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9 SEO Tips for Australian Small Businesses in 2025
9 Essential SEO Tips for Australian Small Businesses in 2025
Looking to implement SEO in your Australian small- to medium-sized business? In this article we're going to discuss 9 essential SEO tips you can implement to get your business appearing in front of more customers and to start taking up your share of the market. We know not every business can implement all of the below strategies on their own, but even if you can dedicate the time and resources to two or three of these tips, you will see an increase in traffic and customers from organic search.
At Branchlead we specialise in helping small- to medium-sized businesses plan and implement SEO strategies. We work with some of the best SEO strategists and content writers in the industry to ensure your brand stands out above the rest. Interested in implementing a complete SEO strategy to consistently bring in more traffic and more customers? Just contact us today.
Defining Your Goals---What to Expect
Before we dive in, it's important to understand what potential impact SEO can have on your business. While SEO will help your business grow over time, it isn't some secret sauce that boosts your revenue 100x overnight. SEO gradually optimises your website to capture more and more organic traffic. As long as you continue to adhere to Google's standards and produce more and more quality content that adheres to a professionally created SEO strategy, your business will continue to compound and grow month after month. SEO is time consuming and complicated, even though we are giving you all of our SEO secrets in this article, implementing them can distract you from more important parts of your business. Want a professional to take care of SEO for you so you can focus on the parts of your business that keep the lights on? Just contact us and we can take care of your business's SEO strategy and implementation for you.
So, let's dive in.
1. Focus on User Experience (UX)
User experience is a key element to the success of your website. While it is important to make your website look clean, modern, and professional, you need to ensure the design isn't so flashy that it distracts your readers and keeps them from making a purchase. Ensure your website has a logical flow and information is organised appropriately. You can do a brief shoutout to your team and your services on your homepage, but these things should have their own dedicated pages where customers can find all the information they need in one location.
If you want your website to convert more traffic, you also need to ensure you properly manage your page load speed. Studies have shown that if a website takes over 5.7 seconds to load, conversion rates drop below 0.6%. For every second it takes for your page to load, you lose customers. Not only that, but as your page load speed increases, so does your bounce rate (which means more and more people are clicking on your website and leaving without reading anything because it takes too long to load). To prevent bouncing, you should compress images when possible and limit the number of images per page. Embedded images take longer to load and mean more lost customers.
Remember, user experience is key to converting traffic to leads. Happy users stay on your website and get your page ranked higher on Google. They are also more likely to spend more time on your website and be more willing to try your services. If users have a bad experience on your site, you will lose customers before they even get to experience your business and service.
Optimising your website for user experience can be a time consuming process but just for the returns in customer retention and lead conversion, it is well worth the investment. Ready to have a professional optimise your website for you? Just contact us today and Branchlead can help streamline your business's organic search funnel to ensure you bring in and convert more traffic with your website.
2. Optimise for Mobile Devices
Research shows that as of January 2025, 62.69% of global web traffic comes from mobile devices. If you want access to this share of the market, you need to make sure your website is optimised for mobile users. While it may seem as simple as enabling the "mobile view" on your website builder, it is actually a bit more complicated.
For complete mobile optimisation you need to ensure your website image frames are responsive and are served in a next gen format; webp is perfect because webp images are usually a reasonable size and they compress well. You also need to ensure image frames are cropped to specific sizes for mobile, tablets, and iPads.
Accessibility can also help boost your business. Make sure all your images have properly attributed alt tags. In these alt tags you should include SEO keywords, and you should describe the image like you would for a blind person. Because these steps help more people access the content on your website, Google views alt tags as favorable sources of information and doing so will help boost your rankings.
While this step sounds easy, it can be time consuming if you aren't a super-tech savvy individual. Want to save time to focus on other aspects of your business? Contact us today and Branchlead can do all the tech work for you.
3. Leverage Local SEO
Local SEO is one of the most rewarding investments. According to a 2019 study by BrightEdge, organic traffic (AKA Google Searches) generates 53% of all website traffic, and historically that number has grown year after year. More recent data shows 93% of online experiences start with a search engine. That's why it's important to claim your Google Business Profile and ensure all the information listed is accurate, especially name, address, phone number, and hours. This allows people to find your business when searching locally whether that's through Google's web search or on Google maps.
