What Is Small Business SEO?

[Alice Thomas]

Starting a business is always a daunting venture. There are so many things to consider, like getting the right supplier, improving product quality, getting customers, offering support, and not getting pushed out of business by your competitors.

In fact, getting overshadowed by competition might be the worst fear of a would-be business. 

When you look at huge corporations, it’s not uncommon to feel dwarfed, to feel like you’ve got no chance of attracting customers, because everything you do, they do on a grander scale.

However, there is one thing, a great equalizer, that will help you stand toe-to-toe with the giants - and that thing is SEO.

This, in fact, will be the topic of our article today - what is SEO, what benefits does it have for a small business, and how to get the best out of it? Stay tuned, and find out!

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is a range of practices that are supposed to improve your ranking in Google’s search engine, thus making your website more visible to a person searching for a product or service relevant to your business.

Always consider consulting with experts from this niche such as top San Diego SEO companies, if you are not sure how the whole thing works.

However, that would imply that you already have a website in place. Indeed, not all small businesses have a website - 28% of them, in fact, here in the US, don’t have one.

And that’s a great shame. These businesses rely on old-fashioned and traditional methods, and while they may work okay, they’re still nowhere near as potent as something simple as having a website.

The reason behind this is that almost everyone is online now. Almost everyone has access to the internet and has a device on which they browse it. And almost everyone is going to go there first to find products/services.

This is where a website comes in. Not only is a website your storefront on the internet, but it’s also the first impression you’re making on a potential customer and a way to incentivize them to make a purchase. 

And considering almost 70% of customers abandon their carts and leave a website never to come back due to bad user experience, that first impression is vital.

Through SEO, you can not only reach people more easily, but you can also provide that user experience people want and need. Using well-thought-out SEO strategies is a good way to grow your business and a vital component of that growth.

How Does SEO Benefit Your Business

That is a good question. Since creating a website costs both time and money, that investment better be worth it!

And it is. It’s very much worth it - just a little bit of technical SEO can yield a 117% ROI within six months. If that’s not an incentive to get down with SEO, we don’t know what is!

One of the main benefits of SEO for a small business is that it builds brand awareness. Branding is a big deal nowadays, as brands tend to evoke trust within customers. It is simply not enough to have a good product anymore - you also have to know how to push it.

Imagine, for example, living in New York, home to many exclusive brands and large businesses. Ask any branding agency from NYC, and they’ll tell you that these brands rose to prominence not just because they had a great product but also because they knew how to get it out there.

With that said, SEO can help you greatly by pushing your brand to the forefront, where it will get recognized for its trustworthiness and quality. Furthermore, if you have solid SEO practices in place, you are sure to rank high in Google’s SERP, which will automatically make you an authority in your respective industry.

Leading from this, another major benefit of SEO for newer businesses is increased conversion rates. Being recognized as an authority makes it easier to convert simple visitors to customers.

It goes without saying that people don’t always buy things from you just because they landed on your website. People like to look around, compare prices, research, etc., before making a final purchase.

However, holding a high rank in SERP makes you their first stop, and once they realize you’ve got what they need, they will likely engage with you. It’s also a sheer numbers game - the more visitors you get, the more likely some of them will become your customers.

Finally, the most basic benefit of SEO is overcoming your competition (or, at least, evening the odds).

People usually don’t go farther than five top results in SERP, and they seldom go to page two. 

Getting into those top five search results increases the number of people that click on your link and builds up that authority we mentioned, and your website is more likely to be shared on other platforms and between people.

And by other websites and businesses too! One of the major components of SEO is link building - the practice of obtaining links and being linked to by other authoritative sources. 

If your website ranks high and has good, relevant content, it is much more likely other websites will point to it for further research and products/services it offers.

Best SEO Practices

Now that we know what SEO is and how it benefits your business, let’s review some of the most prudent practices employed by SEO masters.

Firstly, local SEO is, perhaps, your staunchest ally. It is proven that 86% of people use the internet to find a local business, and 29% use it to find a local business weekly. That’s a lot of people you could be serving and a lot you could be reaching with your website.

The way you attract locals to your website is by introducing specific geo-relevant keywords. 

So, for example, if you’re operating from NYC, you can put “New York” or “NYC” in tandem with your most relevant keywords, which will help narrow down your target audience to those people looking for a relevant product/service in New York.

This works because Google tends to display businesses closer to the geolocation where the search query was made first. This makes geo-relevant keywords very potent when it comes to pushing your website to the forefront of SERP.

Another thing you can do to improve your local SEO is to display your NAP on your website at all times. NAP stands for name, address, phone number - the three key channels through which folks can contact you.

Further, you should also keep on top of your Google My Business Account or your Bing Places of Business account. These two accounts are also a great way of keeping in touch with your visitors and customers, as this is where you can display critical information such as business hours, any changes to those, holidays, discounts, or answer questions.

Circling back to keywords makes sure you feature local, geo-relevant keywords in your meta titles and meta descriptions. 

A meta title is the title of your webpage, and it is the first thing displayed in SERP (the link you usually click on to enter a page). 

Meta descriptions are small paragraphs under the meta title that describe what a person can find on the page.

Incorporating local keywords here is important because of web crawlers - autonomous programs that scour the web and catalog sites and pages. 

If your meta title and description both feature a keyword relevant for a query, then it’s more likely to get a higher ranking in SERP.

Finally, try engaging with other businesses similar or relevant to yours.

We already mentioned link building and how it’s a very powerful tool in making your website more trustworthy. Creating a network of links with your partners and even some of your competitors allows you to support each other and drive business in the direction that is beneficial to you all.

Consider this - your business might cover one part of your respective industry, while another one covers another. You can then link to each other, pointing the customers to purchase products/services they need, and, at the same time, Google will boost both your rankings because you both have relevant information that other people might want to know.

Wrapping Up

In the end, it is important to say that starting your own business is never easy. There are a lot of considerations you have to make and a lot of things you need to mull over. However, there is one thing that’s certain: creating a website is never a bad thing, and SEO is your great equalizer.

As we said in the beginning, SEO allows you to make yourself known to the public. With proper SEO strategies, your small business can become as good and as important as the next megacorporation trying to establish a monopoly in your industry.

Finally, SEO is a cost-effective and almost surefire road to success. As long as your products and services are in demand and of respectable quality, SEO will never drive your costs up but help you turn a profit and ensure your business lasts a long time.

Author bio:

Tomas is a digital marketing specialist and a freelance blogger. His work is focusing on new web tech trends and digital voice distribution across different channels.

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