If you’re a business owner, you’ve probably heard the term SEO once or twice. You’ve probably heard how it can help you business grow and bring in new customers; what type of business wouldn’t want that? The problem is that SEO has a lot of jargon surrounding it, and can be a bit difficult to get into. Today we’ll break down what SEO is, why it’s important to small businesses, and how you can start working on it today. Let’s jump into our small businesses guide To SEO.
What SEO and Why Is It Important
SEO stands for search engine optimization, and is the art of making yourself appear higher in the search results. When you go to google (or really any other search engine) they use a bunch of complex algorithms to determine which pages to show you. They use a bunch of what they call “ranking signals” to determine how relevant a particular web page is to a given search result. The higher it ranks the better placement in the search results it gets.
This is important as it’s been shown many times before that the top 3 positions get the most clicks; with traffic dramatically dropping off from there. Think about the last search you did, how far down did you scroll before either finding what you wanted or trying another search. If you’re like 90% of people probably not that far.
Now, the exact algorithms search engines use are closely guarded secrets. They don’t want you to know exactly how they determine your ranking or else people would be easily able to game the system. What they do though is release broad statements about what types of things influence their decision. This is things like page content, number of links back to the page, how authoritative the site as a whole is, and much more. This allows anyone to start making improvements to their site and begin ranking higher.
Ranking higher is so important as it’s basically free targeted advertising. While you can always pay people to do SEO for you, a lot of the benefits can be had with just a little effort, especially if you’re targeting low competition searches (we’ll talk about competitiveness of keywords later). You also get to reach people that are very targeted, and interested in whatever you’re selling. If someone searches for “dog food store” you can be extremely confident what they’re looking for. SEO is a great way to reach targeted customers without having to pay for ads.
The one downside is SEO is a slow process. I generally advise small businesses that are just starting to be ready to commit for at least 6 months before seeing any real results. That’s just the nature of the work, it takes commitment and steady progress. You can’t expect to put in an hour of work and see 100’s of new customers.
With all that it’s easy to see why so a business would be interested in SEO, but also why so many miss the mark. It’s not a free ride, and certainly requires a sizable time investment. Getting into the right frame of mind is essential as this is a marathon, not a sprint.
What Goes Into SEO
Now that you have an understanding of what SEO is let’s talk about the broad steps that go into it. Each one of these could have an article of its own, so I’m going to give you the 1000 foot view of it and leave further exploration for another time. I want to stress that this is just a brief primer, to be a true expert you’ll need to spend some time with each of the points below.
Understand Your Audience & Location
While not strictly an SEO task it’s just as important here as it is for any marketing activity to understand your audience. This really helps you drill down on user intent, and target searches that bring the most value to you.
Take for example a restaurant in a small town and then another in an area with a lot of tourists. Each of these is likely to cater to a different clientele, and therefore care about different searches. Having an honest assement of your audience gives you an idea on how to structure your SEO work.
Keyword Brainstorming
Once you understand your audience it’s time to start thinking about what types of searches you want to target. These searches, something like “restaurants near me”, are commonly known as keywords. When you’re working to improve your SEO you’ll typically select a handful of keywords, and then work to rank for searches including those words.
Keyword brainstorming is a very artistic process, and everyone has their preferred method of doing it. Basically, you want to come up with ideas of what you’re customers are searching for. Try to put yourself in their shoes, and come up with ideas.
It’s important to try to think like your customer as a lot of professionals won’t search the same way. You might use terminology or phrasing that the average person won’t know, so try to think and use those words. Tools like Google Search’s recommendations can help suggest closely related phrasing.
Long Tail Keywords
A key thing that lot of small businesses utilize are what are called long tail keywords. These are keywords that are longer in terms of word count, and are usually easier to target as they have less competition. They also are more targeted which gives you a better chance to snag a valuable customer.
For example, do a search for “restaurants near me” and “Mexican restaurants near me”. You’ll notice that the amount of results goes down significantly, and while this isn’t the best measure of competition it’s the easiest to quickly test. You also get the benefit that people looking for “Mexican restaurants near me” are much more likely to be interested in that type of food than the more generic search.
