For the uninitiated, SEO can seem to be a complex and foreign landscape, but it doesn’t have to be too complicated. Indeed, there’s a lot that small businesses (and anyone) can do without any vast SEO knowledge, and without spending too much money.
Here is the compiled version of the fundamentals of SEO for small businesses:
Have a Mobile-Friendly Website
Developing mobile sites can now be done quickly with simple plugins for your CMS, such as WordPress, meaning that making all of your content mobile-friendly can be done rapidly and cheaply.
Optimizing it for fast load-speed (again through plugins where available) will help you stand out from the competition in terms of performance.
Identify the SEO Gaps in the Market
Targeting the same keywords as your bigger competitors won’t see you make much ground as they are more established and have more coverage online.
Using keyword research tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner to spot gaps in the market will enable you to capitalize upon these – they may even convert at a better rate too.
Get Intimate with Your Audience
Who is your typical online customer? What are they looking for? How do they spend their time online? What kind of content do they like to consume?
When you completely understand your audience, you will know what you need to do online to grab their attention.
If your audience spends a lot of time on Facebook, you should focus on effort there. If your audience reads online tutorials about topics relevant to your niche, maybe you need to produce your own tutorial content.
Without a thorough understanding of your audience’s needs and requirements, you won’t be able to make effective use of the online channels at your disposal – you’ll just be trying out different things at random, and that’s a terrible waste of your precious resources.
Base Your SEO on Search Page Results of Your Niche
Too often, small businesses have no idea who or what they are actually competing with in the search engine.
For example, if you want to focus on a keyword that has a lot of huge international companies ranking on the first page, you should realize that perhaps your expectations need to be tempered.
Another example: if search engines show a lot of images or videos in their results for keywords you want to be visible for, you should consider producing that sort of content rather than just focus purely on text.
Also, often search engines will show local business results – if that’s the case, your efforts need to be adjusted to focus on achieving visibility in those types of results.
Be Authentic
Hiring somebody on the cheap to run your Twitter account or build links for you may seem like a tempting idea but it can – and probably will – backfire.
If you haven’t got much of a marketing budget, take one step at a time but do it yourself as nobody knows your business and your customers better than you. Connect with them personally, do not count on somebody else spamming them on your behalf resulting in any positive outcome.