SEO promotion of a small business seems to many entrepreneurs to be an unjustified expense. Over time, they do start to promote the site in Google, but it takes more time and resources. This article will tell you how to optimize small business sites to get the most out of your investment.
Should You Use SEO for a Small Business?
Adding to all the difficulties in running a small business is the fact that the owner must delve into the issue of digital marketing. He has to choose which promotion tools to use. The question also arises, will SEO promotion of a small business website be effective?
As with other marketing channels, the effectiveness of search engine optimization will depend on the chosen strategy and specific actions.
Why do entrepreneurs rarely use SEO for small business promotion on the Internet as a marketing tool?
They do not have enough baggage of technical knowledge. It’s true, most entrepreneurs have no idea how SEO works. They cannot always evaluate the effectiveness of decisions and work results.
They don’t have or don’t have enough budget for marketing. To solve this problem, you need to plan your business finances very carefully and choose an SEO strategy that will give good results for a small cost.
In this guide, we will talk about the most simple and affordable SEO optimization works that will definitely help a small business website rank better and get more traffic.
Importantly! Before starting work on the optimization and promotion of a small business website, you need:
- Determine the region of promotion of the site and the target audience.
- Create and launch a site by connecting a domain to it.
- Connect the site to analytics systems and tools of Google or Bing.
- Get at least minimal traffic for the site.
What Does Small Business SEO Include?
Let’s start with what works Sacramento SEO for a small business includes and what tasks this tool solves.
Keyword analysis
Having determined the main market niches where the business operates, you can collect the semantic core for the site. At this stage of work, several tasks are solved at once:
- Formation and optimization of the site structure. With the help of Serpstat, you will be able to collect a list of search queries for promotion. And the search query clusterer will help to correctly group search phrases and distribute them on pages.
- Expanding the audience of the site. The most complete semantics allows the site to collect all the traffic in its niche and bypass competitors.
- Work on expanding the audience, authority, and recognition of the brand. Most modern sites have a blog. One of the key tasks of information content on the site is to expand the audience, to form a community of loyal customers. Where relevant, content also works for brand recognition.
Work with site semantics is closely related to the following stages of SEO sites.
Copywriting
When the semantics is collected and the structure of the site is optimized, it is time to tackle the texts.
But collected and grouped keywords are not enough to move on to writing the text.
Content marketing for small business
Content marketing is a website promotion technique. It is based on the regular creation of expert and useful content that meets the interests and needs of your target audience. This tool doesn’t sell directly, but it’s important for driving site traffic and long-term business success.
Content marketing is not considered a part of SEO, but it is closely related to it. It allows:
- expand the semantics of the site;
- increase organic traffic;
- generate additional links to the website.
Content marketing will only be effective if you have an effective strategy. Its development includes:
- Setting goals. Decide what you want to achieve. This could be traffic growth, brand mentions, and other metrics. Read more about analytics for content marketing in one of our blog articles.
- Analysis of competitors ‘ activity. If these are blog articles, be sure to write material on the same topic.
- Forming a content plan. Once you have set clear, measurable goals and found your competitors, you can start developing a content plan. Read about how to do it in the article.
- Publication and distribution of materials. The easiest and most affordable way to distribute your content is to publish it on your company page on social networks and other thematic communities. But a sense of proportion and context is important here. All references must be relevant.
In a blog, it is important to combine evergreen content, which will be of constant interest, and topics that interest readers right now. The trend queries tool will help you find such tools . Working with it, you can find those topics that are of interest to the audience in your region.
Link building
Links from other resources are one of the main ranking factors in Google. It depends on them what positions your site will have and how much traffic it will receive. As with content marketing, competitor analysis is important here.
Ways to get backlinks will differ depending on which sites you choose. Most often it is:
- placement of information in catalogs and on thematic portals;
- publishing guest articles with backlinks;
- link sharing;
- creating content that attracts links itself;
- crowd marketing.
Site Usability
To put it simply, the usability of the site is an indicator of how convenient and understandable the resource is for users.
The usability of the site depends on how easy and fast it is to find the necessary information, and how easy it is to place an order.
A poorly performing site will have a higher bounce rate. Visitors will simply go to competitors.
To avoid this, you need to conduct a usability audit of the site and correct errors with the help of a web developer.
Conclusions
SEO of small business sites differs mainly in that the price of ill-conceived solutions is higher here. Therefore, it is extremely important to conduct a detailed analysis before any works and implementations.
