small business seo
“We are a small business with a small budget, can you help with our SEO” A question that we get asked daily but the answer is often more complex!
The major issue providing SEO for small businesses is being able to manage the expectations of the site owner in line with the investment they are willing to make. The race to the top of the search engines has never been more complex, Google for one is introducing more complex algorithms to measure a sites authority. Their thinking is if you want to take advantage of the huge benefits from being on page 1 then you have to play your part and produce a high quality user experience for your visitors. So what can you do if you are a small business experimenting with marketing for the first time.
A few Simple Tips For Small Business
- Ensure that your website is search engine friendly – sounds obvious that following Googles best practices are advisable but many do not. Your website is your shop window; remember you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
- Research your market; what sort of keywords or phrases are your potential customers likely to use to find you. Look at the option of using Long-tail Yes, they don’t bring the same traffic separately but if you target multiple long tail keywords you can get lots of easy traffic. Not everybody is capable of ranking highly for highly competitive keywords but anybody (!) can rank for long tail keywords.
- Do some reverse engineering with the keywords you want to rank for by producing a simple Return on investment chart. Remember the greater the competition for a keyword the longer it will take to rank but these terms will certainly drive the greater volumes of traffic.
- Remain Unique – Duplication or plagiarism will guarantee a slap from Google which you may takes months to recover from. No two websites are the same so don’t expect to be able to copy the ideas of others.
- Produce good quality content that your visitors will engage with, write for your customer not search engines. A good tip in these days of Social Media is to claim authorship using Google+. Be inventive, create videos, statistics, infographics anything which your customer will find interesting.
- Never, Never be tempted to rush the process of building your sites authority through the buying of links.