As a small business owner in 2024, you probably already have a website and know how important it is to your business. But, you’d be surprised to know that in the United States less than 64% of small businesses have a website
The same thing can be said about the importance of SEO for small businesses. There may exist awareness of its importance, but people are not acting on it. It may be because of a lack of interest, knowledge, and/or resources, but only 17% of small businesses invest in SEO.
This leads to missing out on “easy” opportunities to boost traffic and conversions being lost. So, in a nutshell, this article will help you understand how basic SEO concepts can help you build and maintain a fast, robust, and user-friendly website that ranks higher in search engines, builds brand awareness for your business, and ultimately helps bring more qualified potential customers, increase conversion rates, and bypass your competition to gain new customers for your business.
Key Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses
SEO is basically the process of continuously improving the quality and quantity of traffic to a website from search engines. This just means that your website is a machine that brings in traffic and tries to turn them into customers. SEO is the maintenance, upgrades, updates, and improvements you make to that machine. Here are a few key benefits of fine-tuning your SEO machine:
Make Your Sites More User-Friendly
SEO is not only about bringing in more traffic. It will also help you improve your users’ experience by building a website that performs better on mobile and other devices.
This is an important SEO factor because Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content on your website for indexing and ranking. So, your site needs to be optimized for mobile.
Bring in More Customers
The goal of having a website for your business is to stand out from your competition and attract more customers. That’s why you spent a significant amount of money to build it. It only makes sense that you should invest in SEO in order to optimize your site and bring in even more customers.
This is a screenshot of how some SEO work can boost organic traffic:
In fact, websites that are optimized grow as twice as fast as those that aren’t. SEO as part of your marketing strategy is probably the cheapest tactic in the mix and has long-term effects in positively bringing more “targeted” traffic to your website that will eventually turn into more customers to your business.
Better Conversion Rates
Pages and sites that are properly optimized provide a better user experience. This means users will be able to easily navigate and find the information they need on your site and they’ll be more likely to convert into leads and paying customers.
Build Brand Awareness
Search engines and online presence play a big role in building your brand. Appearing in the top spots of the SERPs for the major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! is one of the most effective ways to build awareness and trust for your brand.
This screenshot of a results page illustrates the top spots of a common search query:
Bypass Your Competition
Do some research and find out if your competition is doing some SEO marketing. Finding out they actually are is reason enough for you to look into the idea. Niche or small markets are highly competitive and every small edge you can gain over your competition makes a difference. Search engine optimization can make a big difference.
6 SEO Tips for Small Businesses
As a small business owner, you probably don’t have the time or the skills to do your SEO yourself. However, it’s important that you understand what it involves and how it can help your business thrive. Let’s look at the most crucial tips to keep in mind.
1. Use SEO Best Practices to Build Your Website
Start on the right path from the get-go. If you’re just building your website, make sure your design and web development team follow SEO best practices. It’s not good enough that it looks good, your website must also perform well in search engines.
If your site is already live, try asking your team to run an audit to find out issues that might be affecting your user experience or traffic. You can do this by using tools like AHREFS, Moz, Google Search Console, and others.
Screenshot of an AHREFS audit showing technical SEO Issues to be fixed:
The issues that you will most commonly find are broken links, missing tags or ALT text, slow loading times, and other small technical stuff that is relatively easy to fix.
2. Prioritize Keywords
Keywords are the basis for your SEO strategy. Invest the necessary resources into researching and finding the right keywords you need to target in order to bring in the right audience for your business.
Once you’ve defined your target keywords, create content around them that is focused on giving your target audience the most useful and insightful answers to their queries. This keyword research is also useful when you invest in paid ads.
3. Optimize the Metadata for Your Pages
Beyond creating optimized content to put on your pages, you also need to make sure the “data” behind them is optimized for your focus keywords as well. Make sure every page’s titles, meta descriptions, image ALT text, and other details have been optimized with unique text that is under the established character limit and motivates users to click through.
4. Create a Content Calendar and Share Awesome New Content Regularly
Good, consistent content marketing will help you climb up the ranking in search engines. Building authority in Google takes work, effort, and time. It also takes effort into distributing that content and placing it in the right places and the times so it reaches the right people.
You can use several different tools to build a content calendar, from an Excel sheet to online project management tools like Trello:
Use your content calendar to plan out in advance and include supporting content such as videos, infographics, tools, charts, etc. This makes your content richer and will help to rank as well.
5. Build a Strong Backlink Profile
Backlinks might be the most important ranking factor out there. Google, for instance, uses its algorithm PageRank as one of the most important ones and its foundation is backlinks.
Backlinks tell Google that your site is trusted by other sites, that’s why they link to you. This signals search engines about your site’s authority and relevance, and it shows up higher in rankings.
Here are two great ways to build backlinks:
- Backlinking Campaign
This is basically a strategy where you find sites that fit your backlink criteria and reach out to them to propose a guest post with a link back to your site. Make sure you reach out to relevant sites and offer them valuable content in your pitch.
- Broken Link Building
This strategy consists of finding prospect sites or blogs that have broken links to content that is not there anymore. If the link and the content surrounding it are relevant to your audience, you’ll pitch a piece of content to replace the missing one.
Backlinks can also be placed in sites such as directories, business profiles, and social media. However, make sure you do it the right way through “white hat” practices that don’t “violate” any search engine’s norms, these are “black hat” techniques and include such penalized practices as link buying, automated link building software, and so on.
Your internal linking structure is also important for your SEO. Make sure you keep a clean and clear structure to help both search engines and your users better navigate your site.
6. Optimize for Local SEO and Use Google My Business
If your small business serves people locally, optimizing your site for local searches is a great idea. Very similar to regular SEO, local SEO focuses on finding local keywords, optimizing a business’s Google My Business profile, and building “NAP” citations.
In case you don’t know, ¨NAP” stands for Name, Address, Phone, and this info needs to be 100% consistent across all your citations.
SEO is Smart Business
If you’re a small business owner or manager and your goals focus on improving your business to grow, then applying SEO principles and practices to your marketing and content strategies is not only necessary but a smart business decision.
It’s up to you to decide if you tackle this part of your business by hiring experts in-house or by outsourcing some of the SEO processes to highly professional and skilled agencies that will take a weight of your shoulders so you can focus on your running your business.