when working on it in sections. Think of community, seasonal, and industry topics to develop your timeline and tailor your content. Also, you don’t have to pull your hair out by reinventing the wheel. It’s perfectly okay to repurpose content for use across various channels. For example, you may want to reformat a news release as an article or a link in social media.

Promoting Content

Now that you’ve created some awesome content, it’s time to market it. Even if you’ve written the best content of your life, unless your audience can find it, it’s pointless. The solution? Promote, promote, promote! Let your current audience know through email, social media, etc. They will help you advocate as they share with their networks. Another option is to identify a website that already has an established audience. If you write content that is pertinent to this particular audience, go ahead and feel free to email the website owner, introduce yourself, and share your piece of content. If they see it as valuable for their audience, they will likely share it. This is a great way to establish credibility.

Building Brand Recognition

Ultimately you want to grow your business and increase sales and what better way to do that than building brand recognition. Google and other search engines show results from reliable sources, so it’s important that you build trust, authority, and reputation. Seem like a tall order? It’s really very easy. First, provide good products and services so that your customers will share positive reviews (trust). Establish your business as an expert in its field (authority). Help yourself with this task by creating quality content, customer reviews, webinars and videos, etc. And it never hurts to contribute to charitable causes and participate in fundraisers (reputation). These are all key to building a great brand for your business.

Putting the SEO in Social

Many small businesses have created a presence on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and others. While that is a great start, it’s not quite enough. Just as you use keywords and keyword phrases in your site content, you need to be doing so on social media sites as well. People are now searching social media sites for specific information, so it is important that you choose your words carefully. You want to use keywords relevant to your entire audience, so that those who are searching will find your updates.

Mobile is a Must

No matter how big or small your business may be, you can’t ignore the mobile factor. If you want to look appealing to mobile users, create a mobile user friendly experience. Many companies are opting for responsive designs, which takes your current website design and transforms it based on the browser your website visitors are using.

Information Overload

Feeling a bit overwhelmed and overloaded with information so far? It’s definitely a lot to take in and that is perhaps one of the biggest challenges small businesses face. Developing and maintaining your SEO strategy is tough work, but take a deep breath because it is manageable. First, do some basic SEO cleanup. This includes taking care of duplicate title tags and duplicate content on your site. Next, focus on your content! Implement a content marketing strategy for your business. And remember, don’t do it all at once. Instead, develop your timeline in order to tackle it in  chunks. Finally, start working on your mobile strategy for your website. More and more people are using their phone to browse around online, so it is important to stay up-to-date, otherwise you will fall behind the competition.