As a small business owner, you understand how difficult it is to make an impact on the digital landscape. How will your company stand out among so many competing companies seeking attention? Will clients discover your brand while looking for a solution, or will larger corporations win the search engine war?
Does SEO work for small businesses?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a long-term strategy that helps generate traffic for websites. It involves the implementation of various methods and processes that aim to rank your website and any web content higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).
Although it may be quite intimidating to compete with other websites that have been existing longer than your business, search engines are fair when it comes to reciprocating your efforts in optimizing your website for the right keywords and generating relevant content and that gives value to your target audiences. However, it is to be expected that things will not come easy and SEO results will not appear right away. But the assurance is: SEO does work for small businesses. In fact, it is the best way to boost your website.
5 advantages of SEO for small businesses
Considering SEO as a part of your digital marketing strategies is the best choice that small businesses with websites can do. The following are the reasons why:
1. You will gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace
Over three billion people utilize the Internet for a wide range of activities, including searching for information and purchasing goods and services. Breaking through the cacophony as a sole proprietor may appear to be an insurmountable undertaking. But employing SEO will help improve your brand's ranking in search results in a cost-effective way to get recognition and a strategic edge in your sector.
2. You will reach your intended audience in an efficient and accurate manner.
Rather than going to customers, starting SEO for your small business will allow customers to come to you. On-page and off-page SEO methods are both intended to target certain groups of your audience and motivate them to take action. Proper SEO for small businesses management enables your small business to form significant connections with clients.
3. You can provide relevant information
Have you ever looked for information online and not found an answer on the first, second, or third page of results? It's an unpleasant experience, and the reason isn't a lack of knowledge, but rather an excess of badly handled SEO strategies. The SEO and position of your website in search engine results are critical to answering a common inquiry, addressing an issue, or satisfying a demand.
4. You can expand your brand’s presence
Being able to find your website and your website’s pages on the first page of the SERPs will gain your brand popularity, thus, more traffic. More people will also become more aware of the existence of your brand. With SEO, you can get your content at the top of these pages, and thus, expand your brand presence.
5. You will gain conversions
Aside from expanding your brand presence and gaining traffic, SEO for small businesses will also help you gain conversions. Your high-quality content and products will, of course, do the rest of the work but SEO will bring people to read and scroll them through.
How Can Small Businesses Get Started With SEO?
Whether you want to do SEO on your own or hire a digital agency is up to you. Nonetheless, you need to learn how SEO works and how it affects your business. Here are the ways you can get started:
1. Do a Keyword Research
2. Learn On-Page and Off-Page SEO Strategies
3. Know How to Optimize Your Content
4. Know How to Optimize Your Web Images
5. Know How to Analyze Data and Come up With Insights
1. Do A Keyword Research
Keywords are used to give the search engine a hint about what your website content is all about. Conducting keyword research will give you insights about how many people are searching for data, products, or information using that short or long phrase. It will also help you find out how many are also using that keyword to rank their content. This phase is a crucial step in SEO. It will make sure that you won’t execute optimization efforts blindly.
2. Learn On-Page and Off-Page SEO Strategies
Both on-page and off-page aspects influence search engine results and should be taken into account when developing an SEO for small businesses strategy.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO or sometimes known as ‘on-site SEO’ is the process of optimizing your website content and other website factors that affect search rankings. The strategies implemented often include writing your web content and improving the title tags, internal links, alt text for images, and URLs using the keywords gathered from your keyword research.
Off-page SEO
On the other hand, Off-Page SEO or ‘off-site SEO’ pertains to measures or strategies conducted beyond your own website that influences your ranks in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This includes strong link-building campaigns, content marketing, guest posting, and other indirect strategies such as social media marketing and video marketing.
To design and execute a successful link-building campaign for your website, you must first realize that link building is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. One that necessitates talent and a deep understanding of the subject of SEO.
A Strong Backlink's Anatomy
● Domain authority is high.
● PageRank is really high.
● a high trust rating
● Co-citations that are relevant
● A page title that is relevant
● A content subject that is relevant
● Keywords to target in anchor text
● positioned in the main content section
● Page's age
● The age of the backlink
● Dofollow hyperlink
Essentially, you want to obtain as many backlinks as possible from other sites that are closely relevant to the niche of your site and its internal pages.
You also want a link profile that is diversified and appears genuine.
Connections from various sorts of sites (posts, media sites,.edu &.gov websites, discussions, indexes, social media, and so on...) that have natural linking patterns and a decent balance of dofollow and nofollow links. (There will be no excessively keyword-optimized anchor texts!)
3. Know How to Optimize Your Content
Web content refers to any content published on your website; this includes any texts, images, and videos. Content does a lot to help your website pages rank in the Search Engine Results Pages. Aside from your main pages, here are other areas that you need to optimize:
● Meta Title. This is also known as the title tag and represents the title of the web pages in the SERPs. The best way to optimize your title tag is to add the page’s main keyword to make it more relevant.
