Tom Welbourne
Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
Here’s How To Fix Your Small Business SEO Problems
- August 15, 2018
- , 1:44 pm
As a Marketing Agency for Start-ups and Small Businesses, we are regularly asked to fix SEO issues and develop an ongoing strategy for them. Over time, it’s become apparent that many businesses face the same SEO issues which is why we have put together this helpful blog post on the four most common reasons most businesses SEO strategies fail and how you can solve this to make sure your business succeeds.
1. Your website is too slow
A lot of small businesses and start-ups simply focus on having a good website but neglect the little details that improve the user experience. Page speed is highly critical for all websites. We often deal with a lot of small businesses in retail, fashion and e-commerce that have websites filled with plenty of product images and videos. This is great and helps customers visualise their products but can be a huge problem when it comes to SEO as a lot of these pictures and videos have large file sizes which can slow down the performance of the website.
According to Forbes writer and SEO guru TJ McCue, simply improving a website’ page speed will not only improve user experience which is a key ranking factor that Google prioritises but will also lead to the reduction in bounce rate of unsatisfied customers – also signalling to Google that your website has relevant content.
Therefore, in order to find out if your website is too slow, we strongly recommend using tools such as Web Page Test or Google’s Page Speed Insight as a starting point. At The Good Marketer, we use a range of advanced tools and optimisation to ensure your website is as fast as it can be. To find out how we can help your businesses SEO Strategy, view our Small Business SEO Plans
2. Expecting Results Too Soon
This has to be the biggest factor for many small businesses SEO plans not succeeding. A lot of businesses often expect instant results with SEO as well as expecting their business to jump to the first page of Google in less than 24 hours. Our team of SEO experts deal with this on a regular basis and advise businesses to start slowly and be realistic.
With regards to time-frame, we always advise that it takes around 4 – 6 months for businesses to start seeing results. A lot of businesses simply want to see themselves ranking on the first page of Google instead of the bottom line which is when they start to see an increase in sales/leads. We believe results will START to be seen within this 4 – 6 months’ period of time, but we often see the results earlier.
3. You are not using long tail keywords
Some of the clients that come to us are already aware of keywords and how effective they can be in an SEO campaign. However, we often notice that one of the key reasons an SEO strategy is not performing is due to focusing too much on short tail keywords as opposed to long-tail keywords.
We always like to explain to our clients that potential customers searching for a product or service will often give as much detail as they possibly can. So instead of simply searching ‘trainers’ they are more likely to run a search on “men’s black trainers” or “women’s hi-top trainers”. Consequently, small businesses should keep this in mind when choosing their keywords as long-tail keywords will set you apart from your competitors.
4. Failing to use backlinks
Backlinks are often neglected because a lot of small businesses and start-ups do not know what they are. As a small business marketing agency that strives to deliver the best results for our clients, we would say backlinks are the backbone to a great SEO strategy and we make it a priority for all of our clients to start building a strong backlink profile. Backlinks are simply incoming links to a particular webpage. They act as a vote of confidence to Google as they often provide link juice to a business’s website and blog articles.
The reason most businesses fail when it comes to backlinks is due to either neglecting them altogether, even in the cases where the website releases blog posts on a regular basis or buying cheap backlinks that can cause more harm than good.
Your Search Engine Optimisation strategy can be complicated and time-consuming. In order to get the best results, our team of experts are on hand to take care of this for you, we help to build high-quality backlinks, develop your keywords and help to outrank your competitors. You can view the full details of our SEO Packages here, alternatively, complete our contact form below.
