Over time, SEO has come to be seen as crucial in the success and growth of small businesses across the globe. As a result, a large percentage of small businesses have begun (or attempted to begin) SEO campaigns aimed at increasing their online visibility and web traffic. Still, because much of the population is still unfamiliar with SEO and how it works, oftentimes these campaigns do not live up to the expectations of those conducting them. Optimizing your SEO campaign to where it can achieve its greatest potential can be tricky and this post is here to help you ensure you’re doing everything you can to help your small business improve its SEO.
Keywords
For people new to SEO, selecting the right keywords for your SEO campaign can be tricky. When trying to determine the right keywords, you want to make sure that these keywords have intent, relevance, and search volume. For example, if you are a small business in the Denver, Colorado area that provides roadside assistance, you want to choose keywords that are relevant to your business and have a high search volume. In this case, a good keyword to use would be something like “Roadside Assistance Denver.” If you were to simply use “roadside assistance” without Denver in the term, then this keyword would essentially have you trying to rank on a national scale, competing with big names like AAA. Therefore, by including “Denver” in the keyword, you’re effectively limiting the scope and creating a more relevant, intentional keyword and will soon be ranking much higher. In the case of local SEO for small businesses, by fine tuning your keywords you’ll be able to conduct an effective, affordable SEO campaign that will set you up for success down the road.
Blogging
One of the best things a small business can do to improve it’s SEO campaign is to begin a blog. Blogs are great in that they’ll give you plenty of extra SEO “juice” to take your marketing to the next level. Firstly, blogs are great at helping you easily expand the size of your website. It’s important to know that Google really likes to see large websites that are regularly adding pages and new content. They see you as taking a more active approach to your website and will take this into consideration when determining how to rank you. Secondly, creating a blog will work wonders in helping you gain authority within your industry. By writing blog posts that focus on including target keywords, over time Google, as it sends its crawlers to your site, will begin to see you as being authoritative within your industry and will reward you with a higher ranking. Still, blogging can be a little intimidating to someone new to it. At the end of the day however, having a team member of your small business write 2-4 blogs per month will seriously help you boost your online visibility. These blogs don’t have to be anything crazy – simply writing 300-500 words, including your keywords, and including numerous links to other content within your website as well as to other websites will have you boosting your rankings in no time.
Link building
One of the most difficult aspects of conducting an SEO campaign for a small business is building links with other, more authoritative websites. Arguably the most crucial aspect of SEO today is having as many other websites point back to yours by including a link to your website on theirs. Having other websites that have a higher domain authority point back to yours will help increase your legitimacy in the eyes of Google and other search engines. For example, if you are a roadside assistance business in the Denver area, trying to have a link to your website on AAA will seriously help you increase your online visibility. If you’re a small business looking to conduct a highly effective campaign, be sure to speak with your SEO specialist for tips on putting together the best possible link building strategy.
