Quick and easy SEO for Small Business websites

How to correctly Search Engine Optimize your Small Business website

With some forethought and some website know-how, just about anyone can gain rankings for their website using white hat methods.  In this post, I will explain some top-level SEO tactics that will help anyone gain better rankings for the keywords they desire.

Correctly using Title Tags on your small business website

Title tags are used to quickly explain in 50 to 80 characters what your page is about.  This is what is shown on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) hyper-linked in blue as seen below.

Title tags should not be thought of as a Title for your page, but more as a Headline.  This is the first thing that people will see on the SERP, if it doesn’t speak directly to your most valuable prospects, it won’t get clicked.  What good is getting to the first page if you don’t get clicks?

Do’s and Don’ts for website title tags.

• Do keep your title tag between 50 and 80 characters.  Try and target only one or two top level keywords, I also recommend adding a city name or two if you’re trying to attain ranking for city related searches.
• Do only use “|” or “-” to separate keyword strings in your title tag.  These symbols are the most frequently use separators, and to someone quickly scanning results on the SERP helps break up keywords on what your page is about.
• Do be specific and to the point in your title tag.  In the above example it should be clear to see that this website is about Cadillac Transmissions, Clutch and Differential Repair.
• Don’t use the same title tag for every page on your website.  If you do, the search engines may think its duplicate content and your chances for ranking all your pages declines dramatically.
• Don’t use more that one or two top line keywords in your title tag.
• Don’t repeat keywords more than twice.  Remember you’re trying to entice people to click your website, stuffing keywords in the title tag does little to help with achieving clicks.

Meta-Descriptions optimized for search engines and visitors

Meta-Descriptions are the text under the title tag on the SERP.  When writing your meta-description, it is important to use your desired keyword(s) from your title tag.  It’s important to use your desired keywords naturally, with a few secondary keywords mixed in.  The meta-description should give a brief overview of what a visitor should expect to find on your page.  Small businesses may also want to add city names they service, or special offers such as “free estimates” or “find coupons here”, you could even add confidence factors such as “30 years experience” or “BBB Rated A+” or something to that effect.  All this needs to fit into approx. 180 characters, so really thinking about your desired keywords, cities and most valuable prospect  when writing your meta-description, while maintaining readability is key.

The wrong way to do a meta-description

As you can see in the above example, stuffing keywords into the meta-description does little to entice a prospect of visiting the website.  In this example I did a search for “Plumbers Portland, OR”, and unfortunately for these folks they are ranked 9 pages back, so kind of shows this tactic does not work (other factors not mentioned).  The example under them also shows a waste of title tag and meta description space.  I almost never use phone numbers in title tags or meta descriptions, they are a waste of valuable SEO space and do nothing to help rankings, unless you’re trying to rank for your businesses phone number, which seems like a silly thing to do unless your businesses name is something like 1-800-Got-Junk.

Are Meta-Keywords important to small business websites?

These days the search engines rate very little (if any) relevance on meta-keywords.  In fact many newer website building programs don’t even include a meta-keyword field.  However, if your website program does, filling in a few meta-keywords can’t hurt.  Most experts agree that 7-10 keywords per page is sufficient.  Make sure to use your primary and secondary keywords, variations on these keywords and any cities you are trying to rank for in this area.

Heading Tags to reinforce your websites content

Heading Tags, sometimes referred to as “h tags” are much like headlines in an old fashioned newspaper make it easy for your readers to understand what the content on your web page is about.  They also helps search engines understand the same.

Correctly using a h1 tag on your website

Heading tags come in 6 different sizes from h1 (being the biggest) to h6 (being the smallest).  There should only be one h1 tag per page.  This tag should include your top level keyword, worked into a brief overview of what the page is about.  For the transmission shop above, a great h1 tag for a page talking about Cadillac transmissions, clutch and differential repair would be “Expert Cadillac Transmission, Clutch and Differential Repair“.

