As a small business owner, would you place your business in the basement of a warehouse in the middle of a desert with no easy roads that lead to your store? By not incorporating search engine optimization (SEO) into your small business plan, you are doing the same thing. SEO is becoming the most important internet marketing strategy you can use, because it can put your company on Main Street with glowing blinking arrows that point to what you have to offer. An aesthetically pleasing website that features a quality product is not going to cut it anymore, and some studies have shown that SEO is more important than paid search advertising, or pay per click (PPC). There are certain things that small business owners can do to boost their SEO that help their company get noticed.
Getting Started
Most websites can benefit from SEO, but for now let’s focus on non- ecommerce websites, meaning those websites that don’t directly sell product on their website. In many ways, small- business SEO is easier administer, because there is less competition and search queries are more specific. Let’s say you own a plumbing business in San Antonio, Texas. The first thing that you should do is sign up for Google’s Adwords tool so you can research keywords like San Antonio plumber, best plumbers in Texas and San Antonio toilet repairs. Search engines are all about solving problems. By getting in the mind of a potential customer you need to come up with keywords that will relate to how your company can solve their problems. The longer your list of keywords is, the better.
SEO-Friendly Web Content
Now that you have performed adequate keyword research, it’s important to place,(not stuff) those keywords throughout your website. The content of your website should be relevant, original and easy to understand. Search engines love original content, and creating unique blog posts will help boost your SEO. Building trust should be a priority so make sure the content you place on your website is reliable.
Utilize Tools
Besides Google Adwords, some other tools that will be helpful to understand your SEO campaign better are Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools. Also sign up to be on the local listings for Google, Yahoo and Bing so that these search engines can show a map of where your business is located, with your phone number, website and reviews.
Overlooked Tips
In an article titled “The Beginners Checklist for small Business SEO” from a search engine optimization tools company called SEOMoz.com, the author maps out some overlooked tips. Some of the tips include adding the company address and phone number on every single page of your website and creating a specific e-mail address for your website. The article also emphasizes how important SEO research is so that you can understand robots.txt and link building. The article suggests that you add your website to local directories, it says: “to find the relevant directories, use the list of link sources you created earlier. Also, you can try searching for ‘(your client’s local city name) business directory’ and ‘(your client’s industry) directory.’”
As the internet becomes more convoluted, algorithms change to seek out the most relevant information. To make sure your company stays ahead of the competition you have to understand the science and art behind SEO. If SEO is too time consuming, you can hire a company that specialize in link building and on-page optimization. By budgeting SEO into your business plan you could see a return on investment for years to come.
Greg Henderson 
Sarah Goodluck 
Chris Marentis 
Sachin Kr 
Laura Goede 
Amazing! I’m really pleased about reading this post where it gives me a lot of useful and helpful ideas I needed. Thanks a lot.
Hi, Teresa! I totally agree, especially with the end of the article: SEO can raise you in SERP, but doing it the wrong way, you can get penalized, so the best thing you can do (when you don’t know much about SEO and SEM) is to ask for help at a specialized company.
Tony recently posted..Central Vacuum Cleaners – A Simple Way to Have a Cleaner Home
There are many tools found to optimize our site to get highlighted by search engines. Too much of optimization is risk. White hat SEO is the best practice to bring our website in top ranking, it takes time but gives long term result. Now marketing trends are improved tremendously. Social media networks play a vital role in it. Good, quality and updated content with fine optimization makes our website a better one.
The most important thing for business marketing strategy is seo based competition analysis as it will show you what are the keywords that are getting more business, how many backlinks the competitor is getting and lot more. Even keyword research is equally important. Its better to be in top 20 list of google search results for a keyword that is having more traffic than to be on top of google search results for a keyword that promises very little traffic.
This post is not really for me, as I believe I am already past the basics of SEO, but it’s always good to read about it, so you don’t forget.
I did really like the analogy about Search engine rankings as putting your store in the basement of a warehouse in the middle of the desert. Haha that is spot on!
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The main point is,of course, SEO-friendly content. If you’d like to have a successful blog or site, then you should think much about content
Hiring SEO experts/agencies for SEO campaigns is advisable to have better and sustainable implementation and results.
Now that Google+ is available for company pages, I think establishing a profile there is worth adding to any SEO strategy – as the changes to search results with Search Plus Your World mean that anyone sharing your content or given your pages a +1 will show up in searches.
If you can become active on Google+ with people in your local area and also your niche (who can be from anywhere else) – it should improve your rankings. The trouble is that this, like any SEO activity, takes time and won’t bring results overnight.
Great tips and advice! Thanks for sharing!
Jon, I agree that companies should claim their Google+ profiles quickly. I notice a lot of people these days have Gmail, and when they’re signed in a search for something, having Google+ posts integrated with organic search results means these businesses can show up to.
Really levels the playing field!
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really cool set of tips, getting a local listing can do wonders if you are a location based business like a hotel or a restaurant. Also you need to focus on the reviews in listing because they can make a huge difference to the click through.
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SEO give us advantage over our competitors. We can never ignore the importance of SEO. But at the same time we also remember that good SEO is not an easy task. Search engine optimization has become highly technical. It requires a lot of research and technical abilities. Competitor analysis is also very important in SEO. The main problem is that It is really becomes hard to find a reliable agency for good SEO.