What small business owners need to know about small business SEO?
Small business SEO is essential to the quality and the longevity of your company’s online success and your dream. The SEO journey starts with a small business website, choice of some critical keywords, and quality content. I am sure you have heard similar words many times. You may even think SEO pundits are like ominous gang members (hence the “tagging” feature photo in today’s post!). LOL!
SEO for small businesses is increasingly important because of the pressuring factors of challenged economies and the promises of the global scale of the World Wide Web. Even the tools that local SEO offers are left untapped by many of your competitors…that is an opportunity for you.
SEO for small business starts with a quality website
Online audiences are much more demanding than even just a few years ago. Your small business website must be well-organized, visually appealing, and function well. It is a near-necessity that the website be “responsive” meaning that its display adapts to all browsers, tablets, and smartphones. Then provide useful content. It is NOT true that if you build it they will come…but if you don’t build it, there is nothing to come see! To attract the right visitors, include the right keywords in your content. Discover more about small business keyword research.
Small businesses must entice website visitors to come
The whole point of building a website and investing in keyword research and quality content that is informative and interesting is to attract visitors. But I am sure many fine websites for great businesses find that simply putting an awesome website out there does not draw the traffic that results in a return on the investment. So here is where small business SEO choices are important.
Not all tactics are right for all businesses, but engaging in some of these basics will help most small business discover success online:
- Blog – continual creation of quality content with keywords that your target market are using to search for you will set the stage for increased website traffic.
- Guest blog and network with other online sites in your industry – offer to link to each others’ sites to increase your exposure. Write a guest blog post for a related or complementary business. You will get exposure to a new audience and the potential for links back to your site that build authority…and ultimately sends more traffic to your site.
- If you get most of your customers within a 100- mile radius, do some basic local SEO and even go the extra mile to get exposure in your local market where your competitors will not.
- Engage in at least one social media community. You will build your following and the search engines value social media engagement.
- Utilize Google+ profiles and pages. They offer lots of benefits including authorship and fast indexing of pages placed in the links section of the profile.
- if you have a little coding know-how or have access to a programmer, utilize schema.org markup for local business, organization, or events. The schema markup speeds clear delineation of your small business’ information within the search engines and can be especially useful for local SEO. If you publish event information on your website, you can use Google’s simple tool called Data Highlighter to include the markup.
Your small business may not have the resources to do all of the above, but pick a couple and give them a try. The website and keyword research with great content are essential. If you have that, then using a few SEO techniques will likely yield results that help you generate traffic and increase revenue.
Because most people search for a product online before they buy it, it is critical that all businesses including local business have an online presence that is engaging.
If you can afford to have a strategy developed by an SEO professional and get some training on SEO, go for it. It will be money well spent. If you engage with your SEO professional to help guide the implementation of the strategy, you will find that you can afford most services if you tie them to clear planning about what you want the SEO to do for your business.
Do not put off selecting and implementing strategies. The results will pay for themselves. Need help getting started? Contact us for a free consultation.
What are your experiences with SEO? Have you tried some of the techniques above? What were your results?
photo credit: funkandjazz via photopin cc
