In modern times, businesses need to be present both offline and online in order to thrive and remain competitive. If you own a local business, a well-executed off-page SEO strategy will go a long way in improving your online visibility and search engine ranking, and ultimately lead to higher conversion rates and revenue.

Whether you are an off-page SEO novice or are already familiar with some aspects of off-site SEO, our checklist for small business SEO can come in handy in your efforts to reach your audience and give your brand a boost.

1. Be Present on Social Media

Social media presence is an important part of small business SEO, as they are the place where most people spend a large portion of their free time, with the average user clocking in more than 2 hours online every day. Hence, many businesses (small and big) look to use this to their advantage and take a proactive approach in connecting with their audience.

This doesn’t mean that you should have a profile on every social media. Consider their differences and think about what type of content you want to share, as well as who you want to reach. Once you have the answers to these questions, you can pick the platform(s) best suited for you and start engaging with your target audience.

While sponsored and targeted social media ads will cost you some money, they are a great way to get your message through to those who are likely to be interested in your products or services and are worth the investment more often than not. On the other hand, interacting with your audience with interesting and informative posts is free and will drive more visitors to your webpage, as well as build your brand image.

2. Build Backlinks

Link building is a vital part of off-page SEO, and earning backlinks on reputable blog sites is one of the best ways to boost your rankings on the search engine results page. This can be achieved through guest posts.

In essence, it comes down to finding and reaching out to blog websites that post content related to your niche and offering to write guest posts for their page. The blog posts you write for them contain links leading back to your website, hence the term backlinks.

The more backlinks you have on high-authority blog pages, the likelier it is that Google will recognize you as an authority on a certain topic and rank you better in related searches.

However, in order to secure backlinks, you will need to produce unique quality content that will appeal to the owner of the blog webpage. Otherwise, they will have no interest in posting your blogs.

3. Make the Most of Rating Sites

Small businesses can benefit a lot from good reviews on websites like Yelp, and not only in terms of assuring their potential customers of the quality of their products and services. The number of reviews, as well as your average score, are also taken into account by search engines.

This is why you should list your business on rating sites such as Google, Yelp, or other industry-specific ones. Once you are present there, make sure you encourage your customers to leave a review, as both search engines and customers tend to see businesses with a lot of good reviews as trustworthy.

4. Create a Google My Business Account

We’ve already mentioned that your potential customers and clients are likely to look for your products and services online, and you want to make it as easy for them as possible to find you.

Creating a Google My Business account is one of the best ways to ensure that when someone searches for your brand name, they receive all the information they need to reach you. This often includes your physical and web address, contact information, working hours, and other useful details.

Keeping your customers informed on any developments and changes your business is going through by posting updates will help you avoid any misinformation that could lead to bad customer experience. Additionally, a Google My Business account will boost your local SEO and help you rank better in local search results.

Finally, customers are able to post reviews on your Google My Business page, and we have already covered how important these can be for building trust and credibility.

Considering the benefits of having a Google My Business Account, both in terms of building a relationship with your customers and off-page SEO, there is absolutely no reason for any business to not tap into its potential, especially since it is free.

Conclusion

While businesses of all sizes can benefit from the tips given in this article, our off-page SEO checklist was made with small entrepreneurs in mind, and following it requires minimal to no expenses. Hopefully, you will find it helpful for increasing your organic traffic, getting more leads, and boosting your conversion rates.

Just remember that, although some of your off-page SEO efforts will yield results virtually immediately, others may require some time to start showing noticeable improvements.