Small Business Growth Tips: 7 SEO Tips for Writing Blog Articles

Small business professionals have a lot of expertise to share, and SEO (search engine optimization) techniques can help online articles find a wider audience.

Many small business owners don’t know that simple tips, including how you format your blog articles, can make a big difference when optimizing your content for search. Of course, having content that is valuable to your audience and is well-formatted will improve the chances that search engines, like Google, can find your business online.

The following are top tips for small businesses who want to learn how to optimize their own content for search.

Add a Descriptive Title With Keywords

Each article should have a title, called an H1 if you’re talking about HTML code, that is about 60 characters long. A one-word title is not going to be descriptive enough.

Ideally, you’ll want to choose a title that contains one or more keywords. In this article, we picked both “SEO Tips” and “Small Business” to be part of the title, so it’s very clear what a small business owner might learn by reading the content inside.

If you’re fresh out of ideas about what you should title your article, do a Google search on your topic and use what you find as inspiration. If you’re comfortable using AI, you can feed your article to the robots and request ideas for titles. Chat GPT is probably one of the best-known AI tools you can use for idea generation.

BONUS TIP: If you are able to use one or more of your keywords within the opening sentence, it can help with SEO.

Write Valuable Content and Add a Call to Action

Small business owners are skilled entrepreneurs, and the world wants to know more about your goods, services, industry, and expertise. Having a blog is a good way to share more about what you know that goes beyond the goods/services and contact information on your website.

Content Tips for SEO Success

• Make sure most of the content you are writing adds value to your customers. Tell them what they should know, share tips, and don’t be self-serving. You don’t want your article to read like one big advertisement. Add value before you ask for their business.
• At the end of your article, add a call to action (CTA) that explains what you’d like readers to do. This is the section where it is okay to be a little more salesy. Contact us isn’t the only choice. Invite readers to subscribe to your newsletter, follow you on social media, complete a form, call you, set up an appointment, or attend your next webinar.
• Add links within your article to pages on your website to encourage people to learn more about what you do and what you offer. If your article is about tips for buying a new roof, you might link to a page on your website that describes all the types of roofs available to residential customers.
• Include one or two links to outside reputable sources. This is really easy to do when you’re quoting statistics. For example: The S. Chamber of Commerce reports there are 33.2 million small businesses in America today.

Break Up Large Blocks of Text & Organize Your Subheads

Large blocks of text are difficult to scan and hard to read on a digital screen. If you are looking at one long block of text and wondering what to do next, consider adding subheads and bullet points.

Different levels of subheads can be organized as a second-level subhead (or H2), a third-level subhead (or H3), and so on, gradually becoming smaller.

This helps people and bots analyze your content more easily and access the topics you are writing about.

Add an Interesting Image to Your Blog Article

Make sure you use an image in your blog article to add visual interest. It’s ideal if you can use photos you have taken yourself, but there are good sources of royalty-free images online, including a tool like Canva or Unsplash. Or use a paid service such as DepositPhotos.

If you take a photo using your phone, it might have a generic name like: DS145.jpg. Make sure you rename your image file and include your keyword if possible. An image for this article might be named: small-business-owner-reading-SEO-tips-and-writing-a-blog-article.jpg.

It goes without saying, but do not use just any image you find off the Internet because that is a copyright violation. Another way to protect yourself is to caption or list a link to the source for all of your pictures at the end of your blog article. Creative Commons has a lot of best practices to attribute photos and other content.

Here are some ways to write attributions:

• Header photo courtesy of Canva.com/JasonDoiy (See above)
• All photos by Your Business Name
• Photo used with permission

Add Your Location and Localize Your Content

Localize your content if your business location is important to you. If you offer services in Alexandria, Virginia, make sure you mention it within your article. If your business offers consulting services for federal government contractors, be sure you mention that you are located in the Washington, DC area in addition to your headquarters in Northern Virginia.

Treat your location as a keyword and look for opportunities to mention counties, neighborhoods, states, and cities where your customers are located.

Avoid the Use of Duplicate Content

One of the most frequent things we see on small business websites is content that is duplicated in many different places. With few exceptions, you want original content on your website.

Sometimes duplicate content can come from a national franchise that writes blog content that is pushed out to all the local franchisees. This is a time-saving service that local franchisees appreciate, but it does nothing to localize your content and help your website perform optimally on search.

Another reason duplicate content can pop up is because bad actors steal and reuse your good content. While it is definitely a copyright violation, it is often easier and cheaper to write new content than to spend time with a lawyer going after a violator.

We should mention that AI tools are getting better each day, though sometimes they can inadvertently reuse content from the Internet. This is why if you use AI to write your articles without fact-checking or using a plagiarism checker, you can end up with duplicate content by accident.

Use an SEO App on Your Website

An SEO application on your WordPress website, such as All in One SEO, can help you optimize how long your title is, your description, how you organize your content, and how often you use specific keywords.

This kind of app can get into more technical details surrounding SEO to increase the chances that your page will rank well on search engines. It’s worth the time to read up on how to take advantage of its features.

Need SEO Help and Original Content for Your Website? Call Us

Alexandria, Virginia-based Intelligent Evolution, LLC specializes in web development and search engine optimization (SEO) for small businesses and associations across Northern Virginia, Greater Washington, DC and points beyond. Our professional writers also interview, research, and write SEO-friendly, original content that is localized for your business. Call us at (703) 370-7433 or set up a phone call to learn more.