When you don’t have dedicated SEO staff, it falls on either the owner or the webmaster to look after optimization. Fortunately, it does not take massive SEO campaigns to see benefits. Most businesses have done almost nothing regarding SEO, and for those, there is plenty of low hanging fruit. Here are some quick and easy tactics you can use to give your business a boost online:

Google My Business – This is something that most businesses ignore and could be a competitive advantage for those that sign up. Google My Business is where you edit the details and provide images for your business listing online. Many businesses do not even have operating hours posted online.

Update profile – If you do have a profile on Google My Business, take the time to ensure that all the information is current. Addresses, opening times, days and branding can change over time. Keep updating all the information regularly.

Google Search Console – Another wasted opportunity for those that do not use the data from the console. You can get a lot of useful data about your domain at no cost, directly from Google. Inbound links, index status, and crawl errors are just some of the data you can get about your sites and domains.

Site Speed – The loading speed of pages has a bearing on how well your pages rank. There are plenty of tools (including Google’s) that can tell you what the page load speed of your site. If you do have speed issues, you can fix them quite easily.

Fake news is a big problem for Google, and it’s also a major issue for Facebook users as well. The challenge is how to deal with it. How can we teach an algorithm to sort fact from fiction? Project Owl is Google’s attempt at trying to hit fake news where it hurts.

Fake news spreads thanks to signals from friends and family. A friend or family member likes an article, or searches for a topic, and it becomes part of your bubble too. The new update aims to try and tackle the problem of search by addressing Google’s autocomplete feature.

How the Owl Works

When users enter a term into Google’s search engine, or Chrome search bar, a new form will allow them to offer feedback on the suggested terms. This way, if a suggested term is offensive or fake, users have more power to let Google know about it. It won’t remove the term from search immediately, but it does send a signal to Google that something is wrong or off.

Autocomplete Problems

Celebrity hoax deaths have become a popular Internet prank because they are easy to spread. Users just need to convince other users to search for a celebrity’s death enough, and the rumor spirals out of control. Autocomplete is trying to be helpful, but instead it’s contributing to a raging firestorm.

Now, the community will have more tools to police itself. It’s hoped that Google will be able to offer a much higher quality search experience.

Bio: Submit Express, founded by Pierre Zarokian in 1998, is dedicated to helping businesses achieve their best rankings online.