The 5 Must Know SEO Tips for Small Businesses

There are some secret SEO tips that can double your business visibility drive traffic to your website and improve your sales but most of the time, these tips are top industry secrets guarded behind the pay wall by experts.

They want you to pay to learn these tips so, they do everything to keep it away from you, even when these information should be readily available online.

In this guide, you’re not only going to uncover these SEO tips, you’ll find ways to use them as part of your digital marketing strategy to boost sales and drive your own business growth.

Now before we get started, let’s find out what SEO is all about below…

What is SEO?

SEO is the short term for Search Engine Optimization. It is is a collection of digital strategies that can help you make your website and your business to be more visible to search engine users.

As a small business owner, blogger or content creator; search engine optimization helps your website or blog to be more visible on the search engines like Google, Bing etc., when people use keywords to make searches on those platforms.

Neil Patel Defines Search Engine Optimization as optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.

It is not true that your website will not work without SEO. But, search engine optimization is usually a cheaper, popular and more realistic way to get traffic to your website. That’s why it’s always the top options for bloggers and website owners.

How SEO works for Small Business Websites

Just the same way SEO optimization works for big brands, it works for small businesses too but on a different level.

As a small business owner, the first thing you must know is that although search engine optimization can still work for you, you have to take a different approach.

For example, you need to have an SEO approach that is dynamic, strategic and targeted at driving a set result within a specified time.

What this means is that you must map out your goals and then set out a search engine optimization strategy, based on those goals.

Now, the following are the key SEO tips to revamp website visibility and double your traffic…

Set an SEO Goal for your Business

Whether you’re a small business, medium enterprise or large conglomerate, having a specific goal for your Search optimization is one of the best kept SEO tips you’ll ever get out there.

A lot of small business owners do not realize this. I was like this a long time ago so, it’s quite understandable.

Today, a lot of small business owners are comfortable with building a website or writing content on their blog.

I can understand a lot of people do this ignorantly but SEO optimization is far more than updating a blog post.

After building your website, before you hit the button to create the next post, you have to create an SEO goal, based on your overall business goal.

How to set an SEO goal for a Small Business

If your business goal is to get more exposure for your brand, your SEO strategy will be slightly different than what you’d have, if your goal is to make direct sales.

Bearing this in mind, instead of working on the general search optimization strategy, map out a plan that will lead towards brand exposure specifically.

This also applies if your goal were to drive more sales.

To drive clean results as a small business, you need an SEO optimization strategy that will work for you, based on your specific goal.

Having a clear goal for your SEO strategy is the first step towards knowing the result you want to Optimize for and being able to measure them when the time comes.

Define your Target Audience

After setting out the strategic goals for your search engine optimization, one of the next key SEO tips you need is to clearly identify your audience.

Now, let’s look at this as someone going for shopping…

If you were to be a shopper right now, your SEO goals would have been the items you have written down on your list while the grocery store would be your target audience.

Now based on the above analogy, your “target audience” (store) must be identified. And they must have the things you want to buy otherwise you won’t go to their store.

This is the same thing that should happen to the target audience for your SEO goals. You need to know them clearly. This is the first step towards achieving the set goals.

So who exactly, is your target audience?

To answer this question clearly, you need some data. Having some data to back up your projections will give you a more realistic result.

Besides using existing data, to get started with this, you can always look at your competitors and see the kind of audience they are targeting.

Of course your business is not to go drag their existing audience with them in their own way. But, you can always use a different approach.

Secondly, with a tool like Google Trends, Google Keyword tool, Wordstream etc. You can always find out what matters to your audience, where they are and how you can get across to them.

Furthermore, you can ask direct questions, follow their conversations and then find out ways you can provide solutions to the things they really need.

PS: Remember that as a small business, sometimes defining your online audience and their attributes can need a lot of research and data.

Create your SEO Strategy

You can’t achieve a lot with your SEO without having a clear strategy you’re working with. This is one of the crucial SEO tips that can make or break your effort.

You have to create a strategy that outlines the steps you’ll take with your SEO efforts and how you’re going to implement each of these steps.

From here, you can begin to answer the question; what steps can I use to achieve these goals or how can I get to reach out to my target audience in a way they will respond positively?

Finding out the above is very important. And when you do, your answers are going to form the core of your SEO strategy.

So, after this, you’re going to begin to answer the other questions like how do I achieve my SEO goals?

And then how can I reach out to my target audience in a way that will help me achieve my goals.

Answering these together will help you in defining your SEO strategy.

It will affect everything you have to do as regards building your business…

From your target keywords, the kind of content you want to create, the social media you want to focus with and the marketing strategy you’ll want to choose etc., your SEO strategy will be at the core of everything you do with your small business website.

Implement your SEO Strategy

This is one of the most under rated SEO tips that can transform your outcomes. Beyond creating an SEO strategy, to get an actual result, you must implement the strategy.

To get started, work on finding out what you want to achieve with your SEO strategy.

If the strategy is about utilizing written content to drive search traffic for example, then come up with an interesting content marketing strategy, based on your written goals.

After that you can then go ahead, create your content and share with your audience.

While doing this, be sure that your activities are measurable because you will need to measure your progress from time to time, alongside your goals to know if what you’re doing is actually working or not.

PS: Beyond implementing an SEO strategy, be sure you’re doing it right.

Rinse, Edit, Implement

In the SEO optimization world, things do change a lot. And sometimes, at a very fast rate.

That’s why, setting out an SEO strategy that works may not happen at the first time. This is one of the SEO tips I had to learn the hard way.

Even if you have the best SEO strategy, it’s possible it might not get you the exact results you expected due to one reason or the other.

If you come across outcomes like this, know that it’s time to review your strategy, study your outcomes based on set goals and then work on taking a different approach.

Always keep in mind to measure, analyze and review your SEO strategies at intervals.

Final Words

In a nutshell, evolving an search engine optimization strategy that works is the first SEO tips that will lead you towards improving your search engine visibility.

And you have to be very committed to going with the trends, updating your strategies and listening to what your audience really wants, if you want to get the right results.

Again, beyond optimizing for humans, you also have to Optimize your website for the search engine in a way that will work for both your human audience and the search engine bots.

Also, do not forget the place of paid advertising in creating search fast visibility results, Link building, Guest Posting, Collaborations and other top SEO tips that will deliver your outcomes.

And of course, you will learn more about search engine optimization and the real strategies that works, when you sign up for our content marketing course, here.

Now, it’s your turn. What’s bugging you the most when it comes to search engine optimization for small businesses? Just leave your questions down below.