You can take this one step further by using location-specific keywords in your content so Google will put your website in front of more people looking for local services. What would a location specific keyword look like? If you are an accountant based out of Adelaide then it may be something like 'accountant Adelaide' or 'bookkeeping Adelaide.' This of course all depends on the best keywords for your business to target based on your SEO strategy (but this should give you a general idea). Typically with location-specific keywords, the more specific the better.
Branchlead helps research your industry and find the best SEO keywords to boost your reach. If you're ready to bring a professional team onboard to handle your SEO needs, contact us today for a free consultation.
4. Create High-Quality Content
Creating high-quality organic content is a great way to connect with your audience. While you may not always be directly 'selling' to them, you are building a relationship which means higher levels of know, like, and trust (which are key elements of any sale). When creating content you don't want to just chase trends. You should focus on content that resonates with your brand and audience. For ideas you can look at competitors in a similar space, you can also turn to ChatGPT or other AI tools for ideas and filter for ones you think are doable and best resonate with your business. For best results, regularly engage with your audience. Turn every piece of posted content into an opportunity to receive feedback and adjust accordingly.
This content strategy works whether you are creating content for social media or creating blog posts for your website. One thing to remember with blog posts is the importance of SEO. Tie your content back to your SEO keywords, that way when individuals search on Google for more information related to your services, they land on your website. Then you help them find the information they need, and the longer they spend on your website, the more likely they are to purchase a product or service from you.
Branchlead has some of the best content writers in the industry. If you're looking for a blog that drives traffic or even just content for your social media profiles, Branchlead can help. Contact us today for more information.
5. Conduct Thorough Keyword Research
There are many companies that provide keyword research tools for your business to find which keywords your audience is searching for, and to help you maximise your chances of ranking by showing you how competitive each keyword is. For businesses just starting out the cheapest and easiest to use tool is Ubersuggest, for a single domain you can get access to keyword research tools for as little as US$29 per month, or lifetime access for US$319. For 99% of businesses who just use one domain, Ubersuggest is more than enough; however, if you want higher level tools you can also check out Semrush or Ahrefs. Both of these tools are more expensive but they also offer more services to help take your SEO strategy from good enough to the top 10%. (By the way, these are just a few of the many tools we use at Branchlead.)
To make the most of this process you need to define your buyer's journey by looking at what your business does best. You will want to research keywords that focus on the later stages of the buyer's journey (where people are ready to purchase). So instead of focusing on early stage topics like 'my basement keeps flooding' you can focus on purchase-ready topics like 'sump pump installation Melbourne.' When you use Ubersuggest (or whatever tool you choose) to do the research, you want to look for a low KD (keyword difficulty) which means the keyword(s) will be easier to rank with. While other SEO specialists may spend a lot of time focusing on volume, we don't. This is because if you define your buyer's journey properly and you choose late-stage keywords, the volume doesn't matter because your leads are already ready to convert.
Branchlead has more than 10 years of experience in SEO. We've already helped several businesses start bringing in revenue with SEO within the first month of launching their website and implementing their SEO strategy. Whether you just want keyword research done for you, or you want the whole SEO package, Branchlead has many options available to fit the needs of your business. Contact us today for a free consultation.
6. Build Quality Backlinks
You may be wondering, what are backlinks and why do they matter? Backlinks are references to your website posted on other reputable websites. If Google sees your website associated with another reputable website, it serves to boost the reputation of your website and thus your ranking. This is often done through blogs or other online platforms and you can think of it kind of like having a newspaper article written about your business (but it's entirely online).
For local businesses, the easiest way to build quality backlinks is to reach out to local blogs and local sources of information, then partner with them to get a guest post or an introduction posted to their website or blog. You can also do the same with local micro-influencers. As long as you're working with reputable partners, just think of this step as getting more eyes on your business.
Branchlead helps local businesses build backlinks with reputable partners. We have a large network of clients and businesses which allows us to use the reputation we have helped other businesses generate to help boost yours. Whether you're ready to launch a full SEO strategy, or you just need a few reputable backlinks, Branchlead can help. Contact us today and we can discuss the appropriate level of service for your business.
