Seven SEO tips for small businesses to complement any other form of online activity in attracting customers. The first thing to point out is that SEO is a longer-term activity, much like planting seeds that over time will grow. So be prepared to invest the time in creating content and then planting that content on your blog or website.
Small businesses can be faced with a challenging situation when it comes to promoting their business, that situation is usually a limited marketing budget or lack of internal knowledge. Conventional advertising like radio, newspapers, or out-of-home advertising is relatively more expensive than digital marketing. Even online marketing via cost per click or display type advertising can drive up your cost of customer acquisition. This is why many small businesses should plan for the future and investigate up the most effective online advertising methods to scale their business.
SEO is one of the most affordable and effective digital marketing strategies, and there is no shortage of seo packages from advertising companies online. Although it does take time to scale your small business website organically via search results, SEO offers promising results without breaking the bank. If you want to succeed in SEO, do these seven simple steps.
1. Understand your audience
The first and most obvious tip in digital marketing is understanding your audience. Who do you want to sell to and why would they buy what you have to offer. Without understanding your audience, you will not know how to communicate with them. In turn, this will waste your efforts and budget. By fully understanding your audience demographics, psychographics, and pain points, you will know how to present your product or service that provides a solution for their problems.
2. Do extensive keyword research
Keyword research is the core of SEO marketing. SEO or otherwise known as “organic traffic” makes use of industry keywords to make your small business website rank on the first pages of search engines. And since you are probably a new business or new to your industry, you will want to stick to long-tail keywords that have less search volume and are more specific. For example, a core keyword would be “sales training” while a long tail keyword would be “online sales training courses”. By focusing your digital marketing efforts on a broader set of keywords ensure you are not wasting your efforts using vague and general keywords that other prominent brands in your niche are ranking highly on the search engine results.
3. Create killer content marketing strategies
One the critical seven SEO tips is to create great content. Content marketing is creating content to educate, entertain, and engage your target audience. Content can come in different types and formats such as podcasts, blogs, videos, infographics, slide presentations, and more.
For your content to rank, you have to optimize it for SEO. For instance, always ensure you keep an eye on your off-page and on-page SEO. Elements such as meta descriptions, H1, H2, H3 tags, images, internal and external links, slugs should have your keywords or any similar keywords.
Last but not least, your content will not grab attention if it’s not relevant and valuable to your audience. That being said, aside from the technical SEO details, prioritize quality content at all times.
4. Optimize social media channels
Social media marketing also makes use of SEO to rank on search engines. In fact, search engines would scale authoritative social media profiles. For brands, this is a huge opportunity to leverage social media marketing to promote your small business. To optimize social channels, be sure to complete your social profiles by integrating important keywords. Include images of your products and services, customer testimonials etc. Then ensure that valuable content is posted daily or weekly in order to become an authority in your market.
5. Repurpose evergreen content
Repurposing content involves adding to or completely revising content that a business has already posted online, where you now add more value. Repurposing evergreen content saves a business time because they do not need to write a new blog from scratch. This way, you can tap into different audiences that hang out on various social and advertising channels. For instance, you can turn your evergreen blog into a podcast or vice versa. So, this article on seven SEO tips could be repurposed with videos, adding text etc. Or you can turn your video tutorial into a compelling infographic. So, focus on evergreen content with the topics that are still relevant for the business today and will continue to be relevant for years to come.
6. Create backlinking campaigns
Backlinking is when you gain a mention from other sites that have high domain and page authority. For small businesses, this is a great opportunity to gain exposure within the site’s community or followers. Ensure that you’re getting quality backlinks from credible sites with the same target audience as you. Try guest posting or participating in forums. Better yet, you can try cold leads by asking for a backlink.
7. Monitor results
To really make use of these seven SEO tips and get the upper hand of using digital marketing is you have analytics to track and monitor results. This way, you can modify your future digital marketing campaigns. Moreover, you can also nip campaigns in the bud if they’re not generating traffic or conversions. Small businesses should monitor their advertising campaigns so they don’t waste time, money, and efforts.