●Meta Description. Meta descriptions provide a brief summary of your web pages. This can be found below the page title in the SERPs. You need to add your main keyword at least once in your meta descriptions as well.
●Landing Pages. These are standalone web pages that are used for marketing, specifically made to encourage conversions and generate leads. When writing content for landing pages, you need to insert your keyword at least 2-4 times within the content.
● URLs. If possible, use a keyword on your URLs. This will make it even easier to hint the Search Engine about what the content is all about.
Other than inserting your keyword/s within your content, it is important to remember that your content must be relevant and able to add value to your visitors. Be warned that keyword stuffing will do more bad than good and will only lead you to be penalized.
4. Know How to Optimize Your Web Images
Images help a lot in conveying your brand message to your visitors. They are also valuable especially for eCommerce stores that use them to represent the products that these businesses sell. Therefore, they need to be optimized because not only will it help your images be found on the search engines, it will also help optimize your website performance.
To optimize your website images, you can do the following:
●Use image compression tools. Running your images through image compression tools will help to significantly reduce the size of your images.
●Use Descriptive Alt Tags. This will give the search engine descriptive text about the image so that it will be indexed correctly.
● Use the right file formats. Logos, banners, and your other web images require specific file formats and some file formats consume a lot of space. PNGs for example are heavier in terms of file sizes compared to JPEGs. Make sure to take note of the necessary file formats for each image you upload on your website.
5. Know How to Analyze Data and Come up With Insights
Are your campaigns working? Do you see results from your efforts? What is the current situation of your website in the search rankings? These questions can be answered with the help of Google Analytics and other SEO tools. However, it is meaningless to have access to your SEO data and not know how to analyze it.
In order to come up with insights, you must know the data or SEO metrics that you need to monitor. You must also find out why they are important and how they influence the search engine rankings. Here are some of the SEO Metrics that you need to frequently check:
● Organic Traffic. These are the number of visitors that land on your web pages directly from the SERPs. If you have a lot of organic traffic, it can only mean that your web pages appear a lot or frequently in the SERPs.
●Click-through-rate. This data represents the number of people who clicked through a specific link from your campaigns such as emails or your CTA buttons.
●Bounce Rate. This represents the percentage number of visitors who come to your website and leave without navigating through other pages. A high bounce rate would mean that you are not meeting your visitor’s expectations.
● New Referring Domains. This represents the new backlinks you gained from unique domains. The more referring domains you have from high-quality websites, the more Google will consider your website as trustworthy and of good authority.
Aside from these, the other SEO metrics you need to know are your Domain Authority (DA), Keyword Rankings, Backlinks, and the number of your indexed pages.
How much does SEO cost monthly for a small business?
If you plan to hire a freelancer or a digital marketing agency, you must have an idea about how much the average cost is for the services. The cost of search engine optimization (SEO) is determined by the payment arrangement used by the service provider. However, in 2021, the typical cost of SEO is $750 to $2000 per month, $80 to $200 per hour, or $5,000 to $30,000 per project.
Hourly rate ($80-$200)
Many small businesses spend between $80 and $200 per hour, depending on whether they employ an individual or a small team, and if the consultant is new to SEO or has years of expertise.
Project($5000-$30,000)
While it is uncommon, a corporation may employ an agency or consultant to implement an SEO strategy on a specific project or campaign. It's tough to generate an estimate because project demands vary per firm and campaign, and expenses might range from $5,000 to more than $30,000.
The cost is ultimately determined by the extent of the project, the duration, and the amount of experience.
($750-$2000/month)
This is the most common plan for businesses that wish to establish an ongoing SEO strategy while still utilizing services as needed.
At the low end of the range, an agency will execute basic SEO chores such as on-page optimization and copywriting for around $500 per month. At the high end – $5000 a month or more – agencies will create high-quality content and distribute it to other websites in order to build links.
Most businesses lie somewhere in the middle, paying between $750 and $2000 per month in a customized plan based on the services they require. The advantage of this price plan is that as you develop a connection with an agency, they will be able to gradually improve your site's SEO.
Conclusion
Although digital marketing strategies are continuously changing, SEO will always be the best option to help boost your small business. When SEO is done correctly, your small company website will gain long-term growth and lasting power.
If you want to create an SEO plan for your small business, don't be afraid to do so! Nothing is accomplished until you begin with something. However, be warned to not get fixated with the rankings because this is a common mistake many small businesses make. Keyword rankings are very important, for sure, but if you fixate on it, tendencies are, you will forget about improving your products and giving value to your customers.
About the Author:
Yen Pedrajas – full-time Lead of SEO at Removal.AI - an ecommerce platform used to remove background from image automatically.
She is also an ecommerce and digital marketing enthusiast who loves to share and write new insights and perspectives about marketing and growth hacking for startup business.
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