7 Quick and Easy SEO and Website Design Tips for Busy Business Owners

Why Optimizing Your Small Business Website is Essential (and Ongoing)

“I am not getting enough website traffic.” I hear that a lot when I talk to potential clients. The primary purpose of any business website is to attract, engage, and convert visitors. If your website doesn’t get enough traffic, that is a big problem. To help you do better, I want to provide you with seven quick and easy SEO and website design tips.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of SEO and website design tips. No business owner I know has anywhere near the time or resources to implement even a fraction of them. Nor would this necessarily help you to achieve measurable and sustainable results.

Yet, many business owners feel they need to do everything at once to achieve their business objectives. Once again, they are wrong!

There Is No Secret Sauce!

Optimizing your small business website or online store is an ongoing project, not a one-time effort. There is no magic pill or secret sauce that will instantly provide you with the results you need to succeed.

Instead, you need to roll up your sleeves and work on your online presence a bit every day or as often as you have time. Instead, keep at it and follow my SEO and website design tips. You will attract more visitors and provide a better user experience.

How Google Crawls Your Website

The internet is continuously changing, and frequent algorithm updates by Google often send small businesses scrambling. But one factor all of Google’s algorithm updates have in common is, prioritizing the design of any website or page to provide an improved search experience.

Unfortunately, Google isn’t always forthcoming with the particulars of each algorithm change they introduce. But there are clear and consistent SEO actions that Google rewards through boosted ranking and visibility.

When a search engine like Google or Bing indexes a web page, it sends out “crawlers” or “spiders” to crawl that page. Those “spiders” pick up on specific optimization factors to determine that web page’s rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs.)

Consider Key SEO Ranking Factors

To rank highly on search results pages, you must focus on essential ranking factors. Ranking factors are critical to optimizing your small business website and content. While there are many different search ranking factors, I don’t want to overwhelm you. Let’s start with the following:

• Long-form content (at least 1,000 words)
• Backlinks and internal links
• Long-tail keywords or phrases
• Related key terms
• Optimized media (like images, infographics, and videos)

The better optimized a web page is and the more traffic it receives, the higher it will rank over time.

Essentially, you could have the best service or products in the world. Still, if your website is poorly optimized, you won’t get any web traffic to your site, and your business will most likely end up failing.

Focus on Three Essentials

If you want to create an online presence that will sustain your small business, you must concentrate on the following:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• User-friendly website design
• Optimized page content

Progress is progress, so keep going and don’t give up. Even if you only work on one detail every day, you will notice gradual improvement and start to move past your online competitors.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at a few SEO and website design tips that you can implement right now!

Simple SEO and Website Design Tips You Can Implement Right Now!

How to Begin SEO and Website Design Optimization

You need to prioritize website design and SEO tactics if you want to rank well and drive traffic to your website. And there are some quick and easy ways small businesses can implement SEO and website design tips on their websites or e-commerce stores.

But business owners need to continuously re-visit these areas and continue updating and changing them as new algorithms come out, search engines change, and as time passes in general. Search engine optimization and web design are not “one and done” actions.

Yes, that requires ongoing effort on your part. But there are severe consequences for not keeping up with SEO and website design improvements. Without a strong SEO and design plan, your small business will fail.

Over time, your website and pages will lose page rank, resulting in reduced lead conversions and lower revenue, costing you valuable business growth opportunities.

No business owner I know wants to set out for failure. They just get overwhelmed by the process of optimizing their website, content, and searchability. The following SEO and website design tips will show you how to get started.

4 Quick and Easy Website Design Tips

I frequently write about web design and SEO on our blog, so I will not cover the topic in-depth in this post. Consider this a starter guide to user-friendly web design and search engine optimization, a cheat sheet if you like.

Whether you partner with a web development company or you’re doing it on your own, you need to prioritize both good SEO and website design.

Here are four simple website design tips you need to focus on when creating your website:

1 – Keep It Simple

You are not designing your website for yourself but for your target audience. Focus on the needs of your ideal consumer. Provide the best possible user experience. Having a flashy website with cool effects may seem the way to go. But clean and straightforward web design will provide much better results.

Use a clean and straightforward layout, including a color scheme consisting of not more than three colors, an easy-to-use navigation menu, a readable font, and the same template layout style for all your pages.

2 – Be Mobile-First

Modern consumers will use a mobile device at least once to access your website. More likely, they will use a variety of devices, including tablets and smartphones, to check out your products and services. Which means you need a mobile-first website.

Your website layout looks different when it displays on different screen sizes. A great design on your desktop may not be so appealing on an iPhone. Therefore, you need to be aware of what your website or online store looks like, how it functions, and how fast it loads on various devices.

Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to show you how your website performs for mobile optimization.

