Did you know that approximately 8.5 billion Google searches happen every single day?
So if you’ve never considered how your business performs in Google Searches, well, now is the time to get serious about it!
The key to success on Google is one crucial thing: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
We reckon that you’ve heard this acronym before in your time as a small business owner, but have you given much thought to how you can use it to help grow your small business online?
If you’d like to learn more about SEO for small businesses, keep reading! We’re sharing the benefits of SEO along with simple, actionable SEO tips for small business owners just like you.
Simply put, SEO is about the actions you can take to optimise your website to improve your visibility on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).
The main objective of SEO is to allow your target audience to find you when they’re searching for relevant keywords on search engines like Google.
The reason this is so important is that being more visible on these search engines will drive more organic traffic to your website.
More eyeballs on your content increases the likelihood of your customers clicking on your site, which then increases the chances of them making a purchase or other type of conversion (like signing up for your newsletter).
There are so many different things you can do when it comes to SEO for your business website.
That’s why there’s a huge industry of SEO professionals (like us) who work day in and day out to help optimise websites for small businesses (like yours).
Here are our top tips to grow your website online:
One of the easiest ways to score high on SEO is to create high-quality, informative, and engaging content that adds value to your target audience’s lives.
When you consistently deliver this quality content to your audience, you’re showing search engines that your website is full of valuable, relevant content that will be useful to your target audience.
You must ensure your website is user-friendly, mobile-friendly, and easy to navigate.
Having a pretty site means nothing when your customers feel frustrated by their experience on your website! This is especially important for the mobile version of your website.
As of July 2025, 58% of web traffic searches take place on mobile. If you’re not capturing that market with a top-notch mobile experience, then you could be missing out on a lot of potential customers.
First, a quick definition of keywords: in the context of SEO, keywords are specific words or phrases strategically added into your website’s content to improve its visibility in search engine results and attract relevant organic traffic to your website.
Keywords are the foundation of SEO, and an element you cannot afford to ignore.
While bigger retail and corporate businesses likely oversaturate a lot of the more common SEO keywords, keyword research can provide you with unexpected keywords that are relevant to your small business.
Typically, there are three types of keywords:
To help you with this, check out our keyword research template as part of our Essential SEO Checklist.
Research has found that long-tailed keywords (keywords that are constructed more like a short 3 to 4-word phrase or sentence) get 1.76x more clicks in organic search results.
As artificial intelligence usage grows, with examples like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, there will likely be millions more questions and phrases that people will ask search engines and chatbots for what they’re looking for.
When doing keyword research, it’s a good idea to consider the whole customer journey. That’s from the top (awareness) to the bottom (purchase/lead) stages of their journey.
To help you with keyword research, you can use free or paid tools.
Free keyword research tools
Paid keyword research tools
The meta title and description are what you’d typically see for a website in Google search. It helps you to get a better idea of what the website or page is offering, and whether that’s what you’re looking for.
Sometimes Google may also choose to display other content. And can also select an image to show.
Being thoughtful in the way you construct meta titles and descriptions can take some practice, but it’s genuinely worth it.
Meta titles and descriptions don’t just function as a summary of what people can expect when they click on the link, but also serve as a way to capture their attention and stand out from the rest of the results on the same search engine result page (SERP).
Here are some things to keep in mind when coming up with good meta titles:
Now, when it comes to meta descriptions, things get a little tricky.
Google rewrites meta descriptions 62.78% of the time. However, that doesn’t mean you should neglect your meta descriptions! In fact, 43% of people click solely based on the meta description.
Be sure to write a summary of the web page in a way that resonates with your audience and makes them want to get to know more.
There are many tools out there that will help you track your website’s traffic, engagement, and conversion metrics. A popular one is Google Analytics, which is our website analytics tool of choice!
Tracking your website’s performance on tools like Google Analytics is essential as a small business because it is a clear, data-led representation of your customers’ journey through your website.
It answers important questions, such as what your customer journey looks like before a conversion or where your customers tend to drop off.
This data then allows you to make small (or big) changes to your website to optimise it and increase conversions.
However, we understand how complex and time-consuming this whole process can be. That’s why we’ve got a range of DIY and done-for-you packages to help with this.
It’s essential to keep your website content relevant and consistently up-to-date.
This ensures that your website is adding value.
Although there may be no such thing as a freshness score by Google, we’ve seen that websites that update their content or publish new material are more likely to rank better.
