What is Small Business SEO? A Complete Guide
Not only are big business websites built for search engine optimization, they are ranking good because they are working on it!
If you own a small business website, SEO may help it rank higher in search results, bringing you more organic customers and eventually contributing to your company’s expansion in the future.
It has multiple benefits!
According to a study by MOZ, organic ranking receives 8.5 times more clicks compared to PPC ads. But unfortunately, half of small businesses hardly care about SEO.
Small Business SEO is a resource that can help almost any entrepreneur fetch desired outcomes, but is still frequently ignored and undervalued.
While SEO offers long-term advantages that may dramatically transform a small business’s growth line, it takes time to cultivate and yield genuine returns – often up to 12 months.
Let’s dive deeper into small business SEO with the help of this comprehensive guide.
What does Small Business SEO actually mean?
When you optimize a website for a small business, you are basically nurturing it to rank within a limited horizon, within a limited budget for a specific objective. For a number of reasons, only a few websites rank in the first 5 results in the search engines. Producing high-quality content is a crucial component of SEO for small businesses, but multiple moving parts are included in the whole process. How a small business website’s SEO is done is detailed next in the discussion.
How to perform SEO on a small business website?
SEO work for any website may seem unending and challenging. But comparatively, Small Business SEO gets the advantage of drawing more results with limited work. Here’s a disclosure:
On-page SEO
Optimizing the visible portion of a website is the target of on-page SEO. The target includes optimizing everything from blog content to meta data and much more.
On-page SEO consists of
- Keyword analysis
- Home page, blog entries, service pages, and any other anchor page that is visible to consumers and attracts visitors from search engines.
- Before clicking on a result, search engine users may read the meta titles and descriptions.
- Search engines and user-friendly URLs
- Search engine and user-friendly image formatting
- Enhancing internal links inside the website
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to the process whereby one makes efforts to increase a site’s overall authority by working on external factors, outside of the actual website. With a higher domain authority, websites can readily outpace competition and achieve top Google rankings.
Off-page SEO consists of:
- Social media signals are produced when a website drives traffic from social media platforms.
- Natural links pointing to your website from relevant websites
- Similarly, it even involves promoting your website on third-party platforms.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to SEO that is invisible on the front end but visible on the back end of a website. These elements enhance interaction with search engines and, later on, determine how effectively on-page SEO goes.
Technical SEO consists of:
- Mobile usability
- Site speed
- Site structure
- Website migrations
- Structured data
- Managing indexing and crawling errors
Create a Google Business Profile Account
The most efficient strategy to appear more clearly in Google Search as a small business is to list your website in Google Search local results. Listing your website in Google Maps may help further in solidifying your Google listing profile, often defined as your business profile. Thus this can be considered as one of the most impactful and rewarding techniques to scale your small business website with the power of SEO. After all, your business profile is displayed collectively across different channels such as Google Search local results, Google Search Knowledge Panel, and Google Maps, which empowers your geographical keywords tagged with “near me” terms.
Optimized for Voice Search
With the growing popularity of voice assistance, voice based search will experience enormous growth in the coming future. So, just like you optimize your local SEO for written queries, you need to put in extra effort in recognizing how individuals may ask these queries while interacting with such voice based devices. This may include focussing on more long-tail terms that are used while using voice searches. So in order to improve your small business SEO, you need to modify your content’s SEO in a way that it aligns with your targeted users’ casual speech as well. This may include focusing on general question openers, such as how, what, when, who, where, and why.
Targeting Local News Stories and Events
To attract the attention of your targeted users towards your website, discussing local events, issues, and news can do wonders. If you combine the news with your website content, it tends to cause hype among your audience, and they’re likely to hear more from you in the future around the topic.
It basically involves
- Publishing blog posts focusing on some local news, nearby event, or other public activities
- Making stories about local nonprofits or issues that your company supports
- Launching offers specifically for a local audience
Setup for Social Media Signals
If you don’t have a Facebook business page, and most notably, a LinkedIn page, create one today! Such social media profiles can attract meaningful connections that might potentially help your small business grow at a rapid pace. Thanks to the advanced algorithms of these social media platforms, they extend your small website’s reach to local customers. Simply run a campaign or keep yourself active on social media platforms and target a specific keyword throughout the social media post to drive traffic to your small business website for free.
Final Words
The fact that SEO is an ever evolving thing, one can never predict what’s gonna work tomorrow. All you can do is focus on staying up to date with new changes and features that search engines like Google keep on introducing. With this small business SEO guide, we hope that you might have understood the importance of local SEO and ways to benefit your business from the power of local searches and SEO by thinking beyond the conventional boundaries.