Small Business Ethical SEO Tips
Ethical Search Engine Optimization For Small Business
SEO is constantly evolving.
It’s finicky. Things that worked in the past don’t work anymore, largely, for good reason.
What Do We Know About SEO?
SEO is much like Aesops’s Fable, “The Tortoise and The Hare.”
The hare was fast out of the gate but failed to win the race. The wise tortoise paced himself and emerged victorious.
An SEO strategy will benefit from slow and steady growth. Just like the tortoise, your business will succeed by a paced, consistent and ethical SEO strategy.
Creating organic growth for your business starts by developing a comprehensive and ethical search engine optimization strategy.
What Would Make My SEO Strategy Unethical?
There’s a lot of ways to stray down the wrong path — the most common SEO missteps, or Black Hat Tactics are:
Buying vs building links: Paid links versus organic link-building for SEO strategies.
Duplicate content: Identical text on multiple pages negatively affects SEO rankings.
Keyword stuffing: Overusing keywords unnaturally, harming content and readability.
Spamming comments: Posting irrelevant, promotional comments, damaging site reputation and rankings.
Why Are These SEO Strategies Unethical?
Largely because they represent poor-quality and obvious techniques. Search engine results are meant to represent quality, relevance and expertise. As such, many ‘shortcuts and hacks’ have been discovered and corrected by Google throughout the last two decades. Doing things the right way pays off in the end and help your business stay visible.
How Can A Business Owner Avoid Hiring The Wrong SEO Expert?
The best route to ensuring your business has an ethical search engine optimization strategy is by hiring a professional to carry out the research and implementation.
Things to avoid:
Budget companies. If the price is too good to be true, it might be. Often, the low cost comes with a lot frustration. Doing things the right way takes time.
Guaranteed Rankings. Optimizing content for search engines is not an exact science. If there is a guarantee made, ask for the corresponding data and timeline.
Fast Results. Successful Google rankings take time. A realistic timeline for an ethical SEO strategy is 6-12 months. A shorter timeline or guarantee is a red flag.
Billions of searches everyday - is your business there?
How Can I Make My Businesses SEO Ethical?
Play by the rules. Which is:
labor intensive
time-consuming
requires technical knowledge
This is where hiring a professional helps because not every business will need or benefit from SEO.
However, if there is an opportunity to generate organic traffic for your business, ethical SEO is often the straightest line. Hiring a professional minimizes error.
Due diligence pays off. The work it takes to rank on Google is a long-term play, however, the potential ROI is significant.
What Are Some Ways My Business Can Start Improving its SEO Ethically? (The Basics)
These are some easy & ethical fixes you can make to your website to start seeing improvement in search engine results:
Generate Keywords. This is step one. “SEO 101”. If this is done wrong, the rest of the strategy suffers. Using third-party software is a great way to compare data. Many of the platforms offer free-trials, which are helpful when gauging your business needs. I use Ahrefs — it is data-rich and I appreciate it’s UX. SEO Yoast is great for Word Press (it’s a convenient plug-in).
Compress all existing images. Having images on your site is great. However, load speed is an important component to search engine optimization. I use Optimizilla to compress images. It is free, easy-to-use, and has a fun name.
Ideally, images should be below 500kb and total page size should remain below 5MB.
The reality: those sizes can be hard to hit with high resolution photography generated from free online image platforms.
If you are looking for the best selection of free online images, Unsplash is the way to go.
Rename all image files and videos. Are the images on your site labeled “image.00987” or similar? That doesn’t help search engines. Renaming the files to accurately represent your business will help search engines read the relevant material on your site.
What does that look like?
“image.00987.JPG” <changes to> “your.services.JPG”
These changes require very little technical skills. If you can work a computer you can make the above improvements to your SEO content strategy. Here is a great resource for developing a keyword plan.
Here’s a fun fact:
Nobody really knows what Google is doing. Google is arguably the most sophisticated company in the world. Everyone is just trying their best to keep up. This happens through ethical search engine optimization and aligning with Google Best Practices.
Search engine optimization is not a quick fix but a strategic long-term move for your business.
How Can A Business Start Improving Its SEO On Its Own? (More Advanced)
Here are a few more tips that a business owner can do themselves to boost their SEO rankings and potential. Some of the ease will depend on which site-building platform you are using. As a general rule for small-to-mid-size businesses, use Squarespace or Wordpress.
Research and analytics are critical for any SEO strategy.
Customize your URL slugs. These are your subdomains. Everything that happens after the / in your .com address. When adding a new page to your own site, the new page will be labeled “new-page-1” — or something similar. That’s not ideal.
Change “New-page-1” to “Your-relevant-business-info” — this will help search engines identify the important details of your site and direct traffic there accordingly.
Here is an example — this is the URL for this article: https://tombostrom.com/blog/ethical-search-engine-optimization. This blog article is about ethical SEO. Easy-peasy.
Add a linking system. Google loves links. A great rule to run with is this: do not have a page on your website that does not have at least two links for every 500 words of content.
These can be links that take you to other areas of your site (internal links) or links that route you to another area of the web (external links).
If you know how to add a link to an email you can learn how to add a link to a website.
Add an SEO Metadata. Many site-building platforms allow you to add a specific SEO descriptions. They give you a specific amount of characters to explain what the page is about, including a title. It’s a great way to tell search engines exactly what is on that specific page of your site.
Important takeaways: Don’t go overboard with the keywords, one or two combinations per description is sufficient.
Squarespace makes this super easy. If you have a Squarespace site, here is a link to how to add an SEO description to a Squarespace site.
Does More Organic Traffic Mean More Sales?
It is important to understand what consumers are searching for. Their intent and path-to-purchase position are critical elements to determining what organic traffic is most valuable to your business.
Hiring a professional to optimize your business online saves time and money.
More traffic can mean more sales but it’s not a guarantee. Getting more relevant traffic is key. This means consumers who are looking for your services and close to taking an action.
Pairing SEO best practices with compelling copywriting and design layout leads to lower bounce rates and higher conversions.
Will SEO Make My Other Marketing Easier?
Yes. An effective SEO plan will carry its content and strategy across platforms and channels.
SEO is data-driven. This creates the opportunity to improve overall marketing with the insights from your SEO reporting.
Improving organic traffic means you’re able to spend less on paid ads.
Hiring an SEO professional means you’ll save time and feel comfortable knowing your marketing investment is safe and hitting goals.