While this is a bit of a simple example it demonstrates that there’s no problems with targeting keywords spanning multiple words. While they generally have less searches per month, they’re also usually less competitive and more targeted. It’s a tradeoff, but one that is often worth it for small businesses.
As a last point to consider when brainstorming keywords keep in mind the user intent. Consider the following two search phrases “How To Become a Veterinarian” and “Dog Veterinarian Near Me”. While these are both about veterinarians the intent behind the search is very different. The latter is much more likely to be looking for the service while the former is a more informative search. Thinking about what the end user wants from the search can help you drill in on profit generating keywords.
Keyword Research
Now that you have a list of potential words it’s time to figure out which of those words are actually worth pursuing. This is a big topic, and like I mentioned at the start we can’t get into it all here. That said, I’ll touch on what I consider the two most important aspects of keyword research.
Search Volume
The first important aspect of keyword research is determining how many searches per month are performed for a particular keyword. If a search has too few searches it might not be worth targeting.
There are a lot of tools that make this fairly easy, and Google has their own Keyword planner which can help give estimates. Plugging in your words here can give you a rough idea of what the top 3 spots in the search results can expect in traffic.
Now, this doesn’t mean not to target lower traffic keywords. If you’ve got a lot of the long tail words mentioned above you’re naturally going to see less searches per month. That’s okay, lower search volumes typically also match up with the next point, competition.
Competition
It’s all great to have keywords that have a lot of volume, but they’re useless if you can’t rank for them. That’s why it’s key to have a look at the competition for a word before jumping in.
This is once again a very large topic so we will only briefly touch on it here. The most basic way to start gauging competition is to simply do a search for the desired keyword and see who’s ranking.
You want to be on the lookout for other small or blog sites. If there are a lot of no-name sites ranking for a keyword that’s a pretty good sign. If there are a lot of big brands and companies ranking then generally that will be a bit harder for you to rank for.
We’ll be putting out a more detailed keyword research guide shortly. Check back to learn more in depth about this process.
On Page SEO
Another large part of SEO is what is called on page optimization. This is things like your pages title, description, and how it links to other page.
The main ideas here are all about semantics, and that the way you’re presenting your site makes sense. Things like having your keywords in your content and header, having a descriptive description, and a good title are all pieces of the on-page puzzle.
You also want to look through and make sure things like 404’s or broken links are corrected. These types of items are negatives as they present a bad user experience. Good SEO is just as much about making your content appealing to the search engines as it is making it easy for users to use.
Lastly, a big item that has become increasingly important in the past few years is mobile friendliness. If you have a website today it needs to be accessible for people using smartphones and tablets. This is not only a user concern, but is one of the big items Google is looking at when they rank your site. To help, Google provides a handy tool for checking whether your site passes the test.
Local SEO Techniques
For most small businesses, local SEO is going to be what really matters. This means targeting keywords and customers that are near you. A search for "restaurants near me” is a great example of a search we’ve probably all done.
These type of searches are usually most important as small businesses often don’t have a very wide market. If you’re a restaurant for example, you don’t really care all that much if people two states away know about you. That’s why local SEO is critical; it targets people in your market that could be become customers today.
Keywords aren’t the only consideration when doing local SEO. Think of some of the steps you might take when looking for a local business. You might want to know where they’re located, or you might look at reviews, or perhaps you check their social media. All of these items are important to building a local SEO campaign. Let’s take a look at some of the key items you might consider doing.
Google My Business
If You only take one thing out this article make it this. Google my Business is probably the most powerful tool for small businesses, and you should be doing it without any exceptions.
If you ever search for a service, and see the results on a small map in the corner that’s what google my business does. This is such a powerful tool as it gets you in front of people that are looking for you right now. The process for getting signed up is easy too, simply follow the prompts, and Google will mail a postcard to verify your address. After that, you’ll begin showing up in the search results!
After this, it’s also important to start getting some positive reviews on your profile. This is both a big influence in what Google shows, but also in whether potential customers will use your service. If you’re sitting with low reviews, or no reviews, people are going to be much more hesitant to use your service. Building reviews can be difficult, but make sure to remind your current customers to drop you a review if they had a positive experience. Even a few nice reviews can go a long way to persuading potential customers to use your service.
