Hello, Nick Ponte here. I’m a digital marketer in Maui, Hawaii. I run an advertising agency here in Maui, and I love helping small business owners develop more efficient ways to market their brand. Lately, we’ve talked about how establishing your brand can improve leads and increase customers through user searches.
When you run a small business, your company has a unique reach and serves a specific market. You have to implement particular marketing strategies that apply to the size of your business and the customers you hope to reach.
“Small business SEO” on Maui presents its own challenges, too. It’s not quite the same thing as “local SEO,” though the concepts certainly have crossover points. With small business SEO on Maui, you aim to improve your website’s presence, so its rankings improve, and you show up in more searches related to your products. This doesn’t entail spending money on ads—it’s primarily about improving organic traffic.
What strategies can you employ to get these results?
Also Read: 3 Tips for Small Business Owners to Optimize Google My Business
Increasing Organic Traffic for Small Business in Maui
If you don’t work to optimize your site for increased organic traffic, you won’t show up in search results…but your competitors will, and that means they get the business you want. Your target audience doesn’t know you even exist.
But if you have an optimized site, users in your market find you in searches, and you naturally get more traffic. That traffic leads to greater website engagement, and thus greater sales and revenue. Plus, you build a customer base and improve brand recognition.
Optimizing your site for more engagement does take regular dedicated time and consistency. You may decide you’d like some help from an experienced Maui advertising agency that understands your market and target audience. If so, give us a call.
In the meantime, try some of the following tips:
Also Read: The Definitive Guide to SEO Keyword Selection
5 Ways to Improve Small Business SEO on Maui
These 5 tips will help you increase organic traffic and improve your small business SEO strategy on Maui:
- Research Keywords
When wording content, titles, and URLs, you need to keep your prime keywords in mind. This will ensure relevance to your topics, products, and ideal market, so you’ll show up in search results. These items also help you stand out from competition. Use a tool like Google’s Keyword Planner to help you research and plan to use the most effective keywords throughout your website.
Then, write great copy! This step is essential for Google to pick up your site, so they will include it in search results. You don’t have to write a lot of copy, but if you need help, hire someone to do it or consult with a Maui advertising agency to help. Build local keywords into your copy, too, so you get the benefit of reaching your local market.
Increase Rankings on SERPs
Rank high and become visible in search results related to your services or products.
Improve on-page SEO by paying attention to meta-tags. Many websites miss this—these descriptions show up as the descriptions in the search results. Make sure your headings and page descriptions summarize the main topic of each page. Don’t forget to include marketable keywords. Summarize main topics, so users get an accurate glimpse of your content, and they’ll be more likely to click knowing you have what they’re looking for.
You can also include image alternate text to increase your keywords. This content uses relevant keywords to describe images on your website, and it shows up in search engine results. As an added bonus, this also makes your website accessible to screen readers that can read the image descriptions to users in your target audience who listen to your content instead of reading it on the page.
- Build Authority
Build domain authority for your brand by adding backlinks throughout your site. Search engines read these, and it helps them to give credibility to your website.
List your business on well-known business directory sites, like LinkedIn, Google My Business, or Yelp. These and many others let you list for free, so don’t miss this opportunity to build more credibility with search engines and users. Don’t forget to include the link to your website on all of your profiles, and point to your profiles through links on your website as well.
- Leverage Local Traffic
As a small business on Maui, make it your goal to become a local influencer. Narrowing your niche actually makes your reach bigger. Focus on your community and build local keywords into your copy. Add local business structured data to your website to make sure Google picks up on your location and queries it to relevant searches.
Additionally, target social media posts and ads at local customers, or customers coming to your vicinity for tourism. You can do this through location targeting.
- Pay Attention to Site Structure
It’s also a good idea to build a good site structure behind the scenes. This includes schema markup and structured data. But it also includes making sure your site is set up in a logical manner for navigation and internal linking. Google can then better understand your site as it crawls and determines its ranking.
One thing that does take consistency is monitoring your SEO on a regular basis. You can run SEO audits. It will help you determine if you’re getting the results you were hoping for, or if you need to make adjustments.
We can help you take care of these aspects or give you more information in a free consultation.
If you want to learn more or want help, reach out to us today!
Further Reading: 4 Ways Hawaii Businesses Should Build High-Quality Web Content
Photos Courtesy of Colter Olmstead, Lo Sarno