3 – Reduce Page Load Speed

Page load speed is a Google ranking factor, which means page speed optimization is crucial. Page speed depends on many factors, from image size and file type, your website’s design, and functionality, to your website hosting.

You can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to determine which pages are loading the slowest and your average page load time. These tools also reveal any issues with your page loading and how fast your competitor’s website is loading.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is another helpful tool. It shows how your load time compares to the average for both your mobile and desktop versions for your site. You can also use GTMetrix to see how your website performs and which obstacles you need to fix.

4 – Be Consistent

While it may seem a good idea to vary the design of different website sections or pages, it hardly ever works out that way. An inconsistent design is confusing for visitors and does not provide a good user experience.

A consistent design makes your website easier to navigate for returning visitors and reinforces your brand image. Consistency will also make it easier for you to update and make changes to your website.

3 Quick and Easy SEO Tips

The second part of my quick and easy SEO and website design tips will help you improve your search rankings and visibility.

For those of you still new to this, SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO allows your website to be found in search results pages (SERPs) corresponding to specific search queries with relevant key terms for your small business.

Including keywords and key phrases throughout your website content is the best way to ensure that your website will rank well in the results pages for related search queries. Your website and web pages offer several areas and methods to optimize your pages for search.

Here are three simple SEO tips you should use on your web pages:

1 – Optimize for Keywords

Be sure to tell search engines exactly what the purpose of each page on your website is. Include your keyword or long-tail key phrase in your page meta description, URL, and page title.

When a search query matches up with the key terms on your page, they appear bold in the search results. You can further improve your content searchability by including related keywords and phrases.

The exact number of keywords is not as significant as it used to be, so avoid keyword stuffing. Instead, be sure your content sounds natural. Try to use your keywords or phrases in the same way as someone searching for the product or service you offer.

2 – Use ALT Tags

Search engine spiders don’t understand images. They can “see” the image, but they don’t know what it is. Therefore, you must describe it to them. You can do that by adding ALT tags to your website images.

ALT tags are simply a description of the image or content. Including ALT tags helps web crawlers “see” what the image is about and helps page crawlers index those images so they can appear in image searches.

Bonus Tip: Add your business or brand name to the ALT tags for images on your site. The images will show up when users search for your business or product brand.

3 – Build Backlinks

As the name implies, backlinks are links from other websites pointing to your website, specific pages, posts, or other content. Backlinks increase your website’s domain authority and, therefore, your searchability.

Backlinks are essentially votes of confidence in a website as a reputable resource of information on a specific topic. If you receive backlinks from other websites, Google will notice that many people trust your website.

You may see your web page rise in the SERPs as a result because Google is giving your page and content preference over other search results.

But not all backlinks are created equal. Links from spammy or low-quality websites will negatively impact your search rankings.

Start Using SEO and Website Design Tips

For your website performance, slow, steady, and continuous content creation, search optimization, and web design updates are what will put you ahead of your competitors. Using these SEO and website design tips ensures your web pages are optimized and generating organic traffic to your small business website.

Many new business owners tend to focus on the big picture or the next “big thing.” I understand that. But building a sustainable and successful business is not one big thing but an endless series of little things.

It’s the “little things” like web design, site optimization, and on-page SEO that provide measurable and sustainable results for small businesses.

Yes, it may be more fun or exciting for you to work on other business areas: podcasting, social media marketing, increasing market share, or product development. But if you do not focus on the “little things,” your business will suffer down the road.

Taking the time to consistently and methodically work on your web design, content, and SEO development may not be fun or exciting. But it will provide the measurable and sustainable results you need.

Our quick and easy SEO and website design tips are only a start. They will put you ahead of your competition in search engine visibility and ranking. And even more important, they will keep you in the mind of your target audience.

All you must do is implement these SEO and website design tips.

Implementing SEO and Website Design Tips

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, SEO and website design are daunting to most small business owners. I can understand that. With all the different strategies and options, the entire process seems just too overwhelming.

Hopefully, these SEO and website design tips help you better understand the process and benefits of optimizing your online presence. We are here to help.

We Can Help

Here at PixoLabo, we developed a custom web design process including mobile-first web design, e-commerce solutions, and search engine optimization. Each small business is different, and we personalize this process for every client.

Why not start by requesting a free consultation and no-obligation estimate!

Are You Optimizing Your Small Business Website?

Do you have a small business website? Did you start implementing our quick and easy SEO and website design tips? What results did you achieve? What challenges or obstacles did you face along the way?

And most importantly, if you are not working on optimizing your small business website, what prevents you from doing so?

Please leave your comments below so our audience can benefit and grab our feed, so you don’t miss our next post! And help other business owners to optimize their website or online store by sharing these tips with them!

Thank you! We appreciate your help to end bad business websites, one pixel at a time!

By Gregor Saita
Co-Founder / CXO
@gregorsaita