Sub-heading tags – h2 and h3

H2, h3 and h4 tags are used for sub-headings.  It can be tempting to try and stuff keywords into sub-heading tags, try and avoid this.  Sub-heading tags should be used to highlight what each area of content on your website is about.  Trying to naturally use primary, secondary or variations of these in h2 and h3 tags is good SEO.  As you can see from this article, I have used h2 and h3 tags, and tied in my primary keywords: small business, websites, search engine optimization.  I have also included some variations on these keywords, such as: optimized and optimize.

On blogs, it is not necessary to use a h1 tag as the post title should include what you would normally include on a static page h1 tag.

h4 and h5 Heading tags for small business city rankings

Using h4, h5 and h6 tags is not necessary for small business website SEO, but can be helpful in attaining rankings such as city specific searches.

Correctly using h4 and h5 heading tags to include pertinent information such as: area’s served or short lists of services can be helpful in letting the search engines know where your small business pulls customers from.  Unless you tell the search engine what and where your small business does its thing, the chances of you ranking high for these types of searches is almost zero.

How to set-up a Facebook Deal for your small business.

Facebook Deals

Facebook Deals is something that has been in testing for as far as I know the last few months, and only a few businesses were allowed to post deals via Facebook, until now.  I am setting up a Facebook Deal for one of my customers, so thought I would take this opportunity to put together a brief step-by-step on how to create a deal for your Facebook Small Business Page.

First of all, log in to your account and make sure you are logged in as the business.  Go to your “wall” and look for the “edit info” button as pictured below.

click the "edit info" link

Once you click that link, the left column of your Facebook page will populate with different options of areas to edit.  Go to the last option labeled “Deals” and click.

From there a screen will populate to the right of this link, with a hyperlink that says “Create a Check-In Deal For This Page”, click it.  The next screen that populates will notify you that you must switch to using Facebook as yourself, not as the business, click the button that says “Continue as “Your Name””.

Choosing The Type of Deal

There are currently four types of Facebook Deals for you as a business owner to choose from.

1. Individual Deal – Reward individual customers when they check in at your business.  Best for simple discounts or gifts with purchase.
2. Friend Deal – Reward groups of customers when they check in together. Help spread the word about your business more rapidly.
3. Loyalty Deal – Reward customers for visiting your business a certain number of times, similar to a traditional punch card.
4. Charity Deal – Pledge to donate to a charity of your choice when customers check in at your business. A win-win for everyone!

Now obviously you will want to pick the type of deal that will engage your customers and Facebook likes.  An Auto Repair Shop probobly wouldn’t want to choose the “Loyalty Deal” as most people get their vehicle worked on once or twice per year, so having someone check-in over that long of a span for some type of “Loyalty Deal” might be a stretch, but for a Coffee Stand, Bowling Alley, or Deli, a loyalty deal would be great.

After choosing your offer type, scroll down to define your offer.  Clearly think your offer out.  This is not a time to think about how much money you can make of a Facebook Deal, remember you will have plenty of opportunity to upsell, and sell over and over again if the people come in.  If your offer isn’t good enough, well they just won’t come at all.

As you can see below, one of my clients decided to offer a Full Service Oil Change for $14.95.  At that price he looses money in labor and covers his costs in materials…but he’s thinking of the bigger picture.

Decide if you want a “max redemption” and “repeat claims” for the offer, make sure your read Zuck’s Terms, as it is his playground, then hit submit.

Once you submit, you will come to a screen that will let you know that your offer is in review.  Typically from my experience, it take approx. two days to receive notification if the offer was accepted.

Promote your Facebook Deal

Remember this is something you want to go viral…the more people that see it, the better the offer, the more people are exposed to your business.  When someone checks into your business to redeem this offer, all their friends on Facebook see it, imagine the possibilities.  Promote the deal on your website, as your Facebook likes to share it with their friends and family, promote it in your store, anywhere you can.  Then sit back, watch your Facebook likes climb and start thinking of how your going to engage your new found followers.