7. Monitor and Analyse Performance
It is important to monitor and analyse the performance of your website to examine the effectiveness of your strategy, but be careful a lot of metrics are vanity. As a small business owner your goal is to get people to your website, and as long as they stay, they convert and you win.
Here are the top 3 stats you should keep an eye on:
Number of visitors
Where those visitors came from
Your website's bounce rate
You want to keep track of the number of visitors because this tells you if your strategy is working or not. You need to keep track of where the visitors come from because if you have one or more sources of traffic that don't produce as well, it may be time to change your strategy or double down on the more effective sources of traffic. Finally, your bounce rate tells you how many individuals visit your website and leave immediately. If your bounce rate is high there could be a technical problem with your website and fixing that will automatically increase your traffic and conversions. Alternatively if Google sees many of the people they send to your website are bouncing, it will negatively impact your ranking.
Data monitoring and analysis are included with Branchlead's SEO packages. If you're looking for a website audit or other SEO consulting services, Branchlead has many options available for you. Contact us today for a free consultation.
8. Ensure Website Security
While this step may sound complicated there are just a few key things that you need to do that will eliminate up to 90% of security problems your business may face. The first thing is to make sure your SSL certificate is valid. This can usually be done directly through your domain provider and takes less than 5 minutes to do. If your website has a form to submit, make sure you have some sort of captcha or honeypot in place. By preventing bots from submitting forms, you protect your business from attacks that could overload your website or your email, effectively bringing your business to a grinding halt.
Branchlead makes security easy. We manage your SSL certificate and your forms for you. We also custom code all of our websites which means we have the freedom to make our websites more secure from other forms of attack that fall in that last 10%. If you are ready to keep your website and business secure, just contact us today.
9. Stay Updated with SEO Trends
As a business owner, there's a lot of information to stay on top of. If you want your SEO strategy to be effective you need to keep up with SEO trends as well. At Branchlead, we don't gatekeep. For us it's more important to empower businesses and provide them with the tools and information they need to succeed. For the latest trends in SEO for small- to medium-sized businesses, you can check out our blog, sign-up for our email newsletter, or visit our youtube. These resources are updated regularly so be sure to check in often.
For larger businesses or just general information on trends, you can also check out other sources like Hubspot, Ahrefs, Semrush.
SEO for Australian Small Businesses: Where to Start?
By now you probably already have a few ideas about things you can do to boost SEO for your business and get in front of more customers. You're probably also a little overwhelmed with all of the information. So where should you start? First because many of these strategies take time to implement, we recommend you bookmark this page or save this link for later. Try to pick one thing to do at a time. We recommend setting up your Google Business Profile first as it is the least technical step. Once that is finished you can either begin posting content related to your industry, or you can dive into keyword research and start optimising your website and your content. Be sure to sign-up for our email newsletter and subscribe to our youtube so you don't miss any updates.
If you're still a little confused and would like to have someone guide you through the process, or just implement everything for you, contact us today and we can determine the best course of action for your business.
Ready to plan and implement a winning SEO strategy that helps your small- to medium-sized Australian business grow and bring in more revenue? Contact us here.
Small Business SEO FAQs
What is the best SEO strategy?
This depends on your industry and location. It is best to partner with professionals but we know that is not feasible for all businesses. If you only have limited time and resources to dedicate to SEO, start with setting up your Google Business Profile and posting content on social media and your website. These are the first steps to making your business visible online (but they are not the only things you should do and a good SEO strategy will implement all 9 of the tips we have listed above).
How long does it take to see results from SEO?
Industry standard for results from SEO is usually 90+ days to see any effect, especially if you do everything yourself. While standard practice is 90+ days, all of our SEO clients at Branchlead have seen an increase in website traffic and lead generation within the first month of working with us. If you too would like to experience fast-tracked SEO growth, contact us today.
What if I want help with SEO but I'm not ready to commit to a full SEO package?
For businesses looking for help without having everything done for you, there are SEO consultants available who can help you with the technical aspect or guide you with keywords and strategy, leaving content creation entirely up to you. Branchlead offers SEO consulting services for businesses that are still a little too small for a full SEO strategy to be feasible. You can check out our SEO consulting services here.
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