The Beginner’s Guide to SEO for Small Businesses

Many businesses are shifting to digital platforms. If yours is a small local business, going digital is one of the best things you can do.

A recent survey by The Manifest has found that most small businesses are planning to increase their digital marketing spending in 2019. Their top platform choices include social media (56%) and online (41%) such as Google search, banner ads and re-targeting.  

The biggest reason for this trend is the advantage digital speed offers.

Speed matters in marketing. It’s good to have an innovative product, but do you know what else is important? Getting it to market before your competition does.

However, for first-timers or sometimes even the experienced, digital marketing can seem complex and confusing. With all the different strategies available out there, it may be downright daunting to decide where to begin.

If you’re new to digital marketing, SEO would be a great place to start.

What is SEO? 

In simple terms, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the activity of trying to improve search engine rankings. 

Remember the Google search engine? Ever wondered how some sites manage to appear on the first page of a search result while others don’t?

Well, that’s what SEO does: it makes you stand out. 

Let’s face it. The internet has been around for a long time, so you can only imagine how much content there is on the internet right now. If you think that’s a lot, consider this: the amount of existing content continues to increase. 

People make new content every day, but most of it never gets discovered. 

Here’s where SEO can make a difference: using proper SEO techniques can boost your website’s Google rankings. When that happens, your web pages and articles stand a much higher chance of appearing at the top of search results.

Essentially, effective SEO helps the search engine find you – and more importantly, it helps people find you in the search engine.

Why SEO will benefit your business 

While SEO can help increase your online visibility and discoverability, this is not the only advantage it offers. Here are 3 key benefits of SEO for small businesses:

Benefit #1 – SEO is relatively low cost

Every business wants to save cost and increase revenue, and SEO is perfectly fitted for the task.

Implementing SEO is cheaper compared to most other advertising methods. Instead, you’ll need to put in time and effort to get it right, which will then lead to long-lasting results.

In any case, it’s definitely a worthy investment.

Benefit #2 – SEO increases trust and credibility

When it comes to advertising, the goal of any experienced business owner is to create and improve brand awareness and loyalty.

As SEO increases your online visibility, it can also raise your brand credibility.

People trust Google, so when your web pages appear as top search results, your potential customers are more likely to trust your brand as well.

Benefit #3 – SEO can target entire markets instead of just keywords

When you think about search engines, the first idea that comes to mind is usually keywords. That makes sense, because targeting the right keywords can bring more traffic to your website.

But what if I told you that shouldn’t be your main goal? 

Instead, local and small businesses should use SEO to target potential clients and customers within a specific area and niche. So, rather than aiming to just get anyone and everyone to view your content, you’re focusing on people who would actually be interested in what you have to offer.

Now, you’re targeting traffic that causes sales.

A simple guide to SEO for small businesses

Learning how to do SEO can be tough for beginners.

With one quick Google search on the term “SEO”, you’ll find more articles on it than you can ever read.

More often than not, you’ll also be bombarded with a lot of technical terms and definitions. There’s just too much information on SEO. 

Here, we’ll look at 5 basic components of a good SEO strategy for small businesses and some easy steps you can take to set up your website’s SEO. Once you get the basics down, you’re off to a good start.

Component #1 – Links

SEO involves having high-quality links to your site from high-authority sites like websites of associations, government, universities and social media. At the same time, you need links from your site to such sources as well. 

Links are important for a number of reasons:

• Traffic: This is an obvious one. When you have incoming links to your website (or backlinks) from other sites, whoever clicks on a backlink and lands on your site will add to your online traffic.
  
  
• Googlebot: When you create any form of content and post it up on the web, Google doesn’t usually find it right away. This means your content is practically invisible to others. This process of discovery is called crawling, which is performed by an algorithm called Googlebot, and backlinks are crucial to speeding things up here.
  
  
• Reputability and Credibility: Backlinks help Google measure how popular and reputable your website is. Having backlinks that are relevant to your business niche can also help boost your credibility since it would classify you as an authoritative source.

Link building can be harder for small businesses, but it’s not impossible.

One quick way is by providing sponsorship to a few local nonprofits or charitable organizations, which will typically result in backlinks to the sponsor’s page. 

You can also connect with local and niche bloggers. By building relationships with them, they may end up mentioning you in their blog posts or on their social networking sites.