That said, as Google experts suggest, it depends on the query. As you’ll find, some content will still rank for years, called evergreen, so long as the content is serving its intended purpose.
Whether you’re adding new keywords (that your keyword research from step 3 helped you find, of course) or adding more recent references to your content, you must schedule time to keep your website accurate.
This is one of the best SEO tips for eCommerce sites! Make sure you’re using relevant SEO keywords in all your product descriptions and category pages.
This ensures that search engines can lead potential customers directly to the products they’re searching for! It only takes a little bit more effort to include these keywords, so take the time to put this tip into practice at every opportunity.
Place your keywords strategically in:
Avoid spamming keywords everywhere – it’s no longer effective and can harm your website’s SEO in the long run!
You know how they say that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’? Well, this can be taken quite literally when it comes to SEO.
While you can’t quite include a thousand keywords with every photo, you can ensure that all the relevant keywords are included in file names and alt text.
These keywords will be discoverable when people search through sites like Google Images, which can result in additional traffic to your site.
If you run a business with a physical location, then you need to ensure your Google Business profile is up to date and that you’re utilising localised keywords in your content.
Strive to create content that is focused on the local area and which would appeal to the people who live there (or those who are visiting).
For businesses with a physical address, display this on your website footer (at the bottom) as well as your contact page. If you service specific suburbs or regions, consider creating pages that list the areas and suburbs you cover.
The importance of local SEO cannot be overstated – 46% of all Google searches have local intent (meaning the searches are constrained to a specific area), and businesses with a claimed Google Business Profile listing receive 7x more clicks than unclaimed listings.
It’s a common misconception that SEO only happens on a business’s website (also known as on-page SEO).
Unfortunately, many small business owners focus solely on on-page SEO, neglecting equally important off-page SEO practices that can help grow their business.
So what’s the difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO?
Simply put, on-page SEO are all the things you do on your website to directly attract web traffic, whereas off-page SEO includes all the things you do away from your website, which will indirectly attract web traffic.
The tips here are mostly on-page SEO, but we’ll share a few off-page SEO ideas further down.
URLs are all the characters that appear after the backslash following your web domain address.
An excellent SEO tip related to URLs is to create short, relevant, but still descriptive URLs that reflect the unique content of all your web pages.
A sign of a relevant, useful website keeps users on for long periods.
You want people to discover your website on a search engine, read through the landing page that they click on, then continue their journey throughout your website (hopefully resulting in a conversion!).
A great way to ensure that your website visitors keep clicking through your website is to provide plenty of opportunities for them to click on links to other pages on your website.
On an eCommerce website, you can achieve this on your product pages using sections like “often purchased with”. For other types of websites, linking from one page to another can work – perhaps including a link to your Services page on your About page.
And one of the easiest ways to practice internal linking for any website is through blogs, which are an excellent way to utilise keywords as well.
The blog supports linking back to your primary website navigation. So long as the content relates to it and is relevant, which is likely if you add relevant topics to what your business or organisation does for people.
Schema tags are structured data or additional information we add to website content to help search engines understand what content we have to offer.
They are also used by artificial intelligence chatbot tools like Chat GPT and Gemini to scrape your content.
Schema tags can be quite technical. Some tools, such as Yoast SEO on WordPress and Shopify, offer some schema tag settings. Otherwise, get help from a developer and check the schema with Google tools.
Common schema tags include:
Schema tags can help you achieve things such as being cited by Chat GPT, as well as in opportunities like Featured Snippets.
A featured snippet is a prominent display of your website content on Google. For example, if you look up “banana bread recipe”, you will see the recipe in this format.
Other examples include the People Also Ask section, which are the collapsible questions Google displays in search results, along with Google AI Overview results.
The tips above contain numerous examples of on-page SEO, which refers to all the SEO activities that occur directly on your website to attract web traffic.
But we’d like to spend a bit more time sharing a few off-page SEO activities that you can do to encourage indirect web traffic to your site, too.
When it comes to on-page SEO VS off-page SEO, it’s important to remember that it’s not about doing one or the other – you need to put time and effort into both of these types of SEO practices to achieve success!
There’s no avoiding the fact that SEO is vital to small businesses. In an increasingly competitive digital world, businesses must do everything possible to stand out and engage with their potential customers.
If you want to improve on your business’s SEO but don’t know where to start, we can help.
Check out our DIY Essential SEO Checklist and Ultimate SEO Survival Guide.
