Far too many SEO pros and marketers sit on the edge of their seats trembling at the possibility that at some point, SEO will change so drastically that they’ll lose all they have. This is not the case. Certainly there will be changes, and major ones at that, but that doesn’t mean the world will end and all your efforts come to naught.
What you need to know about what’s going on in the future is best epitomized in the words of Jack Ma, the genius of Ali Baba fame. Ma is quoted as saying:
“No one knows the future, you can only create the future.”. Hopefully those are the exact words.
Now that’s power to play with. You can create your SEO future for your small business by not going against the grain of sound and solid techniques and technologies. Valuing and acting upon the tried and true and knowing when to think outside of the box. Older techniques may or may not be as effective today, but some are still staples of the SEO approach that should not be sneezed at.
Handle your basics first, analyze what you’ve done and make sure you haven’t wandered from the beaten path too far. Once you’ve done that, use the various tools to diagnose your site for SEO. See what the latest technologies and tactics have to say about your site and spotlight what you need to work on.
Stay up with the times. It’s important to employ the tried and true, but to shirk the present and breakthroughs is haphazard. Search engines like Google introduce new software and services to aid the SEO campaign, especially that of mobile and voice searches. One can find a good number of people using voice search all over the place. If your site isn’t set up to accommodate voice SEO, you had better hurry up.
This is an offshoot of the popularity of mobile. Mobile has taken the web by storm and anything that isn’t a smartphone or a tablet is going the way of the dinosaur. Use the tools that will examine if your site is indeed mobile friendly and your SEO small business campaign should be ready for anything the future holds.
Linking is still a staple but tricky. You will get penalized for unethical linking procedures but you can avoid this by not accepting links from disreputable sources. Clean up your outbound links and work hard at cleaning up the inbound ones.
Finally, content. You can toss everything out if you don’t have quality, engaging content. Cookie cutter stories, lame looking graphics, sucky videos, will not make people want to stay on your site.
Don’t miss out on social media either. Nowadays social media is one of the biggest deliverers of targeted organic traffic there is. You site should be social media friendly, you should engage with social media sites that you can interact with via your blog. Be friendly and informative and supporting while commenting on such sites and posts. No one wants to feel uncomfortable. Think of your site as a place for people to pull up a stool and chat about the pertinent information they’re interested in.
Finally, get your Local SEO game going on for your small business. People can’t find your store if they don’t know where you are. On top of that, using your location as a marketing tool has nothing but positive results.