SEO can be easy for small businesses. Here's how.

Recently I spent a day on a client's site, and got her to the top spot on Google search within a week. Another week later, visitors had increased 44%, money from sales had increased 52% and the average order value was up 78%. Here's my approach to small business SEO that works.

With a big algorithm shake-up in the past month, there's been a lot of commotion about what you need to change to keep your site ranking on Google.

It's all noise. This sort of curated panic gets marketers a lot of business, but willfully ignores some key facts.

Google looks for keywords, and prioritizes content that is fresh, knowledgeable and popular. No matter how the Google search algorithm changes - and it changes every few days - this stays consistent. If you focus on keywords, and fresh, knowledgeable, popular content, you will win at SEO. I'll detail how to do this below.

1. Keywords

Use Google Trends to look at popular searches for your product. Put yourself in the mindset of someone with the problem your product solves. If you run a sleep meditation class, they're probably not searching for 'sleep meditation class.' They're searching for sleeping pills, white noise machines, drug-free alternatives, herbal remedies, how to get better sleep, does running help you sleep, sleep consultants, what does my dream about narwhals mean. Join interest groups related to your problem, and look at the questions people are asking.

Google Trends is free, and tells you which searches are popular in your region. It's a bit strange in that it measures relative popularity rather than absolute popularity, but you want to find terms that are generally coming in over 50/100, and increasing in popularity over the past 12 months. Pick 10 searches. You will use these keyword opportunities to optimize your site.

2. Avoid keyword stuffing

Google penalizes keyword stuffing, which came from early-2000s bots jamming keywords everywhere they could touch on a page, making sites unintelligible. If Google catches a whiff of this, it will drop you like a stone to the bottom of search, and it can take a few steps to recover. Google's looking for a 'natural' scattering of keywords - within a few words of each other in a sentence, a handful of times on a page. There are two easy ways to achieve this - image descriptions, and blog posts.

3. Image descriptions

Each image on your website has an alt tag that lets screen readers describe an image to a visually impaired person. Where relevant, it's a great place to include your keywords. For example, you might have an image of “a woman meditating.” Once you think about your keywords, you could change this to “A relaxed woman smiling while meditating to get better sleep.” It gives a visually impaired person a better idea of the content of the image, and helps Google understand what your website is about. Again, use a natural sentence to accurately describe your image, rather than just jamming in your 10 keywords one after another.

4. Blog posts

There's no way out of it: most small businesses need a blog. Keeping a regular blog is the easiest way to ensure your site has fresh, knowledgeable, popular content. Even if you update your catalogue every week, blogs provide a way to cement your expertise with a natural distribution of keywords, which is an excellent method for maintaining good SEO.

5. Fresh

Add a blog to your site, and update it every fortnight - or every month at minimum. Your blogs can be 200 words or 2000. Just make sure there's a new post there every month.

6. Titles

Take your keyword opportunities and use them as the titles of your first 3 blogs. 'How meditation creates better sleep than herbal remedies.' 'Better dreams and deeper sleep - my sleep meditation journey.' 'Top 5 drug-free alternatives for a restful sleep.' Make each blog its own page, so that the url contains the keywords - https://mysite.com/blog/top-drug-free-sleep-alternatives. Then write out those blogs using your expertise.

7. Knowledgeable

Use your expertise. Say something new and different. Include credible, well researched sources of information, and reference them by linking to them in your blog. A few off-site links help your SEO as they give your information more credibility.

8. Popular

Once you've written and published your blog post, share it everywhere. I mean everywhere. Google sends 'crawlers' out into the internet that build up a database of popular content that affects how your website ranks. The more links these crawlers follow that send them back to your site, the higher you will rank. I think of it as a bunch of streams leading to a lake. Links that get a lot of traffic and engagement are excellent, and create wide, strong-flowing rivers to your website. But even links that barely anyone sees - those skinny little creeks and tributaries - help bring more water to your lake. The biggest lakes get to the top of Google.

Think about where your target audience hang out online, and start there. Share a link to your blog on LinkedIn, on your Facebook page, in Facebook groups. Ask people to repost or share it further. Share it in your email newsletter. Share it on Reddit, on Quora, on Pinterest if that's where your customers are. Put it in your Instagram bio. Contact likeminded pages, creators and brands and ask them to share it too. Introduce the post by tuning in to a topic of current debate, or a current issue in the news. Tag people, use hashtags and ask questions to create engagement.

9. Images

Add a few images for visual appeal and - you guessed it - add keywords in the alt tags where relevant.

Set up a rhythm to do this every fortnight, or LaunchBot can do it all for you. Let me know how your search ranking improves!