Top 5 SEO Tips for Small Businesses
Are you struggling to drive up your website’s traffic on a minimal marketing budget? Investing in SEO is a simple and cost effective way to boost results! Here at High Peaks Marketing we work with a number of small businesses to boost their search engine results through SEO strategies and tactics. But there are some things you may want to do on your own. Here are our SEO tips for small businesses…
What is SEO?
SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of improving your visibility in web search results in order to drive more traffic to your website. When done right, SEO can also drive better quality traffic to you. Small business owners can use SEO tactics as a low-cost way to drive more business, since the traffic is “earned” and not paid for.
Today, we’ll focus on 5 tips that’ll help you get started with SEO marketing:
1. Take a course
There are some brilliant free or inexpensive online courses you can take to learn the fundamental concepts of SEO.
Our suggestions:
Conductor offers a free eBook that’s fairly comprehensive, answering many of the basic questions you might have, such as “How do I perform keyword research,” or “How do I measure success?”
Hubspot has a free interactive course that’s a bit more substantial, and includes plenty of video tutorials. Udemy has an inexpensive course ($9.99) that dives deeper into optimizing content for SEO best practices. If your business has a blog, you’ll want to ensure every post written follows these tips!
2. Access free tools
Once you understand the fundamentals, you’ll be ready to perform keyword research and you will understand what search placements you can optimize your web content to appear in, i.e.: Google’s Rich Answer Box, or Google Local Listings.
These tools will help automate your research and get your business account set up, freeing you up to focus on making great content, and get back to running your business.
Here’s where to start:
Visit Google My Business to get your site set up with a business listing profile that will show up in search results. This is especially important if you have a physical storefront, as many customers look online in the early stages of contemplating purchases.
For general keyword research and SERP (Search Engine Results Page) analysis, check out Moz’s free SEO tools .
For more specific keyword research, create a Google Ads account and utilize their Keyword Planner feature for research. Note: you don’t have to spend a dime to use the free tool!
For question-based research that is, if you want to appear in Google’s answer box, Answer The Public may help you figure out just what your audience is asking for that you could answer with new content.
3. Do the research
Once you’ve got the right tools in place, it’s very easy to discover keywords your business can optimize for. Using the Keyword Planner feature in Google Ads, you can find keywords that are highly relevant to what your business is selling, likely to drive users with high intent, and generate a decent monthly search volume. You can also see what keywords your competitors are already ranking for.
Once you’ve found your target keywords, make sure the content you write contains them in the article’s title, meta description and headings. Make sure you’re not keyword stuffing, by ensuring the keywords fit seamlessly into the content.
4. Connect through backlinks
This is an extremely important step, but will take a little while to build.
Backlinks are incoming links to your website from another domain. Your site needs clicks, but many large domains who’ve spent years establishing their digital presence get the majority of clicks. You can piggyback off a larger domain’s search authority when the domain links out to your website, driving more traffic to your site and improving your own domain’s search authority.
Take control by reaching out to credible domains, offering to write a guest post or do a “content swap,” where each business trades a piece of content, each linking to the other’s website.
Not sure where to start?
Define your niche, find subject matter experts in your industry that aren’t direct competitors but might speak broadly about topics that your own target audience relates to
Use social media to identify influencers in your industry
Prioritize your outreach to websites with high domain authority
5. Update old content
Since Google algorithms are always changing, the trends in keyword searching will as well.
If you have pieces of content that you think have potential but are not being clicked, take a second look! See if you can revamp and revitalize them through SEO to increase your clicks.
How do you use SEO for content you’ve created?
Do your research to find the keywords searchers use when looking for the content that can be found on your website
Take the keywords you have found and put them in your headlines, title and URLS
Determine your reader’s problem, and solve it for them
Answer frequently searched questions to make your content the selection used in Google Search Results’ answer boxes
Ready to boost your business?
SEO is much easier to manage today with the help of online courses, free tools, backlinking partnerships and a lot of research into keyword trends. Follow our tips and you’ll be well on your way to boosting your website traffic and ultimately, driving more business! Or contact High Peaks Marketing and we can do it for you.
