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An Intro to SEO Every Small Business Needs to Make the Most of Their Digital Marketing

An Intro to SEO Every Small Business Needs to Make the Most of Their Digital Marketing

SEO has changed significantly this year. It’s grown even more competitive in the COVID era.

Businesses are seeing more value in moving operations online, opening eCommerce stores, marketing via search engines and social media, and continuing to see revenues even in a pandemic.

To outpace your competition and rank high on search engines like Google, a small business website SEO strategy is needed. Let this be your intro to search engine optimization.

What you will read in this article are tested techniques that will maximize the likelihood of not only a first-page ranking but a first-place ranking. Here is what all businesses need to know when building their COVID-19 recovery digital marketing strategy.

What Matters Most in SEO?

High-quality content. If you consistently produce well-written, high-value, and engaging content across your website, you’re future-proof for whatever SEO algorithm changes may come. Content’s always going to count for everything. Ensure your website and its blogs are written exceptionally well, employing keywords strategically but also providing the reader with value.

How Do I Plan My SEO Content Marketing?

Your SEO content marketing strategy starts with selecting the right topics to feature on your website. Think about the following when trying to come up with something interesting to deliver.

  • What are the most valuable subjects for my customers? If what you’re writing matters to someone at a fundamental level, they’re going to be interested in clicking on it.
  • What questions do my customers have about my products or services? This is a great opportunity to answer them comprehensively.
  • What are my competitors doing? You don’t want to copy the competition but you can take inspiration from them in developing your own blog topics.

How Do I Choose Keywords For My SEO Strategy?

Keyword research and how you use your keywords are at the top of the SEO priority list. The keywords you choose will in large part guide your campaign. There are short-tail and long-tail keywords, high-competition and low-competition, local SEO keywords, detailed keywords, general keywords, and so much more.

Create a list of 10-25 keywords to start. Blend them throughout your content. Use them when posting on social media. By targeting the most likely keywords to be used in search queries, websites further their chances of being ranked in response. Keyword density per content will ideally be 1-2%. Remember this when optimizing your content marketing for SEO keywords.

Four Types of Users that Will Click On Your Website

SEO clicks will provide you with any one of 4 user types. 

  • Transactional users – would-be customers ready to buy.
  • Navigational users – someone searching for a specific website.
  • Informational users – users searching for the answer to a question.
  • Investigational users – users interested in an answer to a question with the intent of a purchase afterward.

As much as anyone may want, not every click is a guaranteed buy-in. Your SEO has to accommodate and consider each of these perspectives. If your content’s very sales language-heavy and not filled with high-value information, its bounce rate will soar. If you aren’t giving answers to common questions, this should also sound an alarm.

How Do I Know My SEO is Working?

The most valuable free SEO tool is Google Analytics. Analytics gives you insight into all sorts of search engine and website data including your average page ranking, click-through rates, bounce rates, and how many times you’ve been clicked on per keyword. All of this data is incredibly valuable in gaging on whether a strategy is working or not. You can also use it to assist in selecting the right keywords to structure your SEO around.

How Can I Get Better As A Blog Writer and SEO Expert?

Considering the insights you will cull from Google Analytics, it becomes easy to identify underperforming content. Work on optimizing these. Target older blog posts. Update them.

In addition, look at the SEO content that’s working. Produce more content like it. Optimizing outdated or underperforming content combined with pursuing the type of SEO content topics that are performing will equate to improved traffic and better engagement.

What is Structured Data?

Structured data and metadata help search engines understand what a website is about. This data is what shows up in response to a search engine query, and can display photos and additional data to help persuade a user to click on your website. Structured data can help a page rank higher. Fortunately, schema markup a.k.a. structured data is very easy to write. Needless to say, don’t skip this step when optimizing your website.

Are You Delivering What People Expect When They Click On You?

Searcher intent is a must in SEO planning. Search intent is why a user has clicked on your site. If your website doesn’t fulfill the user’s expectation, they’re going to leave and are highly likely to never click back on you again. They aren’t going to be happy. The content you create should deliver. At worst, content that doesn’t deliver is trying to trick the user into receiving a click or making a sale. This never works. At best, it’s bad writing when content doesn’t match the description given to it.

Why Do SEO Strategies Fail?

So you’ve created a great website. The content is filled with keywords but more importantly exceptionally written. So you wait for the users to come and convert. But they simply don’t. Everything looks good but your SEO plan isn’t working. Why?

  • Your website hasn’t been properly optimized with details like page titles, XML sitemaps, meta descriptions, URLs, and keyword density lacking. If this is you, the fix is fortunately simple.
  • Your content’s too thin. Google’s SEO algorithm rewards the most helpful content to a keyword. Evaluating the top-ranked pages for high-competition keywords, we use the content’s usually in the 1,500-2,000 word range. If your pages are short and simple, they might not have enough words for search engines to consider them ‘quality’.
  • Your website doesn’t have enough links. If your content’s useful, it will likely naturally receive external links from other websites. There’s also a lot of value in internal linking, connecting your website in intelligent ways across the keywords you want to rank for.
  • The keywords you’ve chosen have such tough competition that you aren’t ranking anywhere close to the first page with them. This is the most common reason SEO strategies and optimized websites fail.

All in all, SEO algorithms are tough buggers. Every year, they change ever so slightly. SEO is complicated. It requires a committed person to oversee an SEO strategy and ensure the momentum’s moving in the right direction.

People Search Locally

Search engines prioritize results based on a lot of things, including location. The keywords you choose should include a city, province, or country name. The locations where you operate, include those in your keyword mix. Mention them in your content.

What Else Can You Do to Maximize Local SEO?

More people are searching through Google Maps and engines that use location as the top ranking factor. Therefore, there’s a lot you can do to give your brand the best shot at getting exposure through these means. Ensure you’re registered in relevant online business directories, optimize your Google My Business listing, and create location-based and SEO-friendly landing pages.

SEO is an investment. It’s low-cost and high-ROI. It’s free traffic, leads, and customers. SEO is building your brand in visibility and reputation. It’s a way to beat big brands and win customers from your competition. Let this be the beginning of a new period of revenues, profitability, and business strength. With more people than ever shopping online, you can rank your website high on Google with the SEO experts at Unlimited Exposure. This is your opportunity. Take it.