1. Define one clear target keyword/phrase for your business
Ranking for popular keywords takes time and energy. It’s important for you to think about what your business wants to rank for and be very specific.
Ex. If you’re a wedding dress boutique in Montreal, you probably want to rank for traffic rich keywords like “Bridal Boutique in Montreal”
Target an achievable keyword phrase, it’s going to be next to impossible to have your site rank for a term like ‘wedding dress’. You’ll want to narrow your focus a little bit and combine your area of expertise with your brand name or your location you have a much better chance at showing up on the first page of Google. Think of it like this, “What you do + Location” Ex. ‘Bridal Boutique in Montreal’, or ‘Web Development Services in Montreal’.
It will be easier to carry through a single overarching keyword/phrase target across the rest of our site. Don’t lose sight of your top priority/focus keyword and build out everything else to support it.
If you don’t have a website yet, consider purchasing a keyword rich domain like bridalboutiquemontreal.com. You can use this tool to check the availability of domain names.
2. Add Meta titles & descriptions for all of your main pages
Adding meta page titles and meta descriptions to your website help search engines and users better understand what type of content is available on your site. There are three main tags:
- Title
- Description
- Keywords
It’s most important to update your page meta title and page meta description. Keywords are no longer critical for SEO. In fact Google has said they ignore the Keyword meta tag altogether.
The title tag is considered one of the most important elements in optimizing your website. Google pays particular attention to keywords that occur in the title tag, Also, search engines usually display the title tag contents in their search results. Use a descriptive title which explains what your business offers and what content is on each particular page. Keep the length to about 55 characters to avoid having it cut off by search engines.
Use a Who, What, Where formula for the title tag.
Ex. Business Name | Bridal Boutique | Montreal, Quebec
The description meta tag should be used to expand upon the title. It adds to your SEO by showing searchers more info about your page in the search result. This makes it more likely that they will click on your link and come to your site versus the competition. Keep description meta tag about 155 characters in total.
3. Update your page URLs to be keyword rich
- Keywords in the page URLs will assist Google with indexing your site. To do this, make sure your page URLs are clear and relevant to your business.
- As with your choice of keywords, choose a URL based on what your target audience is searching for and if possible add in your keyword target.
- Update your page URL’s from non-search friendly links like bridalboutiquemontreal.com/services
to something like
bridalboutiquemontreal.com/wedding-dress-fitting-services
4. Ensure that your site is mobile friendly
Google now takes into consideration the mobile-friendliness of your website, and it can impact your search rank. As the world continues to shift from desktop to mobile it goes without saying that having a mobile-friendly website will only become more important over time.
Test to see if your website is responsive. Use this Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Update your website to be mobile friendly. Contact your existing website provider and ask them if your site is responsive, and/or mobile-friendly. Or contact our team to discuss our web design services. We’d be happy to help!
5. Add Fresh, Relevant Content on a Regular Basis
Google loves new content. The more often you add relevant content to your site the better you can expect to rank in Google search results. Here are a few ideas for what you could add to your site.
- Add up-to-date projects to a portfolio page (for construction, design, or related fields).
- Add testimonials or add new ones. Google, as well as your potential customers, like to see recent reviews instead of ones from 4 years ago.
- Add or update your team page. Has your staff changed? If yes it should be reflected on your website.
- Start a blog. Write about why you started your business, or write a post about success stories or client profiles. Remember our target keyword/phrase for your business.
6. Optimize your website images for SEO (including file size, filename, and alt tag)
Optimizing your images for search is just as important as optimizing the text content on your website.
- Google can’t tell what an image looks like, so you need to include some information with each image. Save the image with a relevant name. If your picture is on the inside of your showroom, don’t use a name like, “DSC943.jpg”. Instead, use something descriptive “Montreal wedding boutique showroom.jpg”.
- Always include an Alt Tag (attribute tags). This is another tool that Google uses to understand and rank the content of your image and web page. This should be similar to but not exactly the same as the image file name.
- Optimize the file size of every image. Don’t add huge images to your site that take more time and bandwidth to download. Google evaluates the user experience of every page when defining search rankings.
Pixlr is a great free web-based photo editing service.
If you follow these 6 steps to improve your small business SEO you can expect to see your website get more visibility on Google which will lead to more visits to your website.
