Small business SEO tutorial: How to attract higher quality Google traffic

This SEO tutorial will highlight five easy SEO strategies to increase the quality of Google traffic coming to your small business website.

Higher quality Google traffic means a higher rate of conversion, which in turn means a greater ROI (Return on Investment) - basically, more revenue for your business.

Small business owners aren't necessarily web technology gurus, so I've restricted the SEO tips and tricks included in this tutorial to only those that are quick and easy to implement, and don't require any SEO experience.

How to attract high quality Google traffic

When we talk about "quality", in the context of Google or other search traffic, we are basically referring to how much visitors are predisposed to converting. A conversion could be anything from signing up to a newsletter, or making a purchase - basically any predefined business objective.

For example, if you are selling search engine optimization services from a consultancy in New York, then people from California searching for "engine tune-ups" are not considered "high quality" in this context. People searching for "New York SEO consultancy" are.

Here are the SEO tips and tricks you can use to make sure that a higher percent of quality Google traffic reaches your site.

1. Restrict the scope of each article or blog post

I don't mean restrict an article to only talking about a single broad topic, like SEO. I mean restrict your article to talking about:

• What type of article is it? Tutorial, practical, news, opinion ("SEO tutorial")
• Who is it of interest to? Entrepreneurs, startups, small businesses ("Small business SEO tutorial")
• Is it regional? Or better yet, can you make it regional to target audience demographics?
• Are there specific aspects that this article focuses on? Technical, performance, content, image ("Small business SEO tutorial: Google traffic")
• Is there an associated date or timeframe? Can you make the article relative to this year, or month?
• Is there an incentive? What will the reader learn? How will the reader benefit?

It may seem that you are actually excluding plenty of potential visits by focusing the content to such a fine point. Don't worry, the next tip takes care of this...

2. Write multiple articles or blog posts on the same topic

Don't duplicate content. Instead, write new articles from different perspectives. Write updated content if the topic is time dependent. Be imaginative about how you provide useful content on related topics.

The more unique and highly focused SEO content you create, the more targeted your organic search traffic will become.

3. Reduce ambiguous phrases and synonyms

It helps to know what SEO keyphrases people are searching on before writing an article - you can use the Google keywords tool for research.

The English language is full of ambiguity and synonyms. Both of these erode the SEO focus of content.

Researching specific phrases to use in content cuts down on the potential for confusion, as well as increasing the chances of ranking higher on the selected keyphrases.

4. Share content selectively

Google takes clues about which content is influential in which niche by looking at where backlinks come from.

Using unethical SEO companies, or buying backlinks is a ridiculous practice (that Google's Penguin update has dealt a serious blow) because it is simply impossible to automate backlinks from high quality niche web properties.

5. Impart meaning through images

Images are a huge part of SEO these days. More importantly, images are very important to human visitors because we are able to understand an image much more quickly than written content.

Make the images associated with your content highly informative and relevant so that Google can understand what they are about and show them to the right people in the right places.

Additional small business SEO reading

While this tutorial has touched on some simple and effective SEO techniques, you might want to take a look at the following articles that expand and consolidate on the ideas talked about here:

• All the latest top articles on SEO
• What is SEO? Here's the ultimate small business SEO guide
• Five top SEO tips for small business bloggers
• Anatomy of a blog post: How to get more traffic and social engagement from your content

I hope these SEO techniques will help your business to start driving targeted traffic, and, ultimately, lead to more revenue. Please share your results in the comments, or suggest more super cool SEO techniques for enhancing the quality of traffic coming from Google.