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Online Reviews Boost Rankings and Sales for Small Businesses

Back in 2007, The Kelsey Group along with ComScore compiled a study which studied the relationship between positive online reviews, off line buying and price paid for services by consumers.  Now understanding this study was done in 2007, some percentages may have changed since then, but the data complied in this study should make generation of positive online reviews a priority for any small business.

How Many Of Your Customers Look For Reviews On Your Business?

The above study found that 41% of consumers read reviews before deciding (have to believe that percentage is higher 5 years later).  And of those, as high as 87% of polled said reviews (or lack of) had a direct influence on their decision to purchase (or not).  One of the greatest findings in my opinion was that 97% of everyone that took part in the study said reviews had some sort of impact on their decision to buy.

So the question I often ask my customers is: What is being said about your business online?  Are you making it easy for people to leave reviews on you business?  Do you engage your customers and prospects through social media, your website and in your store ask for their online recommendation?  If you’re not doing these simple things, I can honestly say you are missing the boat with your biggest fan base…your current satisfied customers.

Online Reviews Generate Sales

Notice I didn’t say “positive” online reviews generate sales?  Often I get push back about making it easy for people to leave reviews about a customers business.  I think with many small business owners there is always that fear of generating the dreaded Negative Review.  I wholeheartedly believe that the vast majority of small business owners want and strive to do what is best for each and every one of their customers.  Are there times when you’re not going to be able to satisfy every single customer?  Of course.  Is it plausible that a disgruntled customer may post something online that’s less than stellar?  Of course.  But in response to the fear of the dreaded Negative Review, I ask my customers if they were searching online and found a business that only had 5 star reviews, and nothing else, what would they think of buying from that business?  I get several responses to this question, but in general the sentiment is that they would proceed with caution before buying from that business…because as they are already well aware, pleasing everyone is impossible.

Dealing With The Dreaded Negative Review

Now that we have addressed and mostly agree that all reviews won’t be 100% positive, lets talk about how to address and take care of that negative review, if it ever comes your way.  First as a small business you need to decide where to invest in trying to get customers reviewing your business.  I typically start my customers on Google Places, Yahoo Local and Facebook.  Each one of these have functionality to be able to publicly respond as the business owner, or a representative of the business.  Responses to negative reviews should be done quickly as possible to show that you as the business owner follow up on every customer issue quickly.  There are many different software programs and platforms available to monitor your online reputation.

How Not To Respond to a Negative Review

If that negative review comes in, as a business owner you want to respond to it.  I really recommend taking emotion out of your response as it will most likely tarnish what should be a professional response from you.  Lashing out, picking apart, belittling and other such responses have no place here.  Below I have placed a screen shot of one such response I found online.  Obviously the business owner was hurt and dismayed at the review, but placing threats, or questioning someones motive should not be done here.  If I had run across this response while looking for what this business  did…I would have run the other way…and interestingly enough, 5 out of 8 people that were asked if the negative review helped them said yes.  In my eyes. complete failure on the business owners part.

The Correct Way To Respond

I’m not going to pretend that I know your business and how you should respond to a negative online review.  You know your customers and you know how they talk, act and what they respond to.  Obviously responses would vary depending on your business.  A daycare center would respond differently than a tattoo shop, so understand that, you as the business owner should look at your response as everyone else will…a direct reflection  on how you treat upset customers.  Going into long drawn out rants on why this particular customer was impossible to service, or attacking their credibility will do little to improve any damage that may have been done.  Instead I recommend asking details about what was wrong with the service, dates and times, who they dealt with, and personally asking them to call the business and asking for you by name will reap must greater results.  That will go miles further than the example above.  Below I have included a response from a business owner that I thought was very good.

The business owner concluded the review by leaving their full name as well as a phone number to contact them personally.