- SEO is a cheap and effective way to drive traffic to your small business website.
- Business owners and SEO experts say good URLs and strong meta descriptions are important.
- However, don’t overstuff your content with keywords or mimic other website copy.
- This article is part of our series, “Marketing for Small Businesses,” which explores the basics of marketing strategies for SBOs to acquire new customers and grow their business.
With paid advertising getting expensive and social media algorithms harder to crack than ever before, winning at search engine optimization (SEO) has become one of the cheapest and most effective marketing strategies for many crappy small businesses. It seems like
“Once you start ranking high on search engine result pages, you’re not paying for traffic,” says Neal Taparia, who has grown Unwind Media, a seven-figure gaming company that relies heavily on SEO. says Mr. “Obviously, getting quality search rankings takes effort and investment, but when you get there, you get highly motivated, quality traffic at a low cost of acquisition.”
Tapalia launched the company in 2020 and now says organic search accounts for 53% of the site’s traffic.
Legwork doesn’t have to be that difficult either. The strategies the small business owner and his SEO expert shared with his Insider have helped improve site rankings over time and build a meaningful flow of organic his traffic from search. It was helpful.
1. Get the technical elements of your website right
According to Taparia, Google’s goal is to rank the best sites at the top. So the baseline for any good SEO strategy is maintaining a great website.
Neil Tapalia
Courtesy of Neil Tapalia
Erin Fabio, founder and CEO of digital marketing agency Grit Studio, told Insider that too many small business owners interpret this as simply having a beautiful website design and adding a meta disk to their content page. He said it skips important technical optimizations like including descriptions and title tags. , to create proper URL structure and ensure fast site speed. “Technically optimizing is the first step, often a relatively low lift,” she said.
Another way to tell search engines that your website is great is to reduce your bounce rate, or the number of people leaving your site after viewing just one page. Tapalia asked us to think about this from a product perspective: Is your website easy to navigate? Are there eye-catching images that keep people scrolling? Are there elements that make the website more involved?
2. Focus on long-tail keywords
Targeting specific search terms or keywords across your website or through other means such as blogs is a key pillar of any successful SEO strategy. But Fabio said too many business owners are targeting the wrong keywords. “Small businesses should strive to rank for specific keywords, not general terms. If you’re trying to rank for ‘moisturizer,’ try ranking for ‘clean lavender moisturizer.’ It’s going to be more competitive than it would be if we were doing it,” says Fabio.
Marianna Saxe.
Courtesy of Marianna Saxe
In SEO terminology, these are often called long tail keywords. Marianna Sachse, founder of children’s clothing brand Jackalo, told Insider that she used Neil Patel’s Answer The Public tool, which is free to search three times a day, to find more specific keywords and content. “Searching for something like ‘children’s clothing’ will bring up a complete list of similar things that people are searching for. This will help you get the most out of your blog posts.” It gives me a long list of ideas,” she says, adding that 45% of her top blog posts in the past year have used this approach and other SEO best practices like continually updating content. 50% more landing page traffic from
3. Differentiate Your Content and Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Fabio says that blogging weekly about your target keywords is a great way to boost your website’s SEO. However, it is important that your content does not mimic other content’s rankings for the same keywords. Otherwise, it will be difficult to beat them in search results.
Taparia recommended doing a competitive analysis using the current top ranking articles. “Look at all the top search results and understand what content they have and why Google is showing them. What are users looking for in this content and what are they missing?” he said. For example, it may mean creating content that is more researched, organized in a more user-friendly way, or that meets a need or answers a question not served by other content. .
As you write, you’ll want to avoid the common mistakes of keyword stuffing. could actually be a negative signal for Google,” said Tapalia. There is no magic keyword count, but some experts aim to use a keyword in every 200 words. Sachse said he tackles this by incorporating keywords not only in text, but also in image subheads and alt text.
4. Look for Natural Opportunities to Link
Another effective way to improve search engine traffic for your business is to get links to your site from other quality sites. This will improve your domain authority. The worst way to approach this is the strategy many small business owners use, sending a bulk email to the publication asking them to add a link to your website in one of the articles. is to request. For one, people may ignore you. But the quality of the sites you link to is also important.
Tapalia approaches Unwind Media’s link strategy similarly to how other companies approach PR. That means looking for opportunities to provide real value to other sites. “The first big thing we did was look for opportunities to share our expertise with the Help a Reporter Out platform,” he said. “When they cite you, they often include a link to your site. This is a strong link. Especially if it’s from a well-known publication, Google trusts the publication. because there is.”
Tapalia also began conducting his own research and publishing the results on his company blog before sharing them with journalists. “For example, on one of our sites, we looked at the words that Americans have the most trouble spelling by state, created an infographic, and shared this research with journalists. We had our website cited and were able to drive traffic to that blog post,” he said, which led to organic traffic for this particular topic averaging about 620 per day in July. It improved from an average of about 4,800 per day in December, an improvement of 765%, he added.
Once you have all these strategies in place, “patience is the key,” Tapalia said.
“SEO grows over time, so by 12 months, you should see much stronger results than you did at 6.”
