Affordable SEO Tips for Small Canberra Businesses

As a small brand, to leverage the power of the internet to establish your business as a major player in Canberra, the internet offers several benefits. Despite how vast the internet is, with your content seemingly invisible to the myriads of internet users, you may wonder, how can you get the most out of utilising the internet to build your small business online visibility? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) levels the playing field for every business with an online presence. It thus makes it relatively easy for small Canberra businesses to establish their mark in the vastness of the internet. However, to accomplish noticeable results through the use of SEOs, specific measures have to be taken. 

We consider practical and affordable SEO tips you can utilise to ensure your Canberra small business gets increased internet visibility. 

Focus on your Niche

The vastness of the internet can be navigated appropriately to produce effective results for your small business by relying on the powers of SEO. Similar to just how vast the city of Canberra is, yet clients know just how to locate your business's exact location, SEO does the same thing on the internet. However, accomplishing this depends on how well you focus on the niche of your business. This is an effective strategy, as often as even in an industry, several niches exist, some even with little or no competing business focused on this niche. Identifying such niches can involve meticulous research, but upon identifying the niche your business specialises in, with the combination of your location and right keywords in constructing your blogs when discussing concerns and matters faced by leads interested in this niche, your business soon becomes established as an authority in these fields and a point of reference to leads, which definitely translates to increased visibility and even conversion of leads to paying clients.

Leverage effective and consistent link building 

The fastest way to ensure your business website ranks high on search engine pages is to include relevant links to high-domain webpages. This signals to the search engine algorithm that your website is a reliable and reputable source of information. Including a fair amount of such links ensures your content becomes readily available to leads in your location who look up information related to your blog posts. Most businesses fairly trust this method of improving your business website SEO ranking, as 58% of marketers believe that backlinking to high-domain websites positively impacts a website's SEO rankings. While you engage in strategic backlinking, note that search engines frown upon user-generated links for self-promotion. Hence, invest in links to relevant high-domain websites, which add authority and credibility to your posts. This has many rewards, as consistent backlinking with high-quality blog posts would eventually lead to organically linking your posts in other business blogs, thus leading to a significant SEO ranking of your business website.  

Link building also extends to your internal linking. While you do not wish to inordinately spam your blogs with links, including relevant internal links would ensure users spend more time on your website and increase your website's SEO ranking. 

Ensure your web pages are mobile-friendly 

Often, when business website owners set up blog posts, this is done on computer screens, which is quite different from how most readers of these posts look up this content. A significant 60% of internet users look up blog posts on mobile devices; thus, ensuring your business webpage is mobile-friendly is a substantial factor in your business website's SEO rankings. Aside from the obvious appeal to users who may choose to spend a longer time on mobile-friendly web pages, search engines also consider this in SEO rankings. Google, the world's foremost search engine, prioritises this as it forms one of the core bases of user experience. 

Often, the mobile friendliness of your business website involves how the elements of your website, including the size and spacing of texts and images, are arranged on mobile screens. This is a significant factor that most web designers take into consideration. If you, however, are wondering if your website is indeed mobile-friendly, you can look up your business website's mobile friendliness score with the Lighthouse tool available on Chrome or search for an alternative mobile friendliness test online. 

Make use of long-tailed keywords 

Researching keywords is a fundamental skill at the heart of SEO ranking. When developing blog post ideas, the primary focus is often the keyword. Often, it is a common strategy to use short-tailed keywords, which can easily be repeated multiple times in an article. Still, in recent years, this has proven to be counterproductive. Search engines' algorithms penalise stuffing articles with keywords for increased SEO rankings. A great approach is to use long-tailed keywords that apply to the blog post and include them once or twice in your posts. 

A combination of a truly educative blog post with long-tailed keywords minimally included in the article is highly rewarded with increased SEO rankings. This is because it indicates genuine search intent. A good example would be that, rather than including “best painting services” as a keyword in your article, “best painting service in Canberra” would be an ideal keyword to help your blog post rank higher.  

Use Images and videos to drive up SEO rankings 

In recent years, the growing number of internet users who favour the use of images and video content for getting information has increased, and as a small business owner, leveraging this to boost your SEO ranking is key to your business growth. 

You can take advantage of the immense benefits of images and videos for your business website by strategically including relevant images and investing in quality video content. Including this will rapidly ensure your business website ranks significantly. Steps to optimise image and video content on your websites include filling up alternative texts for images, naming relevant files for images or videos included in your blog posts, and ensuring images and videos are in the right format and are all mobile-friendly. Ensure the images and videos are without any copyright infringement. 

Many tools and websites exist to help small businesses create images and videos without copyright infringement. 

Respond to Reviews 

Your business has an online profile on search engines and a growing online presence. One easy but often ignored way to boost your SEO rankings is to promote reviews and respond to reviews on your business profiles. You can ask clients and users to leave positive reviews on your business profile online, and ensure you respond to these reviews. Accumulating a fair amount of these positive reviews would establish your business as a trusted provider of excellent service, and with this being rewarded by search engine algorithms, your business website SEO ranking would shoot up. 

This would make your business among the first to come up when leads look up for services that you offer in Canberra and upon seeing the fair amount of positive and honest reviews you have gathered, would be inclined to try out your service, thus earning you steady influx of clients, while further strengthening your SEO ranking. 

Conclusion 

The life and soul of a business website's online presence lies in its SEO rankings; thus, it is imperative that increasing its SEO ranking is one significant investment every business owner in Canberra should prioritise. Implementing the strategies of focusing on blog contents in your niche, including links to high-domain external websites, strategic internal linking, utilising long-tailed keywords to show search intent, use of images and videos, as well as building up positive reviews with regular responses, all will ensure your small business website's SEO ranking improves.