Give Your Rankings a Boost With These 8 SEO Quick Wins for SMBs

You’ve heard the saying, “Good things come to those who wait,” and that’s certainly true of search engine optimization (SEO). But there are days when you can’t afford to spend too much time on something, and you need some tasks you can get done quickly to drive results. For that reason, you may find yourself asking if there are any quick tasks you can perform to drive SEO results for your marketing. And the answer is yes — there is!

Though your SEO results will take time to gain any traction, there are still some SEO quick wins for SMBs that you can perform. Below, we’ll take a look at several of these quick SEO tips and discuss how you can employ them to optimize your campaign. Read on to learn more, and then subscribe to Revenue Weekly for more tips from the digital marketing agency with over 1,100 client testimonials!

8 quick SEO tips for improving your rankings

To get truly superior SEO results, you’ll have to be prepared to wait for your content to work its way up through the rankings. In the meantime, though, you can be optimizing some aspects of your marketing that you can handle in a short amount of time! Here are eight SEO quick wins for SMBs to pursue:

1. Target long-tail keywords
2. Claim your Google Business profile
3. Improve your page speeds
4. Optimize images on your site
5. Earn backlinks for your content
6. Use HTTPS
7. Update old content
8. Eliminate 404s and redirect loops

Let’s go through each one!

1. Target long-tail keywords

When you launch an SEO campaign, one of the main things you’ll be doing is targeting relevant keywords in your web content. Doing so helps you rank for those keywords and bring in traffic to your website. You may already be targeting some keywords, but for faster and more relevant results, try expanding your keyword list with long-tail keywords — that is, those that are several words long. Long-tail keywords are more specific to particular search intents, meaning they come with less competition. That makes it easier to climb high in the search results for those keywords and do it in less time.

2. Claim your Google Business profile

Another quick task you can use to drive up your SEO is to claim your Google Business Profile profile, if you haven’t already done so. Google Business Profile is Google’s platform for displaying basic information about your business through Google, like your name, address, and phone number. Even if you haven’t created a profile yet, there’s a chance one already exists for you, likely created in association with your location on Google Maps. By claiming your profile, you can edit the information to accurately reflect your brand, and you can upload photos as well.     Claiming and optimizing your profile will allow you to appear in Google search “local packs” for local searches in your area, gaining you more exposure and more traffic.

3. Improve your page speeds

Did you know that 83% of users expect the pages they visit to load within three seconds? If someone visits your website and it fails to load within that time, there’s an exceptionally high chance of them hitting the “back” button. When users bounce from your site, not only do you miss out on traffic, but Google may rank you lower because it perceives that users don’t like your site. To avoid this, you can optimize your page speeds through a few different methods:

• Limiting redirects
• Caching web pages
• Compressing images
• Minifying code

When you take just a short while to implement these things across your site, you’ll see an improvement in your page speeds, resulting in happier users and higher rankings.

4. Optimize images on your site

Are the images on your website benefiting your SEO? If you haven’t gone out of your way to optimize them, probably not. But with the right alterations, they can soon become some additional SEO quick wins for your campaign. To start with, you can add alt tags — short, descriptive lines of text — to your images.

The alt tags will describe what the images depict. Google’s crawlers can’t read images, but they can read alt tags, meaning your images will start contributing to your rankings. Going back to the previous tip, you can also compress your images to speed up your page load times. Unnecessarily large file sizes will bog down your pages and make them load more slowly.

5. Earn backlinks for your content

Next on our list of quick SEO tips is to earn backlinks. Backlinks are where third-party websites in your industry link to your content. You can earn backlinks by visiting those sites, finding broken links on their pages, and recommending that they replace the broken links with fresh ones to your content. The reason this benefits you is that when Google sees reputable websites linking to you, it assumes you’re reputable as well and ranks you higher in search results.

That’s why it’s critical that your backlinks come from authoritative sites, so aim for quality over quantity.

6. Use HTTPS

Another trait Google rewards in websites is security. When given the choice between a secure website and an insecure one, Google will tend to rank the secure one higher. Specifically, Google prefers websites that use HTTPS. On top of helping you rank higher, using HTTPS on your website will help you look more appealing to site visitors, particularly if you’re an ecommerce website where users have to submit their payment information to make a purchase.

Make sure your site uses HTTPS, and your SEO will improve.

7. Update old content

 If you have any outdated content on your site, it could be a missed opportunity for your business. If users visit your website and find a blog post that’s ten years old, they’ll be less inclined to read it — and Google will be less inclined to rank it. To resolve this issue, you can employ a simple solution: Update your older content. Go through some of your old pieces and make sure all the information is current, after which you can update the publication or “last edited” date so Google ranks it higher.

8. Eliminate 404s and redirect loops

A final way you can drive fast SEO results for your business is by getting rid of 404 errors and redirect loops on your website. When users and Google crawlers alike can’t find pages on your site, it doesn’t send a very positive message. Google will quickly learn to put you lower in rankings, and users will get irritated and stop wanting to visit your site. To eliminate this issue, do a thorough sweep of your site to make sure all your pages are available and that all your links work properly. If you ever have to use redirects, be sure you don’t create a redirect loop.

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Looking to get your SEO off the ground?

WebFX can help! We’ve been driving SEO results for our clients for over 28 years, and we’re not about to stop now. With our SEO services, not only will you get help driving SEO quick wins like those listed above, but we’ll also help you generate more long-term SEO successes. You’ll even receive a dedicated account representative to keep you informed about everything we do for you. Just give us a call at 888-601-5359 or contact us online today to get started!