More than 90 percent of new brands do not have what it takes to compete with bigger brands, aura for aura but any business that knows how to wield strategic marketing or set up SEO for small businesses properly can eventually sit with the bigger boys, regardless of their age or industry.
This is one of the top digital marketing that’s helped a lot of new brands to gain visibility, leads, and new clients, sometimes even with little to no budget.
As a new business seeking to grow and make actual sales, the SEO landscape has changed over the past few years yet one thing is fundamental – there are practical SEO strategies that can deliver decent ROI for small businesses.
Over the years, we’ve used some of these search engine optimization strategies to deliver returns on investment for clients from different industries. And in this guide, I’ll be showing you how you can use the same strategy for your own business.
Set your Goals
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Do you have an SEO goal? This is a great question that will need you to think through your expectations before setting up an SEO for a small business.
One of the key reasons you need to have this all sorted out is because getting to have a clear goal or set of goals will guide your search optimization efforts. It will also break it down into more easily achievable units that can also be measured quite easily.
I’ve worked with quite a number of brands that were not really sure about their expectations. All they needed was to get their website optimized for the search engines but they did not really know what matters or the important areas they could focus on.
For beginners I always advice, get clear with your expectations. Do you have specific short term deliverables, middle term and long term deliverables you’d want to achieve with your projects?
Define these clearly and have your expectations all set out for the SEO Expert you’re working with.
Also, you could have set preferences or KPIs, have it all clarifies. Where you’re seeking brand visibility over lead acquisition, make this very clear as part of your goals. Similarly, where you prefer new customers over visibility for a short term goal, communicate this very clearly.
Doing that gets you started on a pathway towards a more focused SEO strategy that is aligned to deliver on your goals explicitly, over a more general strategy which might take a longer time.
Implement Keyword Research
Keyword research is an important aspects of search engine optimization that gets you to align your target search phrases with your business. It is one of the basic foundations of SEO.
Before getting to setup SEO for small businesses, you want to identify the top SEO keywords that are currently being used by your target audience and then find ways to make these keywords, a part of your search engine optimization strategy.
Now since you’re optimizing for a small business, one thing you have to keep in mind is the fact that the competition might be quite tough out there.
Since you’re a new business with barely any digital footprint, start with using less competitive keywords as part of your strategy. Alongside that, prioritize long tail over short tail keywords.
This will get your website to rank in web visibility much faster compared to when using a highly competitive and short tail keyword.
A number of keyword tooks like Keywordtoolio, Google Keywords Tool, Wordstream, Ubersuggest etc. can give you some ideas on the search volumes and competition level for your target keywords.
Now, outside analysing you target keywords, you also want to identify the top keywords for your competition to find out how they are ranking for those keywords and the possibility of existing gaps you could use to position your website in the industry.
PS: Avoid keyword overuse or stuffing as this can negatively impact your page rankings.
Optimize for On-Page SEO
One of the key places you can kick start your search engine optimization for small businesses is to set up your on page SEO.
On-page seo are the search engine optimization strategies implemented on the web pages of your website. This could be the website pages, content, home page etc.
Setting up On-page SEO is very crucial for the success of any search engine optimization strategy because to gets the website all set to attract a well-targeted traffic, based off your preferred keywords.
Now that you’ve had your keywords all sorted out, identify the keywords that aligns with the different pages on your website and us them on those pages, starting with your home page.
While setting up SEO for small businesses, pay attention to areas like title tags, meta title, meta descriptions etc for each pages on the website. Be sure that your description fits and meta keywords fit in very well with the content of the page.
For the main body of your website, consider using the different tiers of title tags from H1 to H5, here they fit in with your website content. Doing this enables you to create content with a well-structured data for the search engine.
Fix your Technical SEO
Technical SEO are the steps taken to improve a website’s architecture and backend elements, to ensure that the website is easily crawled by the search engines.
One of the key areas of technical SEO is mobile optimization. It is an important aspect of SEO you cannot really ignore whenever you’re taking steps to optimize SEO for small businesses.
This is because over 50 percent of your website audience are accessing your website using their mobile phones. And to get the best experience for this audience, you have to create a mobile compatible website that will deliver an excellent user experience for this audience.
