All startups require special care. Search engine optimization (SEO) is part of a strong foundation for small business success. If a small business does SEO poorly, they risk becoming like one of those TV shows that airs on an obscure channel in the middle of the night. Even if it’s a great show, it will be hard for it to gain a following because it’s so hard to find. Similarly, you can have a wonderful business, but if Google does not show your website in their search results, then potential customers will struggle to find out about you.

When entrepreneurs get SEO right, they can see lifts in website traffic, brand visibility, and revenue. This makes for stronger growth and more sales opportunities.

If you start a business without a strategy in place to grow your online presence, you’ll see competitors take business from you since search has become an increasingly important driver of revenue for both B2B and B2C companies.

This post will cover the basics of SEO for small businesses from keyword research to tips on how to save time while creating quality content

What Is SEO for Small Businesses?

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your business’s website so that it can be found and indexed by search engine crawlers, which are bots that trawl the internet, finding and ranking content. (Check out this Complete Guide to SEO to learn more.)

Successful SEO for small businesses involves using several key components of content marketing. Master these fundamentals, and your traffic will start a steady upward ascent.

    • Keyword research — This is the act of learning which terms and phrases your potential customers type into search engines. By figuring out what people are searching for to find related businesses, to find information about your business, or to find information about a topic related to your business, you can create content that is useful to them. A good keyword strategy is monitored and updated regularly as the trends of how people search are always in flux. In order to stay on the cutting-edge, consider investigating the SEO strategies of your competitors using tools like Alexa’s Competitor Keyword Matrix.
    • Copywriting — If your pages are uninformative or confusing, people will bounce from your site soon after landing. On the other hand, if you create useful content that is well-laid-out and makes compelling arguments, your readers will be more likely to read your whole page (check out these SEO copywriting tips). This will increase the average time a user spends on your site, also known as time on site. The average time on site of a top 10 Google result is three minutes and 10 seconds, so it’s crucial to write quality copy that gets readers to stick around.
    • Content marketing — A well-crafted content marketing strategy emphasizes writing blog posts — each focused on a specific keyword — that inform and engage your target audience. Depending on the type of business you run, this may be a key part of your online strategy, and it may not. To test this out, consider creating a few information-driven posts using the hub and spoke strategy. This is when you create a landing page centered around a competitive keyword with decent search volume that is core to your small business; then you link back to that page via other blog posts that cover related, long-tail keywords. In doing so, you will create a site that is easy for both readers and search engine crawlers to navigate, which greatly affect how high a site’s pages rank in SERPs.
    • Link building — The number of internal links (linking to existing content within your own site) and external links (when a different site links to your content) is an indicator that SERPs use to determine the quality of your site. It’s especially helpful if you can get high-authority sites to link to your content as that is a strong indicator of the quality of your site.
    • Usability and UX — SERPs will downgrade you if you have a clunky, slow-to-load, or hard-to-navigate website. Plus, a well-designed page keeps visitors around longer.
    • Local SEO — A good local SEO strategy involves utilizing the above tactics but with a special focus on your immediate surroundings. Think blog posts on local topics, links from popular local newspapers, and Yelp reviews from local patrons.

Why Should You Care?

Without an SEO strategy, your website will likely struggle to appear in search results. Even for businesses with a local customer base, online visibility is essential. No longer are people strolling down main street hoping to stumble across a product they like or a service they need. Instead, they fire up their phone or computer — 86% of people use the internet to find local businesses.

That being the case, it’s no surprise that organic search (when people search a term and then click on a SERP link) drives 51% of all web traffic for both B2B and B2C.

If you want to make money in the modern business environment, it’s critical that you have a plan for ranking higher in SERPs.