We’ve got a great guest blog from marketing expert, Sophie Comas from RImu Marketing with her tips on SEO for small businesses.
In today’s digital world more and more people are using search engines to source information, whether it is to find the time of the next film showing or the address of a good restaurant. Google now claim to process on average over 40,000 search queries per second or 3.5 billion per day. It is a missed opportunity not to ensure that your website is optimised, here are our top 6 things to think about:
- Understand your audience – we talk a lot about this in marketing because understanding who your ideal client is and their aspirations is the foundation of any good marketing. Without understanding this your tone of voice could be wrong or your creative not resonate with them. All leading to potentially costly mistakes.
- It’s all about content! You will see this everywhere, if you provide relevant and useful information to your ideal client then when they require your product or service they will think of you. Definitely do not copy content from other websites or duplicate content, the search engines will know and it counts as a black mark against you.
- Your website. This should be the hub of all marketing, ensuring that any activity you look at from a social media post through to an ad in a magazine will take your ideal client on the journey to engage with your product or service. It is critical to ensure that the pages are labelled correctly for the search engines to understand what the content is and your authority on this subject. If you can, it is also important to cross link to other parts of your website eg: to a contact form, your blog or product specific pages. You should go with the mind set that your website is never finished and adapt to the new algorithms.
- Remain patient, SEO takes time. Different media have different roles so you would expect to see an instant response from a social media post or email, but with SEO it takes time to build up. Unless you invest in pay per click advertising or online ads you should plan to work on your SEO rating over a period of time.
- Quality link building. Once your website pages have been optimised (or labelled) for the search engines then you can start to think about how to drive more engagement and interaction to help build on your authority. Link building with other good sites will help achieve this. But it can be difficult to achieve as more and more people are cautious about letting anyone feature on their site, so they have to be worth it.
- Consider cost per click advertising. This should be the last part of the jigsaw once you are happy that the site is optimised and all organic activity eg: writing a regular blog is happening. Ensure you understand the right key words that you need to focus on. Start by testing a wide number of key terms and then narrow your focus to the terms you see a response with.
SEO is a little bit of a mind field with lots of things to think about, the goal posts keep changing and it is an ongoing focus for many businesses. Having said that with a little time the rewards are there and it is without question the way the world is heading.
Sophie is a Freelance Marketing Consultant, who specialises in helping small/ medium size businesses to flourish through successful, results driven marketing campaigns.
Sources:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-mills/7-small-business-seo-tips_b_5536509.html
https://seoexpertbrad.com/10-seo-tips-for-small-business/
https://www.seomark.co.uk/small-business-seo-tips/