Additionally, search engines like Google also expect that your website’s mobile compatibility must meet a certain threshold before it can consider rewarding it with high level visibility. It is one of the key ranking factors for search visibility.
Another part of the technical fixes you also must consider while fixing your technical search engine optimization is the website loading speed.
Ideally, a web page should be optimized to load between 0-3 seconds. Anything outside of this might be considered a slow loading website and this speed quality can impact on your overall visibility.
Furthermore, if your website is already in existence before you set out to optimize it for more visibility, you want to consider other aspects like broken links, robots.txt files and overall website indexing.
Getting all of this sorted out will to a large extent improve the performance of your website while creating a good user experience.
Prepare for Local SEO
Local SEO are simply the strategies used in optimizing a website or brand to be easily visible to target audience in a specific locality.
This particular search engine optimization strategy is important because Local SEO is always like the low hanging fruits when it comes to search optimization. You can easily target search keywords and get your brand visible for specific regions before adjusting it to even bigger ones.
As you take steps to implement SEO for small businesses, you want to optimize your website to be visible starting with your geographic area.
This gives you a head start as you get to dominate the area, especially where there are fewer competition in that particular region.
To get the most out of local SEO, consider getting your brand featured on the yellow pages for businesses in the region you’re targeting. This gives you the needed local citations, building digital footprints for your business in that particular region.
In addition to that, consider getting your business on Google Maps for that particular region, indicating your location and other contact details.
Finally, include the target keywords for this region as part of your keyword strategy. This will elevate your brand, getting it visible for users using the search phrases.
Share Optimized Content
Content marketing provides a great option for brands to build visibility. It is an important strategy you can use to target a specific set of audience with a particular kind of content in order to generate a specified outcome.
The best part of it is that it is free. Unlike paid advertising, you can use content marketing to create visibility and attract a new audience for your brand without making extra expenses.
If you want to successfully make this a part of your SEO for small business strategies, consider identifying your target audience and then the needs of this audience, based on their search interests.
As soon as you’ve been able to identify this, go ahead and create valuable content, aimed at solving these problems you identified earlier.
While creating your content, aim at creating real value for your target audience. As much as possible, go the extra mile to solve their needs with your content. This is very important.
Avoid using wholly AI generated content, copied posts or content with little to no value as this will not impact your website positively.
While doing that also, use your target keywords strategically across your content. From your header titles to the main body of the content, position your search phrases in a way that it will elevate your visibility.
Build Backlinks
Backlinks are incoming links from other websites to your own websites. Over the years, they have become one of the core factors in search engine ranking.
To get your website on the top of search engine results pages, you need a decent number of backlinks from other websites.
Now since you’re optimizing a new website, it might be a bit difficult to get back links naturally and because of that, you might have to take extra measures to attract backlinks to your website.
One of these measures includes for example, creating high quality content like whitepapers, creating guest posts on specific blogs, designing graphics with topical industry datasets etc.
Putting all of these in place will attract backlinks to your website really fast but you don’t need just any kind of website linking to your website.
First, you need a link building strategy that targets specific websites that are relevant to your brand, websites with your target audience and those other websites with a high domain authority that can easily impact your own website.
Secondly, you have to avoid links from spammy and low quality website by all means. Links from this kind of websites can impact your website negatively. You can disavow such links if they link to your website automatically.
Finally, you’ll pay attention to fix the internal links on your website. Link from one relevant page on your website to the other. This will help in terms of indexing and improving the overall user experience for your users.
Final Words
Even though most new small businesses do not have what it takes to compete head to head with most established businesses, using these marketing strategies, you can set up your business to start right from where you are.
In addition to everything you learned today, you have to take steps to ensure that your website is indexed and crawled by the search engines. Set up your Google Console, Analytics, Bing web master tools etc. and also ensure that your website traffic sources is as diversified as possible.
And finally, measure your outcomes. Use your results and insights from analytics to better position your website for better outcomes. And of course, work with experts to get the assistance that will deliver 100 percent ROI for your business.
Now, it’s over to you. What are some of the challenges you’ve faced when it comes to implementing SEO for small businesses? Drop your comments below.
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