Call Out Your Locations
If you’re lucky enough to have multiple location its a good idea to call those out. Our standard advice is to have at least one page dedicated to each different location. That way, when a user is looking for “dentists in Detroit” you show them the most relevant content.
Local Content
Another great way to boost your local SEO and connect with people is to post local content. Things that tie into local events or activities is a great way to gain some exposure.
Maybe your town has a 4th of July parade; maybe in that case make some content referencing it so people searching for it will find you. This is not only a great SEO tip, but also works to build a relationship with the community.
Other Review Sites
We mentioned it above, but there are a bunch of other review sites that are important for local SEO. Getting reviews on Yelp! for example is another good place to target. A few good reviews go a long way in making potential customers comfortable.
Content Strategy
A big part of SEO is building content for your site, whether that be written articles, video, images, or something else. Having a solid content strategy is key to reaching a wider audience, establishing yourself in the market, and ultimately improving your SEO.
Coming up and executing a content strategy is a large undertaking, so we’ll cover the few basic steps here. The first step is to figure out what types of content you want to create. This includes both the subject but also the medium. A lot of this will be dictated by both your industry and skillset. If you’re an excellent writer, then creating articles is a solid idea. On the hand if you’re in a very visual field making videos might be a good way to reach new customers, if you can make quality ones that is.
The key here is to play to your strengths, as well as keeping in mind what the market wants. This is very important to keep in mind as you want to make sure that you are creating content that your visitors want.
Going back to your keywords is a great place to start, and producing content centered on them is smart. If you’ve done your keyword research well then you’ll have a large list of topics to work with.
The last tip is to always shoot for quality over quantity. The internet is already full of garbage, committing to providing better content than your competitors is a great way to rise of the above the noise.
Social Media
Becoming increasingly important in your overall content strategy is social media. Social media is a great place to reach new clients as so many people are on them. Social media also gives you a great place to start building relationships and helps to show that “person behind the business” idea.
Each social media site is different, and which ones you target depend a lot on your content and audience. Different social media platforms have different core audiences, and that’s important to research ahead of time before jumping in.
I like to suggest small businesses start off with maybe 2-3 sites, and then expand from there. Something like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is a good spread, but don’t be afraid to switch it up. Starting focused like this gives you enough reach to start seeing some benefits, without spreading yourself too thin and overcommitting.
Whichever platforms you do decide to target make sure to spend a little time researching best practices. Each platform deserves an article of it’s own, and there’s a lot of great info on how to properly start using each one.
Off Page Elements
Last up, I wanted to touch on some of the off-page factors that effect your site’s SEO. No matter how well you make your site, there’s a number of additional things coming from other sites that help nudge your in the right direction.
Backlinks
Probably the most well know off-page item is what are called back links. These are simply links coming from another site to a page on your site. Google sees these links sort of like “votes” for your site in that they are vouching for its quality by linking to it.
Not all links are created the same. In the old days it was enough to go out and build a bunch of random, spammy links to rank well. Google caught onto this pretty fast, so their algorithm is much more sophisticated than looking at numbers alone.
Things like the quality of the site and relevance to your site play a big role, but other things like no-follow or the text used in the link itself also come into play. This all taken into account when Google runs its algorithm.
Link building is once again a huge topic, but in general you want a lot of links from relevant, high quality sites. The best way to do this is to let it happen organically, build great content and connect with like sites to mutually benefit each other. Working with companies that build a lot of links quickly is a surefire way to get penalized by google.
Social Signals
As mentioned above, social media is becoming a big part of any online marketing campaign, and SEO is no exception. While Google states social media signals are not directly related to ranking there is plenty of evidence that they do have a positive effect on websites.
The main idea is simply to create great content that gets shares, likes, re-tweets, or whatever is the method of saying “good work” on your social media site. Notice how this ties back into great content, a killer social media strategy starts and ends with great content.
That’s Not All!
As I mentioned above, SEO is a gigantic topic and any one of the points above could warrant its own article. We’ve only briefly touched on each topic, and for those really looking to progress it’s a good idea to dig a bit deeper.
We’re planning to release a whole suite of articles on the above topics so check back often to learn more about SEO and how you can use it to build your business!