Small to midsize businesses need to develop an SEO strategy and remain consistent in order to drive organic traffic. A small business SEO strategy will generate long-term results for your company and ensure that you’re getting found by search engines.
What goes into SEO? Here are 7 factors that you need to consider when implementing a strategy for your business.
Content
The first aspect to consider is content. Your content should:
- Inform
- Engage
- Answer questions
A content creation strategy is crucial to driving long-term organic traffic to your website and consistently creating quality content will increase your chances of success.
In an era where more content is being created than ever before, focus on quality over quantity. Some main forums of content creation and their promotional channels include:
- Visual (video, infographic)
- Text (blogs)
- Voice (podcasts)
After creating the content, it’s important that you’re using the appropriate promotional channels to deliver your messaging. By leveraging a variety of promotional channels, you’ll be able to deliver content to users based on their preferred method of content consumption.
Some users prefer podcasts in the car while they’re driving to work, others prefer to watch a YouTube video while they’re laying on the couch; Try and cater to as many channels as possible to increase the audience you’re getting in front of.
Link building
Link building is the process of gaining ‘backlinks’ to your website/content. This matters because link building can be a significant source of traffic. Here’s an example of what link building looks like:
- Company X is a fitness company and creates a blog post detailing how to get in great shape before the summer.
- A fitness magazine is made aware of this blog post and then posts a link to that blog that begins driving users to your website.
- The users find the content engaging and then reach out to the fitness company to help them create a fitness plan that works for them.
- As more users see this post, they begin to then create backlinks to that article as well.
The results here are two-fold. You’re increasing traffic by receiving multiple backlinks – we’ll call this the ‘compound interest (backlink)’ impact. As the backlinks start providing more traffic, more users are reaching out to the fitness company for consulting services.
Sounds easy enough, so why doesn’t everyone do it? Plain and simple, it’s hard. The challenges are:
- The content must be high quality; Or else why would anyone link to it?
- Every company with an SEO strategy knows backlinks are a crucial aspect and are competing for them
- It’s a time consuming, manual process to try and get your content in front of the correct audience when asking for backlinks
Don’t be turned off by the challenges, we’re breaking down a backlink strategy for you that you can use to start building high quality links that drive traffic.
Social networks
You’re probably seeing a trend that everything we’re talking about has the same main goal: driving users to your site.
Social networks are no different and are a great channel to promote your business. By posting high quality videos (YouTube), pictures (Instagram), text (Twitter/LinkedIn), you’re leveraging multiple channels to drive users to your business. That’s not to say that these are the only social channels, but are meant to provide an example of how to look at social networks and what they can do for you based on the type of content you’re promoting.
Social networks should:
- Promote informative content
- Engage audiences
- Drive traffic
Although we’re specifically discussing a small business SEO strategy, let’s take a look at a tweet that Nike put out in 2019 that received incredibly high engagement.
The messaging behind their ‘show them what crazy can do’ campaign resonates so well with users that it was ‘liked’ over 444k times and shared over 190k times.
You’re probably thinking, ‘yeah that’s because they’re Nike, everyone loves Nike.’, true, but the majority of their tweets get about .003 % of the engagement compared to that campaign. The data here clearly shows that there was something highly valuable that resonated with a large audience in their ‘crazy’ campaign, and they will therefore strive to make more content like that in the future.
Whether you’re Nike or a small, one-person startup, your audience will tell you what is valuable to them and what isn’t; Strive for value.
Website optimization
Sticking with the trend of driving traffic to your website, driving traffic to your website does you no good if its not optimized and user-friendly. Your website should:
- Load quickly
- Be visually appealing
- Have easy to read messaging
- Be filled with high quality content
- Enable easy navigation
For speed – look at GTmetrix. For an overall SEO audit, consider using Moz.
Your website should immediately deliver the message of what your organization does. Look at Neil Patel’s website as a prime example of clear messaging that is immediately visible.
Just by looking at his homepage for 2 seconds, you’ll see that he can help your business drive more traffic. Too often, a company will use fancy ‘jargon’ to try and explain what they do, assuming the users are as intimate within their business model as they are, this is not the case. Keep it simple.
Finally, all of the high quality content that we discussed earlier should be highlighted on your website in a fashion that is easy to navigate. Users should not have to spend time searching for what your offering is, where your blog might be, or how to get in contact with you.
Users leaving your site frustrated will increase your bounce rate significantly.
After you’ve provided significant value for your clients and have established lasting relationships, it’s time to ask for reviews and testimonials.
The first thing many prospects do while trying to decide whether or not they should work with your business is to look for feedback from other organizations/people you’ve worked with. Two key drivers of feedback are:
- Testimonials
Testimonials are highlighted on your website and usually have a quote, short video, or article on how you’ve helped solve customer challenges. HubSpot shows 14 examples that you should consider implementing. The goal of the testimonial is to recognize organizations you’ve worked with, display feedback from that organization that shows how you’ve helped them, and finally gain credibility.
- Google reviews
Google reviews are similar to testimonials but are displayed on your google my business page. Let’s say you’re looking into joining a Coworking space to network and leverage office space, you’ll first google ‘coworking spaces’ and then narrow your options down by location and credibility. We did just that and came across a Coworking space in Long Island with stellar reviews; Example below:
This space has built trust among their clients, and that trust is clearly displayed with a 4.8-star rating on google.
Reviews are a great way of getting feedback from those who have already used/worked with the organization you’re interested in without having to actually reach out to anyone.
Keyword research
With all of the content being created and optimization of your website, you should be focusing on targeted keywords that you can rank for (we’ll get to that shortly).
While performing keyword research, there are a few tools that you should look into:
- Google keyword planner (must have Google ads account)
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- Mangools (for lower budgets)
If you’re a smaller business, it will be difficult to rank for broad terms such as ‘tech company’, ‘marketing consultant’, or ‘best restaurant’. Your goal will be to focus on long tail keywords.
A long tail keyword consists of 3 to 4 words that are very specific to what you’re offering. The below chart will outline broad terms compared to long-tail keywords that you have a better chance at ranking for.
| Broad | Long Tail |
| Technology Company | Server and storage specialist |
| Marketing Consultant | SEO for small businesses |
| Best restaurant | Italian Restaurant in Bergen County |
The long tail keywords will be much more specific to what you’re offering, and have less competition than the very high level terms that people search for.
Ranking
Finally, the goal of the previous 6 steps all factor into your ranking. This implies where your organization is sitting when search terms are inputted into search engines. For example, if you’re searching for ‘italian restaurant Bergen County’, the below is what we come up with:
These restaurants are the first three that show up on the first page of Google (you’ll notice that they all have stellar reviews from their customers). Positions 1-10 usually mean that you’re on the first page of search engines for a specific keywords or term.
SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console are all great tools that will show you what your organization is ranking for. As you leverage these tools, take note of the progress your site is making as it begins to rank higher, and continuously optimize your content to improve your rankings.
Final thoughts on SEO
Remember, SEO is not enhanced overnight. Your small business SEO strategy will take time and consistency for the best results. Within our own content creation strategy, we sometimes find that it can take 6-9 months before you start to rank well.
Because you’re a small business and don’t have significant capital to dump into paid advertising, a search engine optimization strategy will pay long-term dividends at a fraction of the cost.
Whether you execute this strategy in-house or are looking to leverage an SEO consultant, contact us to discuss how you can propel the organic reach of your small business.
Gary McConnell Co-founded Rubicom Digital in 2019 with a goal of providing digital marketing consulting services in the B2B space.
Gary continues to serve as the Marketing Director of a Data Center-focused IT Provider, VirtuIT Systems.