Your Guide to Small Business SEO
It’s a new year and you are looking to either start a small business or bring your business to the next level. The online business world is cut throat and in order to maximize your success and improve your presence, you need to take advantage of all the tools available. One of the most important facets is search engine optimization (SEO) and if you have a small business you need: Small Business SEO.
SEO, organically increases the quantity and quality of traffic coming to your site by improving its visibility on search engines. Small Business SEO is part content creation, part keywords, and part rank. It is no quick fix and requires you to be consistent in order to see results. With the help of our Small Business SEO professional services, you will stand out and beat out the competition.
Steps to Success for Small Business SEO
1. Get SEO Help from an SEO Experts
Search engine optimization is constantly shifting and is extremely complex. As a small business owner, when you begin looking into utilizing search engine optimization (SEO), you may feel lost on how to start. Don’t you worry. It is completely normal. You are not alone!
If you don’t have any previous SEO expertise or knowledge, it is paramount that you first and foremost get SEO help from an SEO expert! You need to find a trustworthy and credible SEO expert in your area or online that can come up with an SEO strategy that best fits your business and audit its online presence.
2. Do the Pre-Small Business SEO Necessities
Although search engine optimization becomes more complex along the way, you can start by applying some of these simple SEO practices to have it start working towards your small business.
Create an Optimized Website:
An optimized website is specifically designed to be search engine friendly. Search engine programs called “spiders” can seamlessly crawl through each page, interpret the content, and appropriately place in the search engine database. Based on the relevance and value of the collected information, the database will place your site in its search engine ranking.
To increase your ranking, we highly advise that you optimize for local search due to the rise of mobile searches. Plugins like Yoast make it easy to optimized a site especially if you have the keyword research done.
Keyword research and SEO copywriting is something your SEO expert help you with.
Set Up Your Google My Business Listing (GMBL):
Google My Business Listing (GMBL) is the modern day yellow-pages. It is a free, easy to use online tool for businesses to manage and track their online presence across the Google search engine and its other properties (i.e. Google Maps). You are allowed to interact with customers, manage your information, utilize Google Posts to advertise events, new services and discounts, free of charge, and gain a better understanding of your online presence and expand accordingly. If you have any reviews on your GMBL, we highly advise that your respond to the reviews. As a business, you may get a negative review - but if you respond to it in a courteous, friendly manner potential customers will see that. In addition, it will make your business seem more reputable to prospective customers.
Set Up & Maintain Your Social Media:
To fully maximize your online presence, be sure to also utilize other digital marketing methods to build an organic following such as social media. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube are great for helping your small business build brand awareness, connect with repeat and prospective customers, grow your customer base, and gauge their preferences.
The content you post on these platforms can also be utilized on your website and increase its traffic, which, in turn, will help improve your ranking. Most importantly, it’s free! Once you start it, make sure to be consistent and keep it up.
Set Up Google Analytics & Google Search Console:
Google Search Console is an ensemble of resources and tools that website owners, SEO experts, online marketers, and webmasters utilize to monitor a website’s performance in the Google search index. Google Analytics, on the other hand, is a free, easy-to-use analytics online tool to help you analyze your business’ web traffic and monitor the effectiveness of your digital marketing.
Why are these tools essential for your small business? You will receive information that will give you a clear understanding of the search appearance, search traffic, crawl data, user acquisition data, and user behavior data.
Get Started with Small Business SEO
Developing Your SEO Strategy
As a small business owner, the online business world can be confusing, daunting, and stressful. Especially, when you’re managing your physical one as well. You constantly hear about how important it is to have an SEO-friendly site and how integral it is in driving new traffic and customers. Small business SEO requires a lot of attention and unique skill sets, and in the midst of learning it all you can easily get lost figuring out the best SEO strategy for your business.
When it comes to developing an SEO strategy, you may face several challenges such as, confusing traffic and conversion rates, not releasing relevant content on the website frequently, forgetting to build a network of external backlinks, and not having a dedicated marketing team.
Here are some SEO recommendations to help avoid these challenges. Keep in mind, the upkeep and updating of the SEO friendly content on your site is no small task, which is why we recommend utilizing the assistance of an SEO company.
• Site traffic data can be overwhelming, especially without the guidance of an SEO company, and understand whether your SEO strategy is working or not. Many small business owners fall for the “high traffic = success” trap. In reality, you should be keeping an eye out for the conversion rate - the amount of website visitors that became customers. Utilize an analytics-monitoring program to track the keyword driven conversion rate. These programs will guide you on selecting which keywords work best for your business.
• Once you’ve created your SEO-friendly site, the work is not done. The next important duty is to push SEO campaigns as frequently as possible. SEO is essentially free advertising, and just like advertising trends are ever-changing.
To maintain or improve your ranking on search engines, it is paramount that you add new content such as, videos, articles, keyword-optimized content, and blog posts. The inclusion of the most relevant keywords and phrases in your industry can determine whether your site is placed on the first page or the 10th. When creating the content you need to keep in mind your location, audience needs, service. In addition, make sure you have a source for pictures.
Websites need images and having a reliable source like 123rf.com and Shutterstock can be extremely helpful.
• Use relevant internal and external links to improve your SEO visibility. Internal links are links on your website that lead users to another page on your site. While, external links is a hyperlink on your site that leads users to another reputable site. Why are these great for your small business? They help build the trustworthiness and credibility of your business, grows your business network by gaining a relationship with other businesses, increase the authority of your websites, and your conversion rate.
We advise you to use your internal links for “call-to-actions”, and hyperlink popular, good quality, and highly ranked external websites to drive your small business’ SEO.
• Marketing plays a big role in the growth of a business. However, effectively marketing a business takes just as much time and energy as running the business This is why having a dedicated marketing team is key to elevating your business. With a dedicated team, you will be able to finetune your target audience, produce and create the appropriate SEO marketing and promotional content, manage and monitor your digital analytics, and conduct research on customers and the market. It will help give customers clear awareness of your brand and mission.
Ask Us a Question!
Let Us Elevate Your Company with Small Business SEO
If you are feeling worn thin, not seeing any changes in your ranking on search engines, don’t know where to start with search engine optimization (SEO), or don’t understand why it is important for your small business, Perfectly Optimized can handle it all for you. Perfectly Optimized knows the quickest and best way to get your business on the screens of your target audience. We monitor the constantly changing trends and use the latest practices accordingly to generate the best results for your small business.
With Perfectly Optimized you will be provided an SEO Consultant that will cater to your needs and craft the best strategic SEO strategy.They can provide full service, train you, or just consult - where they can give you SEO tips and guide you. Our exclusive access to resources and studies, we remain ahead of the curb, allowing our clients to be ahead of their competitors.
Perfectly Optimized is an online and Oklahoma City-based SEO agency providing services that are available to clients in Piedmont, Edmond, Midwest City, the Chicago area and its suburbs. In addition, we offer our services in Spanish. Kick the year off on the right note and have Perfectly Optimized bop your small business’ ranking to the top!