Small businesses in Irvine, CA, face challenges no matter what they produce or what kind of business model they employ. There is going to be competition for them in virtually every area, and carving out a piece of the market share probably isn’t going to come easily.
As always, SEO can help, but optimization for a small business isn’t going to look the same as for a larger, better established one. Here’s a guide to getting started with small business SEO for your Irvine, CA-based startup.
The Absolute Basics
Let’s assume the following for this article. First, you already have a website. Next, you already have Google Analytics set up, as well as Bing Webmaster Tools and Search Console. You should have already created and claimed your Google My Business listing. We’re also going to say that you’re a local business with only a couple of locations and that you get a little bit of traffic, but not very much yet from search engines.
If this sounds like your company, then keep reading. If you haven’t yet set up a website or taken the other steps we mentioned, then save this guide until you’ve done those things.
Are You Being Indexed?
You’ll need to check to see if Google is indexing your website before you do anything else of a technical nature. If your site isn’t being indexed, then all of your careful SEO efforts will be in vain.
It’s easy enough to check on your status with Google. Just go to Search Console and see if your website is listed as valid and shown in green rather than red. The number of valid pages should be about the same as the number on your site.
It’s also helpful if you use a service like Ahrefs or a similar tool. You can use them to do a site audit. That will give some indication of the “health” of your site, which in this case means how many pages are being indexed. If Google can’t crawl any of the content for whatever reason, you need to know about it.
The Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool
Next up, you should use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool to see if the speed for the mobile version of your site is acceptable. Any small business in Irvine, CA should understand that your mobile site is being used more than your laptop or desktop versions, so it’s vital that your site is not loading so slowly that you are being penalized. Any way that you can shave precious seconds off that load time, you have to do it.
Website Structure
From an SEO standpoint, having a logical website structure is part of what’s going to make it appealing not only to visitors but also to Google crawlers.
If your site is not set up in a way that makes sense, then it’s going to be challenging for the Google bots to locate critical aspects of it, like your sales pages, FAQs, etc. It’s also going to be befuddling for the visitors who have come looking for a particular service or product.
Your homepage should link to the other most important pages on the site. Those might include your services, content pages, about section, and so forth. Your general service pages should then link to pages that describe your particular services.
You’re trying to make things as easy as possible for people to find, and so logical that even someone who is inexperienced with the internet and website navigation should have no problems. You should never assume that all of your visitors have the same level of technical experience.
If your site has been up for a while, but you have added to it as time goes on then the navigation might have grown muddled at some point. It’s helpful when you’re tackling SEO to try to take a step back and look at your site through fresh eyes. See if you can find something quickly, like your blog, your business’s contact information, or one of your products.
Look for Broken Pages and Links
Next, you should look for broken links and pages on your site. It’s frustrating for a visitor when they encounter those, and the Google bots will penalize you for them as well.
If you have Ahrefs and you do a site audit, then it will clearly show you all the 404 errors to be found on your site. Don’t assume you don’t have any just because you didn’t at some point in the past when you last checked. Since that time you might have changed some things on your site around, and some of the pages to which you were redirecting people might not exist any longer.
The easiest way to fix 404 redirect errors for your Irvine, CA-based small business website is to reinstate the dead page if you didn’t mean to delete it. If you did mean to remove it, then you can solve the problem by redirecting to a new alternative that is appropriate. If you have a similar page or post, then that is ideal.
Be sure to fix both internal links on your site and also outbound links to other sites. This will increase your domain authority.
These SEO tasks are probably going to take you a while, especially if the size of your site has increased due to your adding new services or products, incorporating new visual content, or posting new blogs. Search engine optimization should not be thought of as unimportant, though, a task that can be set aside till later. If you do not have the time or the expertise to do it, then you must hire someone who can. The longer you wait, the more probable that other companies which offer similar products to yours will be leaping ahead of you in prominence.
SEO does not have to be intimidating provided that you go about it logically and you have the proper tools and skill set. The more you learn about it, the easier you will find your future efforts in this area to be.