While it would be nice to be in the top 10 of any Google search for your industry, this is not usually a realistic goal for small business websites (quite often it’s not realistic for large businesses either). However, there are things you can do to maximize search engine results for your company.

Most of the time when you hear the term ‘SEO’ (search engine optimization), it is in reference to ‘competitive’ keywords. For instance, a search for ‘web designer’ will reveal 29,000,000 results. It is pretty unrealistic for my to assume that a few tricks will get me on the first Google page. A search for ‘web designer nova scotia’ will still give 785,000 results, so getting to #1 on this search is still not easy (At the time of this post I am #55, however). A search for ‘web designer amherst nova scotia’ does put me at #1, a realistic goal. However, even that did not happen by accident.

To assist you in increasing your localized search results, there are a few things you can do. Make sure your physical addess, in full with postal code is listed on your home page. Make sure it is in text too, not a graphic (a picture of the words). Another big helper is to include it in the title tag, the title that appears at the top of your browser (have a look at mine, just glance up to the title bar of your browser to see what I mean). One other good idea is to list your business on Google Maps. Not only will this assist people in finding you, it will help your search engine rankings and list you on the map that appears (first), regardless of where you fall on the rest of the page.

Another item to take care of is ‘non-competitive seo’. What this simply means is to make sure you appear on search engine listings when someone types in your company name. If you’re not sure about this, go ahead and try it yourself. Search for your business name and see what happens in the results. If you’re right there, then great, but if not give some serious consideration to changing your website to make this happen. People get referred to you by word of mouth all the time, and one of the first things they will do before calling you is look up your website. They won’t know the exact url, so they will do a simple search. If you don’t appear, there’s a problem.

Methods to help this ‘non-competitive seo’ is to ensure your company name appears in the title, use heading tags properley (h1 for the company name, h2 for the taglines, etc.). Having a sitemap available will also help greatly. Have a look at your website the way Google sees it as well - search engines do not see your layout, they only see the text and how that is presented and marked up. Go to www.seo-browser.com, enter your site and have a look. Does what you see make sense to you? Can you clearly tell what company it is, where they are located, etc.?

Optimizing your website for Google is not as mysterious as some would make it out to be. For more information, Google themselves give excellent resources to help you here.