(By Elizabeth Tuico) Building a website from scratch can be one of the biggest start-up costs for a small business. However, companies need to regularly add content. By prioritizing certain tasks, prospects can find your website easier and respond to the call-to-action. Ensuring your website functions efficiently and positioning content for optimum SEO results will serve your small business well as it grows.

By making a few changes, small businesses can improve SEO allowing your content to appear in search engine query results and reach your intended audience.

Check for basic functionality.

Sometimes we get too hyper-focused on an activity and forget about the big picture. That happens often with website design. Once a website goes live, it’s important to check the basic functionality. Pretend you are a new visitor to your website (or ask a friend to do a deep dive). Click on each hyperlink. Do they work? Does the content and page flow make sense?

Fix broken links.

A broken link represents a hyperlink that points to a page or resource that no longer exists. These linked pages often were deleted or moved without a redirection set up. When a user follows a broken link, the server returns a 404 (Not found) or 410 (Gone) status code. Luckily, fixing broken links is easy. Many free broken link tools exist such as ahrefs. Once you identify the broken links, you can correct the link. However, if a page from your site was permanently deleted, the 404 page will appear. NOTE: Customize your 404 page to maintain your branding message.

Improve website loading time.

Two seconds. That’s all you get to make a favorable impression. If a visitor waits three seconds or longer to view your website, she will likely leave. Additionally, Google may downgrade your website in its SEO algorithm if it takes too long to open. Check out these suggestions from HubSpot to improve website loading time.

Develop a clear call-to-action.

Make sure all pertinent information stays “above the fold” on your website and includes a clear call-to-action (CTA). Visitors need to instantly know what services your business performs. Long ago, I worked for a company that longed to maintain a sense of mystery and created a cryptic website. They thought this approach was creative, but website visitors got annoyed. Prospects fled the site instead of clicking on different sections to determine the company’s call-to-action. Leadership eventually adopted a more straight-forward online presence.

Below are a few tips to crafting a compelling call-to-action:

• Use action verbs in the present tense like subscribe, sign up, start, and buy.

• Write in the first person.

• Grab your readers’ attention by keeping your CTA short, simple, and persuasive.

• Make CTAs easy to find on a website (use a button feature or contrasting colors).

An excellent example of a call-to-action comes from pizza king Domino’s: Start Your Order: “Carryout” or “Delivery”. When web visitors go to Zoom, the popular video conferencing platform, the first thing they see is "Zoom is ranked # 1 in customer reviews." Retailer Patagonia highlights its environmental efforts on the Advocacy page using a large CTA that reads "Take action," which prompts visitors to sign-up for volunteer work with several grassroots organizations.

Mobile device functionality

Over 55% of website traffic comes from mobile devices. 92.3% of internet users access the internet using a mobile phone. Approximately 4.32 billion people are active mobile internet users. If your site looks horrible on a mobile device, adjust it immediately. A mobile site is designed specifically for smaller screens and features a simplified design that makes navigation more accessible than on desktop computers or laptops with bigger screens. Squarespace adapts to be small-screen friendly and navigable on mobile devices, but many website platforms require plugins to perform well in the mobile universe. Mailchimp created this useful primer for mobile website design. You can test your website's mobile-friendliness with a variety of online tools like Google's Lighthouse testing tool.

In late 2023, Google introduced mobile-first indexing. With this practice, Google uses the mobile version of web pages when indexing and ranking pages.

What is SEO and why does it matter?

Search engine optimization (SEO) orients a website to rank higher on a search engine results page (SERP) to receive more online traffic. Ranking on the first page of Google results for search terms that resonate most to your target audience remains the #1 goal for marketers. SEO helps search engines understand and present content.

Below is a helpful glossary of terms prepared by Google that explains how SEO happens:

Index: Google stores all web pages that it finds in its index. The index entry for each page describes the content and location (URL) of that page. To index is when Google fetches a page, reads it, and adds it to the index: Google indexed several pages on my site today.

Crawl: The process of looking for new or updated web pages. Google discovers URLs by following links, reading sitemaps, and other means. Google crawls the web, looking for new pages, then indexes these pages.

Crawler: Automated software that crawls (fetches) pages from the web and automatically indexes them.

Googlebot: The generic name of Google's crawler. Googlebot crawls the web 24x7x365.

Google can usually discover most of a website if the pages link properly. The Google index contains hundreds of billions of web pages and uses over 100 million gigabytes of memory. SEO experts believe it takes about one week for content to get indexed by Google. (To learn more, consult this article from the Search Engine Journal.)

What tasks can a small business perform to improve SEO?

Publish original content.

Quality, authoritative content remains the number one driver of search engine rankings. Content should also be original so carefully consider how much Generative AI for natural language content (such as Chat GPT) is published by your organization. If the content already exists somewhere else in the website universe, will Google index your page? Maybe not. Don’t take the chance: create original content.

 LOOKING FOR ORIGINAL CONTENT FOR YOUR WEBSITE? Talk to Rebel Road Creative.

 Use the back-end SEO of your website platform.

A description of a webpage can be inserted in most website platforms. Squarespace clearly labels this SEO. WordPress refers to it as a meta description. Many small businesses leave these descriptions blank. Open up the back end of your website platform and fill in these important descriptions.

It’s critical to vary descriptions so the Google Index can discern separate pages. Yoast developed the following list on how to write an effective webpage description:

• Don’t go over 155 characters.

• Use an active voice.

• Include a call to action.

• Implement a focus key phrase.

• Make sure the description matches the content of the page.

• Make it unique.