Another common way to do it is by guest posting for relevant sites.

This is usually the method that requires the most time and effort, because you’ll have to find a site that accepts guest writers and then pitch a compelling topic to them.

Nonetheless, this method can be the most rewarding one too – since it also has the potential of increasing traffic and brand credibility.

Component #2 – Content

Content is great for increasing your website visitors and getting better search engine rankings for your web pages.

Having more content can earn you returning visitors and increase the chances of Googlebot finding your site – although you’ll need to pay attention to the quality of your content too.

If you start pumping out new posts every day that don’t really offer anything new or substantial, the traffic isn’t going to last. 

But don’t get so carried away by the idea of producing quality content that you hesitate to put out any new content at all. That won’t get you anywhere either.

The key here is to strike a balance between quantity and quality.

And the best way to do this is by conducting proper keyword research to find out what your audience is looking for.

Always strive to deliver value to people who are searching for particular keyword phrases.

When it comes to good SEO writing, keyword stuffing is a big no-no.

So focus more on search intent to understand what people are looking for through their search queries – in order to create useful content for readers.

Component #3 – Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

In SEO terms, your page title is the headline of your content while your meta description is like your tagline. And these are two important elements you should keep in mind when doing SEO.

An effective page title should always be unique yet brief and informative. Make sure your title accurately describes your page content, and keep your title under 70 characters. 

Meta descriptions are meant to provide a quick summary of the page content. While it is important to include your primary keyword here, you should do it in a natural way and keep the description between 50 to 160 characters. 

Above all, focus on crafting your meta description for a human audience instead of just optimizing it for search engines. Treat it like an elevator pitch to convince the searcher to visit your web page. 

That way, the search engine would be able to display relevant information that matches the intent of the user’s query.

One crucial concept to keep in mind when formulating your page title and meta description is the user experience (UX).

Since these two elements are usually the first point of contact between your website and your audience, you should craft the title and description in a way that’ll make people want to visit your web page.

Component #4 – SEO Analysis

If you’re implementing SEO for your business, you would want to monitor and analyze your results so that you can continuously improve your SEO strategies. 

To find out how well your content is performing, pay attention to various traffic and engagement metrics, such as: 

• time on page – how long visitors stay on your web page; 
• scroll depth – how far visitors scroll down a particular page; 
• return visits – how many users return to your site after their initial visit;
• page views – how many visits a page has received; and 
• click-through rate (CTR) – how often users find your site from a search engine results page (SERP).

Google Analytics is one of the best tools for tracking your SEO progress. Offered by Google itself, this service allows you to collect and analyze extensive website data for your business. 

However, learning to set up and use Google Analytics can be quite a time-consuming and challenging process, especially for beginners. 

If you have a WordPress website, consider using MonsterInsights, which is a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to get real-time data on your website’s performance without having to log into your Google Analytics profile.

By keeping track of your website’s overall performance, you’ll be able to evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns and make adjustments accordingly. 

Component #5 – Mobile SEO

The use of mobile devices has grown significantly since the 1990s. That’s why mobile SEO should definitely be one of the priorities for your business website.

When you implement a mobile SEO strategy for your site, you’ll be optimizing your content for better viewing on smartphones and tablets. 

The first thing that usually comes to mind at the mention of mobile SEO is user-friendliness. 

This may include the practice of incorporating responsive or adaptive web design into the process of making your website mobile-optimized to ensure better user experience.

You could also try speeding up your site’s performance by compressing image sizes and using caching to improve the loading speed of your web pages.

Keep in mind, though, that mobile SEO is more than just about UX. Ultimately, it’s still about satisfying a user’s search intent. 

Aside from providing useful and easy-to-read content, you may have to produce content of varying lengths to cater to a wider range of user intents. For instance, long-form content may perform better on desktop browsers while shorter and more direct content would work better in answering mobile queries. 

Try out these SEO tips today

Yes, SEO can be quite mind-boggling for beginners. (That’s how I felt when I first started out in digital marketing – dazed and confused!)

But remember: SEO takes time. You have to think long-term to achieve truly lasting results.

If you only take one thing away from this article, let it be this: put your audience first.

Understand the evolving needs of users and strive to adapt to such changes.

That’s how you’ll succeed in the SEO game. Good luck!