Small Business owners are busy, we know this for a fact. There’s so much to do, all the time, but it’s worth it right? You get to be the captain of your own ship, and work for YOU! If you own a small business, you most likely have a website out there. If you don’t, you should definitely start there. websitetooltester has a great deal of information to get you started. If you do have a site already, do you manage it or do you pay someone else to take care of it? Either way, your small business SEO practice should be a priority. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it plays a huge part in how your website ranks when somebody searches for businesses like yours.
Why would SEO be important for me? My business is pretty small and I’m busy as it is…
Even if your business is small, and you’re plenty busy, there’s still some fairly crucial reasons you’d want to keep up with SEO.
It Builds Brand Awareness
When your website ranks higher in search engine results, you are building brand awareness. In fact, if you’re not on the first page of results, you’re likely to never be seen. On average, the first organic result in Google Search has an average click-through rate of 28.5%, according to a newly published study. Click through rates drop drastically with the second position coming in at 15% and 11% for the third.
If a potential customer is looking for “handmade kitten mittens”, and that’s what your business is about; it’s in your businesses best interest to be on the first page, at the very least.
Optimizing Your Website Makes It More User Friendly
Have you ever found yourself on a website, and you REALLY want to buy their product, but you try and try and their website just won’t work? Yeah, me too. Eventually I gave up and went somewhere else and bought something I could actually acquire without the hassle.
User accessibility is imperative. It is a time intensive task, but important for your business’s continual growth. SEO will help small business owners create a faster, smoother, and thus a friendlier site for people to purchase whatever amazing thing you may have to offer them! Don’t forget to make your site mobile and tablet friendly as well!
It Lends You More Credibility
However baseless it might seem; most people are more likely to trust the companies they find in the first search results than the rest. It gives potential customers the sense that you have probably been around for a long time, and that you’re one of the best in your niche.
So, are you ready to dip your toes into the ocean of SEO yet?
We have compiled a list of SEO practices we think you, the business owner, could do yourself and save some extra dough on, and other things that may be better to outsource.
SEO Tactics Any Small Business Can DIY
1. Optimize your Google My Business page:
If you haven’t set up your Google My Business Page yet, stop reading now and go do that! You don’t need a “brick and mortar” address to sign up for your GMB page anymore, so it’s important for you to have a presence on Google, even if your customers don’t have a location to come to.
Having your information correctly listed, allows Google to act as a central location from where all other Google-related entities pull information about your business. Your optimization is key here, as a GMB listing can have impact anywhere in the sales funnel.
This article is a great place to start optimizing your GMB listing yourself.
2. Ask for reviews:
If you don’t have a lot of time to invest into DIY’ing your SEO, asking for reviews is a pretty easy way to leverage your business. How many times have you looked for a product or service and used the reviews as a major contributing factor to whether you’re going to purchase or call them? ALL. OF. THE. TIME.
I know it’s hard to ask people to do this, believe me. But it’s super important and there are lots of creative ways you can ask! There are plenty of platforms out there that help you organize and manage a review campaign too.
3. Research what your competition is doing:
For SEO, we are referencing your competitors online as “the websites that are showing up in the top 10 positions in a search engine query using your targeted keywords”. Now, this doesn’t need to be a sneaky affair. You’re not doing anything wrong keeping up with your competitors! Researching them keeps your business on par with others, and everyone growing. Believe it or not, competition with your competitors is a valuable tool!
4. Off-page SEO; social media, local link building, guest bloggers, and influencers:
First and foremost, you must have a good product or service. Don’t try putting lipstick on a pig, it’s just not worth it! Make sure you have your business brand clearly defined and that you are delivering quality. That makes your SEO much easier. Off-page SEO basically tells search engines what people think about your site, and product.
There are a ton of strategies you can take to heighten your off-page SEO. Factors include guest writers, relevant blogs, building relationships with influencers, giveaways, earning positive press, responding to any negative reviews you might receive, and monitoring who is mentioning you and reaching out to them.
All of these strategies could easily be blog posts of their own, so I recommend researching each and seeing if it’s something you want to implement for your business.
What You May Want to Consider Outsourcing
Now, here’s the thing. You could totally do these next few things we came up with, however they are much more time intensive, and take some technical know-how. It may be in your businesses best interest to hire someone who is reputable, knows what they are doing, and can get it done in a fraction of the time you could do it yourself.
1. Technical SEO Issues
Ah yes, the hulking beast that is technical SEO. At first, it’s pretty tough to wrap your head around what this entails. It takes some technical savvy and experience to get it really dialed in. It is also incredibly important to keep your website up to date and running properly so that search engines can properly crawl and index your webpages.
Common technical SEO issues typically have to do with:
-Speed
-Duplicate content
-Broken links
-Improper use of canonical link elements
If there are problems with your foundation, or they need to go in for a “tune up”, it will likely be affecting your rankings and traffic.
2. Backlinks
Your backlinks are especially important because they act as a vote of confidence from one site to another. For links to help your SEO, they need to be helpful, high quality, and natural. Links remain as the one of the most important ranking factors used by Google and other search engines.
In fact, I have been linking throughout the content of this blog. I have found informative blogs and websites to help you, and in doing such it is helping other sites build their ranking.
There are guides available to learn more if it’s of interest, or you can reach out for help from an outside source.
3. Keywords
Keywords are important. You know, it’s your day off and you’re looking for the “Best Coffee Shop” in whatever area you might be in—and you let Google do the rest for you, right? Well, because those businesses have optimized for their keywords, Google is able to pick and choose who comes up first… and well, who doesn’t. It tough out there in the internet world.
Keywords basically act as the linchpin between what people are searching for and the content you are providing to fill that need. You want to provide keywords in such a way that it targets your audience and your content, and sometimes people might search for your product or service in different ways.
The world of keywords is vast, and it takes some know-how to really get it dialed in. Considering outsourcing this task may be in your best interest both monetarily and time wise.
4. Website Optimization
Your on-page optimization is more than just keywords. The on-page SEO helps search engines analyze your website and the content connected to it so that it can identify if a searchers query is relevant to your site. You want to do anything reasonable to target your keywords without coming off spammy, or you’re going to really miss out on some important ranking signals.
You will want to optimize for: titles, meta descriptions, header tags, body content and URL optimization. Basically, when a potential customer or client lands on your site, you will want them to do something. All of the on-page website optimizations come in to play to help guide the user through the process.
There are tasks within this that range from small tweaks to larger projects, so hiring someone to do it so it’s not a worry for you is probably your safest bet.
In Summary:
An SEO practice is something that even small business owners should be doing. Even if you only do what you are capable of yourself, this will have a positive impact on your online presence and thus your business dealings. There are some SEO practices that can easily be DIY’d, and some that are more time and knowledge/experience intensive that you may just want to outsource for.
Optimizing your Google My Business page, asking for positive reviews, researching your competitors, and off-page SEO are all things you, the business owner are totally capable of doing. Things to consider outsourcing are your technical SEO issues, backlink support, keywords, and website optimizations.
CyAs Tech can help you with every part of your SEO, or just where you might need some extra support.
We offer:
- Detailed SEO reports
- Custom SEO strategies
- Page rank summaries
- Content creation guidelines
- Ongoing, monthly optimization
Even if you only have a few questions, feel free to reach out to us for a complimentary consultation!