Do you know how many searches Google handle per day? It is close to a trillion as per search engine land.

Nowadays people do not search yellow pages directories or phone book to get the service. They just Google it for their needs.

Hence if you are a small business owner and own a website then you must try to come on Google’s first page with Seo activities and attract customer for your business.

We understand how difficult it is for the small business website owner to compete with big boys in the online market and hence we have identified what the major constraints that are causing a hindrance to small business growth in digital space.

• 1. Budget, people, and time constraint
• 2. Need visibility and leads in quick time
• 3. Due to cheap services often choose wrong digital marketing agency
• 4. Web sites are not mobile friendly
• 5. Still following out-dated practices to get visibility in digital space.

Considering these constraints for small business owner who needs to present and compete with big boys in the digital marketing field, we have come up with effective local SEO tips and link building tactics for local businesses. Trust me it won’t burn your pocket.

Here are few simple and effective ways for in doing Seo for the small business website that will increase visibility and help you to compete with big brothers and succeed finally.

Keyword Research Tips For Small Business Websites

Before we explain in detail about keyword research, you must get to know what exactly are keywords in SEO? Keywords are phrases or rather a language of your customers which they use to search for a products or services on a search engine. Consider a scenario where you are a small business owner of a plumbing company in Toronto. You deliver services only in Toronto and surrounding. How will you do the keyword research and what type of keyword you will select for your small business SEO success?

1st: Identify the industry keyword.
2nd: Combine the locality keyword with your industry keyword.
3rd: Search the entire phrase for an example “plumbers Toronto ” and see what your competitors are using. Some example keywords are bordered by the red rectangle below. You take these keywords and copy in a notepad.

4th: Now come below of the search page where you will find the keywords ideas related to plumbers Toronto. This will give you basic keyword ideas that your customers are searching before availing the service.

5th: Search forums and on Quora where people are searching for information and solution. You simply use this parameter and search on google.

key term + forum (In this case it will be “Toronto plumbers” + forum ). After you get the list of forums on search engine resulting page click any of the forum. Log on to that forum and see what are the discussions or conversation happening relevant to plumbing.

You take the conversion idea and search on google to get the auto-suggest. Google auto suggest keyword is very important in keyword research strategy to do Seo for small business website.

Choose the keyword from Google auto suggest that you find relevant to your business and paste it in a notepad. Later you use any of these keywords and frame a topic to write a blog on your website.

This is how you will do keyword discovery at first and after you are done with keyword discovery you log on to Google keyword planner tool and fetch out the search volume of your desired keywords.

Create your Google My Business account

Google has created Google My Business, a one-stop shop for small business owners looking to increase their visibility within Google search, Google Maps, and Google+.

Set up your account (it’s free) and get all of your business details uploaded. This is how your business will appear on Google my business listing.

Here are the lists of checklist which you must follow:

• A. Fill up all the credentials – business name, address, phone no.
• B. Put correct business hour.
• C. Choose the radius of location served. This option will prevent to create micro-location based doorways pages which are not good for SEO for business: https://expresswriters.com/why-google-killed-doorway-pages/.
• D. Choose the right category for your business as suggested by Google. Do not put your customized category.
• E. Add minimum 3 snaps of your key staff, the interior of your store snaps on delivering service to customers.
• F. Write a business description with the targeted keywords. The targeted keyword must appear within 1st 100 words of content.
• G. Include the payment option.
• H. After you deliver the service, focus on collecting the reviews.
• I. Share updates on your local business page in Google. It will include service/products of your business, offers, and deals, activities behind the scene, events in your locality and industry news.
• J. Participate in relevant Google + community with useful insights. Do not self-promote in the community it increases the chance of getting banned.

Note: After you fill up all the credentials, Google will verify the ownership of the business. They will send a pin code at your address. The pin code which you will receive for your local business, use that code to activate the listing.