Google claims that SEO isn’t affected by webpage/meta descriptions since they are eliminated in their ranking algorithm. However, Google uses click-through-rates (CTR) to determine good search results. If more people click on your link during a search, Google considers your website to be a good result. Consequently, that page will move up in the rankings.

Add content every month.

If a website remains static, consider it an online brochure. It is recommended to revisit and refresh your website at least once a month. (If retail is your game and items are for sale on your website, updates will occur more frequently.)

Most companies post blog articles to their websites. Wix determined the ideal blog post length is between 1,500 - 2,500 words, with a sweet spot at 2,450. Staying within this average allows articles to rank higher on search engines and earn more social media shares and backlinks.

Starting a blog and rarely posting can harm your brand. If regular blog posting turns out to be an unrealistic goal for your organization, find other ways to update your website. (When a visitor goes to a blog and finds blog posts from 2020, she could lose confidence in your brand.) Try incorporating the following items to regularly update your website:

• Refresh older blogs.

• Videos

• Presentation files explaining a new service line and company differentiators.

• Fact sheets

• Case study

• FAQs

• Graphics

• Biographies of key staff

• Testimonials (which you can alternate)

• Quotes (which you can vary throughout the year)

• Statistics

• Awards

• Maps for office locations

• Q&A interviews

• Company news

• Events

• Survey results

Note: Understand the copyright rules for photography positioned on your website. Most professional photographers ask clients to pay for usage rights. If you place an unauthorized image on your website, you may be subject to legal action.

IF YOU NEED HELP UPDATING YOUR WEBSITE, talk to Rebel Road Creative.

Employ referrals from other websites.

When ranking web pages, search engines look at other websites that link to or cite a page from your website. This may seem inconsequential, but to Google, referrals from external websites assert a vote of confidence in the accuracy and usefulness of your content. Be proactive about linking your content to other websites.

Use key words.

Determine a list of key words and use these phrases repeatedly throughout your website content. Don’t forget to plug these key words into the back end of your website platform. For example, if you are a photographer, place “photography” and “photographer” in the page URLs, titles, and headings. NOTE: do keep the language as natural as possible. Don’t forget to tag website photos with key words.

Remember the importance of backlinks.

Backlinks (links from other sites) instill confidence for readers and search engines, so link building can improve your SEO. You’ll notice I used backlinks throughout this post. This practice allows the reader to learn more about a topic and properly credits sources.

However, please don’t backlink just to backlink. Low quality or suspicious links might reduce your rankings. Consider your sources. For example, I often write about marketing trends so I backlink to authoritative websites like HubSpot and Mailchimp, two companies that perform substantial marketing research.

Stay up to date on the latest SEO trends.

SEO tricks I learned five years ago do not work now. Search engine algorithms change, and new applications come into vogue. (We’re thinking of you, TikTok.) To stay on top of the latest information, regularly check the Search Engine Journal, Yoast, and SEMrush.

As you can see, SEO is a robust combination of factors that helps create a consistent experience for website visitors, from initial search to first impressions to a positive call-to-action.

Track your progress with Google Analytics.

Now that you’ve made improvements to your website, it’s time to track your progress. Most marketing folks use Google Analytics. This platform collects data from your websites to create reports that provide insights into your business. Many website platforms like Squarespace include robust analytics where website owners can perform deep dives to discover who looks at their content, when, and how. The data is truly fascinating. Small business owners should monitor:

Conversion rates: refers to the percentage of visitors who take an action on your website that moves them down the sales funnel. (For more information, consult this blog post from Wix.)

Traffic flow: how many visitors look at your website, in addition to what content is the most popular and how long they remain on the site.

Bounce rates: the percentage of visitors that leave your website after viewing only one page. Read more about bounce rates here.

Click-through rates: refers to the number of people who click on a link on your website.

To learn more, consult this guide on Google Analytics from HubSpot.

Don’t fall prey to Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO refers to unethical tactics used to manipulate search engine rankings, such as keyword stuffing, hidden text, and link schemes. This practice goes against the guidelines set by search engines through shady tactics to gain higher rankings. Black Hat SEO can lead to your website being wiped completely from search results or earning a significantly lower position. In short, you may see better results for a time, but eventually, the search engines will discover black hat practices and downgrade your online content.

How do the black hatters try to improve SEO inorganically?

Key word stuffing (inserting key words in a nonsensical way) worked 20 years ago, but not now. Sometimes, Black Hat SEO practices includes filling a part of a website not visible to the viewer with keywords using 0 font size for text or white text on a white background. Key word stuffing is now reliably exposed by search engine robots.

Cloaking involves showing one piece of content to users and a different piece of content to search engines.

Another Black Hat SEO technique is redirecting a search engine crawler to one page and all other users to another page. A highly authoritative page with high-quality backlinks can be redirected into another irrelevant page, just to boost its position in search results.

Google strictly bans buying and selling links. Beware of this practice as well as link farms which are a collection of websites developed solely for link building. Black Hat SEO also abuses structured data. An example is an organization giving themselves five stars from a fake review site and incorporating structured data to stand out on search results pages.

Every week, Google gets better at distinguishing original content, thin content, manipulated content, and web spam.

Takeaways

Creating a great website is only the beginning. Small businesses should take the time to prepare original and thoughtful content to boost search engine optimization and better promote services and products. Takeaways include:

• Don’t create your website and forget about it. Review your site twice a month.

• Regularly add quality content.

• Check for broken links at least every quarter (and customize your 404 page).

• Keep an eye out for SEO changes and new trends. Apply what you learn.

Your website is often the first thing a prospect will check. Make the most of this powerful tool.

Elizabeth Tuico owns Rebel Road Creative, a marketing and content consultancy based in Washington, D.C. Rebel Road Creative helps small businesses create content for websites.