For any small online business to succeed it must have a good SEO campaign. If not, the business might not reach its full potential, even if the content available is highly valuable to the customers.
Good SEO practice ensures that your business gets the right amount of exposure to the target audience. Moreover, when you have a decent amount of traffic to your website, you raise your conversion chances higher.
This on-page / site optimization guide for small businesses is here to help you achieve good SEO practice for the benefit of your business.
Structured Data
Structured data can really help most online businesses achieve the most out of their site optimization practices. As the name suggests, structured data is simply organizing data in a sensible way.
So, how does structured data apply to your website and what difference does it make? Well, the answers to those questions are straightforward. You see, structured data is a specific code to your website that allows Google or any other search engine to understand your website’s content better.
When used appropriately, structured data can even make search engines create better search results on behalf of your website’s content. Therefore, when the searchers look for specific information in your field, search engines can easily display the needed answers following your content’s structure.
This means that structured data can help your business be more exposed to a significant amount of traffic due to high rankings. Similarly, your business will appear more professional and appealing to the target audience.
Search engines such as Google are evolving and improving their systems to ensure search queries get the best and most relevant content. Therefore, structured data is highly essential if you want your business to stay relevant and readily available to potential customers. Learn more about structured data at 3whitehats.co.nz .
The Semantic Web
After structured data, understanding the concept of the semantic web is another essential thing for any online business. The semantic web is a process used by most search engines to find and appropriately organize data for the benefit of the user’s experience.
As you may know, search engines have been user-driven for a long time. However, most of them are looking to answer users based on their specific queries. Thus, the semantic web becomes applicable for creating a network of information that can be easily interpreted by search engines.
This way, the search engines’ crawlers can easily find and display specific and relevant suggestions for any queries they receive. That’s where structured data comes in, as it allows the semantic web to find organized information for a better user experience.
The Importance of Structured Data for Small Business
As you may know, search engines are evolving over time by introducing new features to how they work. The machines have now fully incorporated mobile searching, voice assistance, and voice searches.
Therefore, structured data is your website’s best chance to stay relevant and user friendly in all three spaces. If a search engine is able to assess and ascertain the relevance of your website due to structured data, then it becomes easier to rank higher.
Additionally, the semantic web will be able to link your information more easily thanks to your website’s structured data. As a result, you may find your content ranking higher or showing up on more search engine’s results pages than you had planned.
How Structured Data Improves Rankings for Small Businesses
Although ranking high in search engines is every small business owner’s dream, it’s only the first part of finding success. Your ranking means nothing if you have a low click-through rate (CTR).
Most search engines determine how relevant or helpful your content is by observing your CTR. Usually, a website with a high impression but an much lower CTR isn’t a good interpretation for any search engine.
So, how does structured data improve rankings? Below are some of the enhancements to include alongside structured data:
- Rich cards – mostly for mobile users
- Carousel style product view
- Enriched query results
- Breadcrumbs – provides multiple answers to queries
On-page SEO Mistakes to avoid :
Not optimizing your site for mobile
Did you know that more than half of the web’s traffic now comes from mobile devices? This means that you could be missing a lot of traffic if your site does not accommodate mobile device users. Search engines, such as Google, favor websites that are mobile-friendly. Luckily, there are tons of tools out there that you can use to check whether your site is mobile-friendly.
Failure to invest in keyword research
Making structured data on your site will only happen when you have done the good keyword research. Web surfers use certain keywords when they are searching for information online. You can start small with a tool such as Google’s keyword planner and be on the right track. However, you should note that Internet users don’t care about the keywords. What matters to them is all the relevant results for the queries they input on the web browsers.
Failure to focus on content length
You may have done your best when it comes to keyword research. You may have even started to create content around these keywords. However, you may note that you are not the only person churning out such content. Search engines will thus rank those websites with in-depth content higher than those that are shallow. Your focus should not be on hundreds of pages but in-depth content that creates value for the readers.
If you employ well-structured data alongside these enhancements, both your rankings and CTR are most likely to go through the roof.
As you’ve seen, using structured data on your website can help you achieve immense success in areas you couldn’t even imagine. However, you still need to be providing value for your customers.
Ensure that you also enrich your content with relevant and helpful information that your target audience needs. This way, you’ll rank easily on search engines and gain more trust from your website’s users.
