The Ultimate Guide to SEO for Small Businesses

Benefits of Using a Website SEO Service

So we can see how much work an SEO partner can remove from your small business marketing to-do list, but let’s talk about what you gain in return.

Stay focused on growth

As mentioned above, SEO takes a lot of time—not just each individual tactic but also performing ongoing maintenance and staying on top of Google’s updates. By hiring a website SEO service provider, you no longer have to go down the rabbit hole of meta tag how-tos, SEO audits (unless you want to) and Google updates. This means you have more time to focus on other aspects of your business, like growing your offerings or clientele.

See quick(er) success

SEO efforts can take weeks and even months to show in terms of website traffic and more customers. So while I think that learning the hard way is often the best way, SEO’s long turnaround time makes it not the most fun place for trial and error. A small business SEO service has the combined years of experience among its specialists to be able to quickly identify wins and errors that might otherwise take you years (and precious brain cells) to achieve on your own. Plus, there are plenty of other aspects of your business that I’m sure you’re already learning the hard way.

A small business SEO service can take your traffic from good to growing.

Understand your data

The more quickly you can ramp up your website traffic, the better, because the more meaningful data you will have to work with. But what data is meaningful? How can you make sense of it all? This is another benefit of using a small business SEO service. They can take a look at your website traffic and glean key insights to inform your small business goals. They can help you to see:

• Which pages get the most visits
• Which calls to action are most effective
• Which landing pages convert highest,
• The demographic profile of your target audience.

These insights will inform your content strategy moving forward and help your SEO provider to refine its efforts down to only those that are worth your money.

Activate your marketing flywheel

Getting started with SEO can be slow, but good SEO tactics employed by a solid SEO company eventually creates a cycle that reinforces itself. When your website rank improves, more visitors will find your pages in search results. With more visitors arriving at and staying on your pages, you will rank higher. With high rank and wider exposure to your high-value content, more sites will link to your pages. This increases your domain authority and credibility, which further improves your website rank. And so on. And the higher you rank on Google, the more you will effectively reach your audience.

At its best, good SEO sets the flywheel in motion.

Generate more sales

When SEO is done right, you not only see more visitors to your website, but more qualified visitors. Since search engines return results to users who are actively searching for a particular term or phrase, getting to the top of that stack means you’re providing information to the people who want it most, when they want it. This means that the people arriving at your site through search are interested in buying and more likely to convert.

SEO Content Strategy

1. Make a list of topics.

Keywords are at the heart of SEO, but they’re no longer the first step to achieving organic growth. Instead, the first step is to make a list of topics you’d like your content to address.

To start, compile a list of about 10 words and terms associated with your product or service. Use an SEO tool ( Google’s Keyword Tool, Ahrefs , SEMRush or GrowthBar just to name a few) to research these words, identify their search volume, and come up with variations that make sense for your business.

By doing this, you are associating these topics with popular short-tail keywords, but you’re not dedicating individual blog posts to these keywords.

2. Make a list of long-tail keywords based on these topics.

During this step you’ll begin optimizing your pages for specific keywords. For each pillar you’ve identified, use your keyword tool to identify five to 10 long-tail keywords that dig deeper into the original topic keyword.

This helps businesses attract people who have varying interests and concerns — and ultimately create more entry points for people interested in what you have to offer.

Use your long-tail keywords to create blog posts or web pages that explain the specific topics within the pillars you’ve selected. Together, all of your long-tail keywords create a cluster around a pillar topic. Search engine algorithms depend on the relationships between clusters to connect users with the information they’re looking for.

3. Build pages for each topic.

When it comes to websites and ranking in search engines, trying to get one page to rank for a handful of keywords can be next to impossible. But, here’s where the rubber meets the road.

Use the pillar topics you came up with to create a page or post that gives a high-level overview of the topic using the long-tail keywords you came up with for each cluster in step two. These pillar pages can essentially be a table of contents, where you’re giving a description of the main topic, and briefing readers on subtopics you’ll elaborate on in other posts.

Ultimately, the number of topics for which you create pillar pages should coincide with your business needs, like the number of products and offerings you have. This will make it much easier for your prospects and customers to find you in search engines no matter what keywords they use.

4. Set up a blog.

As you write each blog post and expand on your clusters, you should do three things:

1. Don’t include your long-tail keyword more than three or four times throughout the page as Google doesn’t consider exact keyword matches as often as it used to. In fact, too many instances of your keyword can be a red flag to search engines that you’re keyword stuffing to gain rankings, and they’ll penalize you for this.
2. Second, always link out to the pillar page you created for your topics. You can do this in the form of tags in your content management system (CMS), or as basic anchor text in the body of the article.
3. Once you publish each blog post, link to it within the parent pillar page that supports the subtopic. By connecting both the pillar and the cluster in this way, you’re telling Google that there’s a relationship between the long-tail keyword and the overarching topic you’re trying to rank for.

5. Create a consistent blogging schedule.

Every blog post or web page you create doesn’t necessarily need to belong to a topic cluster. There’s also value in writing about tangential topics your customers care about to build authority with the Google algorithms.

With that in mind, make it a point to blog at least once a week. Remember, you are blogging primarily for your audience, not search engines, so study your target market and write about things that they are interested in.

It may be helpful to create a content strategy to remain consistent and focused on your goals.

9. Measure and track your content’s success.

SEO can take a lot of time and effort, and, because of this, you’ll want to know if your strategy works. It’s important to track your metrics to understand the success of your overall process, and identify possible areas for improvement.

You can monitor organic traffic using your preferred web analytics tool or create your own dashboard using Excel or Google Sheets. Also, tracking indexed pages, conversions, ROI, and your rankings on SERPs can help you recognize your success as well as identify areas of opportunity.