Onpage SEO Checklist for Local Small Business Websites

• A. Write meaningful title tags and meta description for every single page that your website has.
• B. Do not use the same keyword in the titles of multiple pages.
• C. Do not create doorway pages to rank for micro-location.
• D. Keep character limit to 55 for title tags and 155 characters for meta description.
• E. Do not over stuff all the keywords in your homepage.
• F. Do not use multiple H1 tags for a web page.
• G. Alt tags the images.
• H. Embed local business address at the footer of the page.
• I. Include schemas to tag products, article, and location business address.
• J. Follow the best practices to build AMP version of your website.
• K. Do not create similar meaning keyword-based content. It will do more harm to get ranked on Google.
  https://moz.com/community/q/keyword-cannibalization-3
• L. Do not use flash and iframe based content.
• M. Do not hide the content within Javascript.
• N. There is a lot of chance to get penalized from Google if you use pop-ups in the mobile version of your site.
• O. Avoid keyword stuffing in the content.
• P. Sprinkle semantic keywords in the body content.
• Q. The most important pages should be directly linked from home page.
• R. Use https version rather that Http.
• S. Make sure that website opens either on www or on a non-www version.
• T. All the inner pages should not be more than 3 clicks away from the website.
• U. Do not use dynamic parameters in the URL structure.
• V. Use canonical tags if there are multiple pages that serve identical content.
• W. Keep URL structure within 50 to 60 characters but do not stuff with the keyword.
• X. Frame H1 tag using the primary keyword.

Make your website mobile-friendly

5 Important Tips to Make Your Mobile Design #SEO Friendly https://t.co/5qsgfBIhFf pic.twitter.com/9r4lFdl62p

— Luke Monaghan (@LukeTheMono) May 22, 2017

If your website reads well on mobile devices, it’s going to perform better in search results. M&M web solutions can make your entire website mobile-friendly in a quick and minimal cost if you are a small business website owner.

Use or create a responsive WordPress theme like Local by Flywheel that allows you to experiment. Also, use responsive plugins as it adds functionality to your WordPress website.

Blog regularly

If your posts contain valuable information and people find that they are getting value from reading your posts then they are more likely to share and/or discuss on social networking sites.

Regular such posts gain credibility for your website and this factor is taken into account by Google when ranking your website due to freshness in content. If you are having a brand new blog here are few tips that you must not overlook.

You should blog frequently for Google and other search engines to increase your visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPS). Keep updating your website with quality content that can address the needs of your customers. New content can help you stay at the top of your customers’ minds and also drive traffic to your website.

Use Google Search Console tool

Use this free tool as a starting point towards the improvement of your SEO effort for your small business. Google Search Console is a brilliant tool that lets you know the problems affecting your website and whether your site is mobile friendly or not, and more.

Here is a Google help guide how Google search console comes effective for local business https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/92319?hl=en

Get Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool

A quick audit of all of your web pages for SEO-friendliness can be performed by Screaming Frog tool.

It is a website crawler tool that analyses broken links, server errors, duplicate content, and URLs blocked by robots and also judges the length of page titles and meta descriptions.

Engage regularly via social media

You should be proactive in engaging with your customers through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and other popular networks on a regular basis to get traction on social media channels.
Provide updates on your new products, promotions and giveaways, and highlight stories of relevance to your customers. Make sure you personally respond to customers who reach out to you with questions or feedback on their orders.

Encourage reviews

Ask your customers to give their ratings and reviews of your business on the basis of work that you have delivered. The more positive and authentic reviews your business receives, the better your business will appear in search engines. Reviews help to drive your local SEO visibility. Read this guide, it will show you the process on how to collect reviews for your business.

Use internal linking

Internal linking is all about linking topics and themes together for the benefit of readers and for search engines.

Here are some reasons to implement internal linking to improve SEO of small business:

• You can give further reading options to your audience.
• You can improve your ranking for certain keywords.
• It helps Google to crawl the site. Internal links in articles, as well as in category and tag pages, help Google to index pages more efficiently.

Now if are an owner of the small business website with limited budget and resources and want to gain search engine visibility, then start implementing these SEO tips. You will definitely see an increase in traffic, leads in local Seo landscape.