Boost Your Online Visibility: An SME Checklist
Is your business easy to find online?
Having a website is one thing. Making sure potential customers can actually find it is another. For small businesses, search engine optimisation (SEO) can sometimes feel like a dark art. There are technical terms, algorithms that constantly evolve and plenty of conflicting advice about what you should and shouldn’t be doing.
The good news is that you don’t need to be an SEO expert to improve your online visibility. There are plenty of practical things you can do to help search engines understand your business, improve your visibility in search results and make it easier for potential customers to find you. Here’s my SME checklist to get you started.
1. Get a Google Business Profile
If you have a physical location, serve a particular local area or meet customers in person, a Google Business Profile should be one of your first priorities. It helps your business appear in Google Search and Google Maps when people are looking for the products or services you offer.
Make sure your profile is complete, accurate, and keep it up to date. It’s another opportunity to show Google, and potential customers, what your business is all about.
2. Get your website SEO foundations right
Your website content needs to work for two audiences: your customers and search engines.
Make sure every page has a clear, descriptive page title, a relevant h1 heading and a useful meta description that tells search engines and users what the page is about.
Reflect the language your customers actually use and avoid industry jargon. Look at weaving in search terms into h2/h3 headings, website copy, image alt-text, internal links, URLs (where appropriate).
But remember: SEO isn’t about stuffing keywords into every sentence.
Your website still needs to be written for humans. If your content sounds unnatural because you’ve tried to squeeze a keyword into every available space, you’ve gone too far.
Write useful, relevant content first. Then optimise it intelligently.
3. Register your sitemap with Bing Webmaster Tools
A sitemap helps search engines discover the pages on your website. Submitting your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools is free and relatively straightforward.
4. Sell products online? Set up Google Merchant Center
If you sell products, make sure they’re eligible to appear across Google’s shopping experiences by setting up Google Merchant Center and submitting your product information. This can help your products appear in relevant Google Shopping results and other Google surfaces.
Make sure your product information is accurate and kept up to date, including product names, descriptions, prices, images and availability.
5. Connect your website to Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another free tool that should be in every SME’s digital marketing toolkit.
It gives you valuable insight into how Google sees your website, including:
Which searches are bringing people to your site
Which pages are appearing in search results
How many clicks and impressions you’re receiving
Any indexing issues
Which keywords and queries your website is appearing for
It’s also a useful way to spot opportunities. You may discover that you’re already appearing for searches you hadn’t considered - giving you ideas for new content or ways to improve existing pages.
6. Make sure your website can be crawled by AI search engines
Search is changing. People are increasingly using AI-powered tools to discover businesses, products, services and information. If you want your business to have the best chance of being surfaced in AI-generated answers, your website needs to be accessible to the relevant crawlers.
Start by checking your robots.txt file, website permissions and technical setup to make sure you aren’t unintentionally blocking important search or AI crawlers. However, you don’t necessarily want to allow every bot to crawl your website. Before doing anything, make sure your clear on which crawlers and services you want to make your content available to, and which ones you want to block.
7. Use SEO tools to find the right keywords
Tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs can help you find the words and phrases people are using when they search for the products or services you offer.
Research keywords and phrases that are:
Relevant to your business
Used by your potential customers
Getting a reasonable volume of searches
Have low competition ie. not dominated by large established competitors
Use this research to identify 3 or 4 core content themes (known as pillars) for your website, and create keyword clusters to incorporate in new content.
For example, if I identified digital marketing as a relevant content theme, I would then look to create content using keywords relating to relevant sub-topics such as SEO, email marketing, automation and personalisation.
Remember, SEO isn’t about stuffing keywords into every sentence. Your website still needs to be written for humans.
Your aim shouldn’t be simply to rank for lots of keywords. The goal is to use keywords to help attract the right people to your website by using relevant and engaging content.
8. Publish new content throughout the year
One of the best ways to build your online visibility is to keep creating genuinely useful content.
Think about the questions your customers ask you every day. What do they want to know before buying? What problems are they trying to solve? What information would make their lives easier?
Turn those questions into a range of content e.g. FAQs, how-to guides, checklists, blog articles, case studies, reports, industry insights, original research and buying guides.
9. Build your backlink profile
Search engines use links from other websites as one of many signals when assessing the trustworthiness and credibility of your website.
A backlink is simply a link from another website to yours. Establishing backlinks from well-known credible websites will improve your online visibility. Whereas backlinks from untrusted sites can have the opposite affect.
Think about the organisations you already have relationships with (suppliers, partners, clients, trade associations, professional networks, local organisations). Could they link to your website?
10. Get listed in relevant online directories
Online directories can still play a useful role in building your digital presence - particularly local and industry-specific directories. Look for reputable directories that are genuinely relevant to your business.
Depending on your industry, this might include:
Local business directories
Professional or trade associations
Industry directories
Local chambers of commerce
Specialist business listing sites
Quality matters more than quantity. You don’t need to register with every directory you can find. Focus on those which your customers are most likely to use and that provide a credible reference to your business.
Want quicker results? Consider Google Ads
SEO is a longer-term approach to improving your visibility in search results. If you have a budget and want to start generating visibility and enquiries more quickly, Google Ads can be worth considering.
You can target the specific words and phrases your potential customers are searching for and appear at the top of Google when they’re looking for those services.
PPC (pay per click) ads can work particularly well alongside SEO. While you build your organic visibility over time, paid search can help you reach potential customers straight away.
Just remember, Google Ads can increase your visibility, but paying for ads will not improve your organic Google ranking.
If you’d like to see some of these principles put into practice, take a look at my latest case study with Deep Sleeps.
Need a helping hand?
You don’t have to tackle SEO alone. At HB Marketing Solutions, I help small businesses take a practical, strategic approach to marketing - from developing your marketing strategy and website content through to SEO-friendly content creation and ongoing campaigns.
Let’s talk about how we can help you get your business found online.