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As you're designing your small business website and writing blogs and website copy, keep search engine optimization (SEO) at the top of your mind. A strong SEO strategy can strengthen your online presence and help you reach your target audience. SEO for small business owners can look different than SEO for larger or more established businesses.
Read on for small business SEO tips, best practices for incorporating SEO into your website strategy, and how to adjust your approach to SEO when needed.
Getting started with small business SEO
SEO is the part of your overall website content and digital marketing strategy that will help customers discover your small business website in search results. The goal is that when people search for certain words or phrases related to your business, your website ranks higher than others on search engine results pages (SERPs). Ranking higher—or appearing early in search results—makes it more likely that you'll get the attention of potential customers or clients.
After you launch your website, you'll need to make sure your website is indexed by search engines, which essentially means that the search engine knows your site exists. Until it is, your site won't show up in organic search results, much less benefit from SEO marketing strategies. Squarespace has built-in tools to make sure your site is indexed, but if you’re having issues you can request indexing yourself.
You'll also need to make sure your website is easy to view and use on mobile devices. Squarespace offers mobile preview tools so that you can test how your website will look on different devices and screen sizes, then edit them as needed in mobile view. You can also design an independent mobile view with Fluid Engine, Squarespace's drag-and-drop website editing tool.
Incorporating SEO into your website strategy
SEO for a small business website is often about laying the groundwork for future success. For example, when designing your website, experts recommend keeping your content structure simple. This means you don't build extra pages your website doesn’t need, and the ones you do create make sense in context for your business and are filled with high-quality content.
For example, if your business doesn't have a physical space, a location page with a map or hours of operation isn’t relevant content to have on your website. However, a business that sells things would likely want to have a dedicated product page with photos of what's for sale and ecommerce capabilities.
It's also helpful to include links to each individual page at least once somewhere on your website. Generally, you can add these links on the homepage, in the website footer, on landing pages, and in a dropdown menu in your navigation bar. Not only does this help your SEO, it also creates a better user experience, since visitors can more easily find the web page they need—and sometimes even discover pages they didn’t even know they needed.
How you incorporate SEO into your web pages is a key part of your content strategy. On a broad level, this means weaving target keywords and phrases into your website copy. Keywords represent the search term someone would use to find your business. For example, "wedding photography" or "T-shirt company in [city name]."
While there are paid SEO services you can use to generate keyword research for terms with high search volume, free options also exist. Squarespace also has website analytics that show you which search terms are already driving organic traffic to your site.
It's important to populate each website page with keyword-rich text. This includes things like the page URLs as well as headers, image alt text (text that describes an image), meta descriptions, and page titles (also known as title tags). This SEO work can all be added during page editing on a Squarespace website.
For small businesses with a physical location, local SEO is a vital way to up your online visibility in local search results.
Local SEO includes:
Making sure your address and contact info are consistent across your website and social media pages
Creating a dedicated location page with information about your business
Including local information in blogs and other content on your website
Doing a competitive analysis of other local business websites to see if they include words or phrases your site doesn’t include
For example, if someone searches “Coffee shop [city]”, local SEO helps your coffee shop appear in their results. On a Squarespace website, you can help your business appear in local directories by using the Location Management tool. This tool also helps you manage the address, phone number, and hours for the business listing that searchers see in results.
Adjusting your SEO strategy
SEO strategies often need to be adjusted if you don't get the results you want. After you launch your website, you might discover people are finding your business using unexpected search terms. Or maybe you aren't receiving the visibility or website traffic you expected. Squarespace’s search keywords analytics can help you check up on your website metrics and identify areas where improvement is needed.
Search engine algorithms frequently change and update how they prioritize content, which might require SEO adjustments. Sometimes these changes work in your favor; for example, search might prioritize commerce sites over other kinds of businesses and boost your website rank since you have an online store. At other times, changing algorithms might require a copy refresh or rearranging existing content.
However, sometimes improving your SEO can be as simple as making sure you don't have any broken internal links—that is, links that go to a web page that’s no longer there—or broken links to defunct websites or one that's changed URLs.
Using these SEO tips is a good way to get your small business website off to a good start and raise your brand awareness online. Once your website and business is more established, you might start to incorporate more advanced SEO efforts, like link building.