Being found online through search engines has gotten increasingly tough due to all the companies competing for attention. Consider that 67% of all organic search traffic goes to the first five organic Google search results, and 75% of searchers don’t scroll past the first page of search results.

 

So, what can a small company do to improve its SEO and get its website more visibility through organic search? We asked business owners what strategies have helped them increase organic traffic to their website; here’s how they responded:

 

Link to other pages on your website

Something that has had a direct impact on my search visibility has been improving my overall internal linking strategy on my site’s content. Any time I create a new blog post, I check to see if I have any existing content that’s related—or that I want to rank higher—and I interlink the two posts. I’ve tested this personally, and even after interlinking and re-indexing a few related posts, I’ve jumped up in the ranks (and that’s without doing anything else). So now when I look to write new posts, I am always asking myself “Will I be able to interlink this post with any other articles that I’ve previously written?” If the answer is no, then I will most likely find a new topic to write about.

—James Canzanella, owner, Isolated Marketing Nights, Wethersfield, Connecticut

 

Get featured on high-ranking websites

Over the past six months, we’ve taken our website from “nowhere to be found” to the first three pages of Google search results for popular keywords that our target audience searches for. One way we have done this is having our business featured on many high-ranking websites by responding to writers looking to feature businesses like ours. (Sites like HARO make connecting to journalists easy.) Organic traffic to our website has increased significantly with our efforts, and we’ve begun to have customers reach out to us after finding us on Google.

—Melanie Hartmann, founder and CEO, Creo Home Buyers, Baltimore

 

Create landing pages for each geographic market

We’ve improved our organic search rankings in our various geographic markets by creating specific landing pages for those markets—outside of the larger markets that we already operate in. For example, in addition to creating landing pages for large metro areas like Atlanta, we also create them for other Georgia cities, like Marietta, Alpharetta and Decatur. Within those new landing pages, we write over 2,000 words of unique content pertaining to that submarket—such as things to see, claims to fame, attractions and restaurants. This ensures that Google’s algorithm can detect the keywords and our business in that specific location.

—Gene Caballero, co-founder, GreenPal, Nashville, Tennessee

 

Research competitors’ SEO strategies

We use a tool called Ahrefs which helps us identify what content or blog posts our competitors have that we don’t—because that means we are missing out on keywords for those topics. Once we have established what we are missing out on, we created a blog post that is bigger, better and more optimized than our competitors. We also link to the article in other places to enhance its page ranking even further.

—Mike Falahee, owner, Marygrove Awnings, Livonia, Michigan

 

Sign up for local business directories

In the past few months, we have seen our website’s search traffic almost quadruple thanks to our SEO strategies. This has led to an influx of leads, and sales have never been better. Focusing on local SEO has been a big part of this. We started by making sure our local online business listings were all consistent in regard to NAP (name, address, phone number) and signed up for dozens of local business directories. The mass quantity of local citations with our business information has allowed Google to gain a lot more trust in us as a company and has directly led to ranking higher for more keywords. Along with this, we have created a lot of local service area pages for the different services we offer.

—Matt Balshin, founder, MB Creative, Toronto

 

Write website copy around relevant keywords

Our website’s main page used to be pretty barren copy-wise, but we recently revamped it to capture a large number of keywords closely related to our business. I looked at the search volume for terms that would help lead people to our service, then had the site content written up with those terms in mind. It essentially reads like an informative article, or even an FAQ page. It’s below the fold on the main site, so it doesn’t interfere with the clean design—but is still there for anyone searching for the content. Once the new page was fully indexed, our Google rank for most relevant keywords rose significantly.

—Jesse Silkoff, co-founder and president, MyRoofingPal, Austin, Texas

 

What have you done to increase search traffic to your website? Share your insights in the comments section below!

Print this article