Search engine optimization is a powerful marketing tactic that can yield significant results for small businesses. It helps search engines like Google find and recognize your business website, identify it as a trustworthy source of information, and organize the information on your web pages.
It can also help you gain organic visibility by bringing more ready-to-buy customers to your business without denting your budget with paid ads.
Keyword Research
Search engine optimization has many moving parts, but it all begins with keyword research. It’s important to know what your customers are searching for and to use this information to create a search strategy that connects with them at the right stage of their buyer journey.
It’s also important to understand search intent, which is the goal that people are trying to achieve when searching for a particular term. For example, searchers who enter the phrase “wedding cake ideas” have different intent than those who type in “buy wedding cakes online Boston” or “where can I get a manicure near me?”
Search engines use complex algorithms to understand what people are searching for, and they then rank websites accordingly. This ranking conveys a sense of trustworthiness and legitimacy to shoppers, even if they haven’t visited your site before. It’s a critical component of any small business SEO strategy. Luckily, there are many free tools that can help you with your research.
On-Page Optimization
If you’ve ever seen a website ranking at the top of a search engine results page (SERP), chances are there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make it happen. That work can be broken down into on-page optimization and off-page SEO, with the former focusing on the web page itself and the latter focusing on the activity that takes place outside of the webpage.
On-page SEO is the process of using keyword research to optimize the content of a web page in order to rank higher in SERPs. It includes writing quality content for visitors, using keywords throughout the content, and optimizing images for SEO. When done correctly, on-page optimization can lead to more organic traffic and increased business revenue. The goal is to provide a useful, relevant answer to a search query by creating high-quality content that is unique and enticing to potential customers. This will make them want to click through to your website and purchase from you.
Link Building
In the pre-Google days of the internet, search engines ranked pages based solely on their content. But once Google’s PageRank algorithm was introduced, they started looking at other factors like backlinks to determine how important a website might be.
The more links you have, the higher your website will rank. That’s why link building is an important part of any SEO strategy, including small business SEO.
To build high-quality links, you need to create great content and promote it. Then, reach out to other websites in your industry and ask them to link to your content. One easy way to do this is through broken link building, which involves finding links on other sites that are broken and asking them to link to your content instead.
To be a successful link builder, you need to have a good understanding of how search engines work. You should also be able to analyze data and generate reports.
Social Media
SEO is just one component of search engine marketing. Another part is paid advertising, also known as SEM (search engine marketing).
Social media can boost your SEO by helping you attract customers and build brand awareness. It also helps you rank higher on search engines’ results pages.
The key is to optimize your social media profiles to reflect what’s on your website. That means using relevant keywords in your profile content and auditing your profiles to ensure they align with your SEO strategy.
SEO also encompasses technical optimization, such as ensuring your website loads quickly and works well on mobile devices. And it includes practices like avoiding intrusive interstitials and following SEO best practices for structured data. By implementing all of these elements, small businesses can compete with larger competitors on search engine results pages. And those higher rankings can lead to more traffic and, ultimately, more business.
