Unfortunately, if you don’t have a clear plan for bringing your page to the top of search engine results, particularly in the first few links, your brand-new site will languish in obscurity.
That’s where an SEO for small business strategy comes into play. A consistent and high-quality SEO framework seems straightforward: Add keywords anywhere and everywhere, right? As it turns out, it takes more nowadays. Modern search engine algorithms seek credible backlinking, appropriate keyword use, website structure and content relevance. In other words, it’s time to look at your SEO content strategy.
6 Ways To Get Started With SEO for Small Business Strategies
Business plan? Check. Website? Check. Local Advertising? Check — or, almost. Your website looks fantastic, and your services or products are ready to roll, but you’re not seeing the traffic that will take your business to the next level. You can leverage the potential of SEO to enhance your local advertising footprint and maximize your marketing budget. When you establish a strong SEO foundation and consistently update and optimize your web pages, you set the stage for both rapid and long-term results.
1. Identify Primary Keywords in the Industry
One of the most critical and time-consuming components of structuring your SEO approach involves researching effective keywords. Your industry terminology serves as a starting point, but you need to think like a consumer if you aim to reach a general audience. When researching your keywords for your SEO for small business tactics, your team can use the most effective data gathering and analysis tools to find effective keywords and phrases that align with these points:
- Intent: Highlight high-intent keywords and eliminate or reduce low-intent ones. The former are “transactional” search queries and indicate immediate interest in a purchase or interaction.
- Relevance: Keywords should elicit traffic wanting to engage with your products or services. Irrelevant keywords will fizzle.
- Popularity: Counterintuitive as it sounds, newer websites should choose less-competitive keywords, at least at first. Higher-demand keywords don’t elevate rank as quickly on new sites with fewer SEO qualifications like backlinking.
2. Conduct an SEO and Keyword Audit
Before you launch your page, and at regular intervals thereafter, conduct an SEO audit to assess your search engine rankings. Managing SEO requires consistent attention to these evaluations so that your team can update page titles and add keywords to meta descriptions and content. Hiring a qualified marketing agency specializing in SEO for small business practices ensures that your keywords are up to date and working effectively to drive traffic to your site.
Based on your research and your audit, your SEO team develops a clear action plan for getting started. Together, you and your team will optimize current pages and organize future updates as part of a consistent timeline.
How can we help?
At Rogue Wave Marketing, we reveal the uniqueness of every brand through inspirational and impactful messaging and content catered for your audience.
3. Optimize Pages with SEO and Internal Links
Keyword stuffing is out, and targeted SEO linking is in. Once you’ve determined which pages on your site could use a tweak for better keyword placement, use the data from your keyword research and SEO best practices for placement. A professional marketing agency well-versed in SEO for small business strategy can manage this stage much more efficiently and with better lasting results. We will consider:
- Page URLs: Include keywords as a component of file name slugs
- Link integration: Use target keywords as the foundation of your SEO linking strategy with inbound, internal, navigational and breadcrumb links.
- Image attribution: Filenames and image alt attributes are two more locations for keywords placement and, of course, any requisite captioning.
- Content generation: Blog posts, product pages and service descriptions should contain your primary keywords based on your research at appropriate intervals in the text.
- Title tags: Most crucially, SEO for small business tactics must include integrating the target keywords in titles and title tags for on-page and off-page benefits.
- Website structure: Organize your content pages and keywords hierarchically so search engines can crawl them effectively and efficiently.
4. Publish a Regular Blog
Quality over quantity is the byword for blogging. As with optimizing pages, you’ll want your blogs to add value for your readers while leveraging the impact of primary and secondary keywords within your posts. Blogs only work, however, if you’re consistent with posts. Rather than posting lengthy articles every few weeks, publish weekly posts of 500 to 750 words full of high-quality information your clients want to know about your industry or business.
5. Highlight Local Connections and Reviews
According to SEO for small business best practices, you should think locally because your clients are shopping that way. Blog posts should spotlight local products and services: Why is your company the best in the area? What do you bring to the community? Along the same lines, highlight reviews for your local area if you decide to allow product or service reviews. Your clients are more likely to trust you with their purchases if they know their friends and neighbors are your clients.
6. Emphasize User Experience
With SEO for business, as with all web development, the end user’s experience on your site is paramount for customer engagement and sale completion. Search engines must be able to crawl your website quickly and intuitively, much like your clients expect. This expectation also applies to mobile versions of your site and associated applications. Front-loading the keywords in the URLs and title pages makes it more likely for potential visitors on mobile sites to consider your site relevant and click the link.
Rogue Wave Marketing Elevates Your SEO for Small Business
Whether you just launched your brand-new website or are optimizing a long-standing site, Rogue Wave marketing is your one-stop shop for all of your SEO for small business needs. Build your site from the ground up, starting with our marketing plan development services, then let us design and launch your website. We’ll manage the complexities of SEO algorithms and web page updates, so you can get back to managing your business. Reach out and partner with us to get started building your online presence and your business today.
