SEO For Small Businesses: What Is It & How Will It Benefit Your Company?

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SEO is a term you’ll hear and see a lot as you start your small business. It’s an unavoidable aspect of digital marketing that plays a bigger role in your company’s success than you initially expected. With that in mind, every small business owner must understand SEO – you don’t need a deep level of intellect on this topic, but having a base understanding will help your business thrive.

Think of this guide as an introduction to SEO for small businesses. You’ll discover what it is, how it will benefit your company and the best way to create the ultimate SEO strategy.

A Brief Explanation Of SEO

Most of you will know that SEO stands for search engine optimisation – but what does this mean? People get confused about the term all the time when it’s actually rather simple. SEO is all about optimising your website and web pages for search engines. In a way, the term is fairly self-explanatory!

The developers at Google go one step further and say SEO is about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site.

As a result, there’s this concept of having either good or bad SEO. Good SEO is when your website and pages are optimised for search engines and this means they’re easier for people to find when Googling particular keywords or phrases. Your pages should appear on the first page of search results and the closer you are to the top, the better your SEO is.

Contrastingly, bad SEO is the opposite of this. It’s when your site isn’t optimised for search engines and this makes it harder for them to understand your content. As a consequence, search engines struggle to rank your pages and they don’t appear on the first page, making it tougher for users to find your site.

Getting To Grips With The Main Types Of SEO

One big reason for the general confusion around SEO is that it is often spoken about in different “types”. You’ve got general SEO which refers to the entire process of making your site ready for search engines, but you also have the following:

• On-Page SEO: This relates to a way of improving SEO by focusing on different aspects of the web pages themselves. On-page SEO looks at keyword optimisation to ensure the right words and phrases are focused on depending on the page content. It also focuses on the structure of your pages and the content with title tags, meta descriptions, headings, internal linking, images, etc.

• Off-Page SEO: Along with on-page SEO, you have off-page SEO. This shifts the focus to forces away from your website that improve its search engine performance. A big one here is link building (getting lots of links pointing back to your site from other websites, telling Google that your site is authoritative and increasing its ranking). Other concepts include getting citations in local business directories or driving traffic to your site through social media. 

• Technical SEO: Here, you’re looking at the deep technical aspects of your site that make it easier for search engines to find and index. This basically means they can spot your site and understand what the content is about, so then it can be ranked accordingly. Most of this is handled either by software or a dedicated SEO team and involves stuff like optimising the site loading speeds, creating an XML sitemap and many other technical things. 

• Local SEO: Next, there’s local SEO. This is when you try to make your website rank well in local searches. It’s essential for businesses with physical locations – even if you don’t get much business or revenue through your website. You’ll create a Google My Business page and focus on keywords with local search elements like “near me” or a location in them. It’s all about ensuring that people see your business when they look at Google Maps or are searching for your products/services close to where they are. 

• Mobile SEO: A large proportion of internet users will use mobile devices to search for things these days. It’s taking over from traditional desktop searches, meaning your website must be optimised for mobile search engines as well. This mainly revolves around having a mobile-friendly website that loads quickly and works perfectly on mobile devices. If your site doesn’t do this, it’ll struggle to rank. 

• Voice SEO: Finally, we have the latest arrival to the SEO bunch. Voice SEO is more about optimising your pages for voice searches. Lots of users are now searching Google using Alexa or Siri and asking questions. As such, the focus shifts to what’s known as “long-tail keywords” which are common phrases someone might ask, like “What’s the best coffee shop near me?”.

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The Best Way To Approach A Small Business SEO Strategy

Every small business requires an SEO strategy to get their website as high up the search rankings as possible. What’s the best way to approach this? The underlying golden rule of SEO is to make sure you do good keyword research beforehand. You need your website and its pages to rank for the relevant searches or you won’t be found by your target audience.

For example, if your small business sells cakes and other baked goods, your main keywords will centre around this.

As for the main strategy itself, it’s best to follow the concept of CFSEO. This stands for cross-functional SEO and is an approach that involves multiple experts across different departments. Rather than having SEO specialists handle everything alone, they liaise with content creators, web developers, social media specialists and others to create a more effective and efficient strategy to benefit your business from the ground up.

You can try to put a team like this together in your small business, but budget constraints often mean that hiring an SEO marketing agency is the better approach. Look for one with a cross-functional team so you know they’re utilising the expertise of numerous people rather than having one individual in charge of everything.

The bottom line is that an SEO strategy must target the right searches and align with all other aspects of marketing and web development if it’s to be truly successful.

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How SEO Benefits Small Businesses

Many small businesses debate the importance of SEO. They see why other businesses may benefit from it, but they don’t think it’s necessary for their company. This tends to happen when you don’t have a big online presence and you get customers from walk-ins and foot traffic.

Regardless of where you’re located or who your target audience is, SEO will always be beneficial as it brings the following advantages to the table:

• Get Seen By More People Online – It may surprise you to learn how many people begin the customer journey online. Even when someone walks into your local business, they may have started that journey with a quick Google. You can’t afford to be hidden from the online world, so SEO helps you be seen by more people and grow an online presence. No matter how much you try to convince yourself otherwise, an online presence is essential in the modern world.

• Improve Lead Conversion Rates – A good SEO strategy will create improvements in your lead conversion rates. Proper SEO means you’re setting your site up to be found by people searching for specific things. In essence, the people who see your website are already somewhat interested in what you offer. It means targeted traffic enters your site, which increases the conversion chances and means you can make more leads into paying customers!

• Establish A Presence On Google Maps – Local SEO is particularly beneficial for small businesses wishing to claim more foot traffic. If you run a cafe, restaurant, local store or anything similar, you need local SEO to establish a Google Maps presence. You’re literally putting your business on the map, so anyone who uses Google Maps sees your business and is more inclined to walk along and give you a go.

• Boost Your Reputation – Businesses that appear highly in search results will automatically have a better reputation than those lower down. It’s one of the funny quirks of SEO as users/consumers see the first few results and believe this includes the most credible and trustworthy businesses. If you can get higher in the rankings, you’ll earn a better reputation which can enhance your long-term success.

• Make More Money – Ultimately, the true benefit of SEO is that it helps you make more money. You do this by generating more traffic, which translates to more leads, but the leads are targeted so there’s a stronger chance of converting them. It all trickles down to more customers for your business, meaning more money is spent and you’re generating more revenue.

Few things are as essential for ALL small businesses as search engine optimisation. It can look like a big intimidating thing, but you must focus on it to push your company forward. Loads of small businesses fail simply because nobody knows about them – SEO gets your name out there and helps you survive.