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Let’s face it: being a small business owner is tough and SEO is just another checkmark on your to-do list. Here are 5 small business SEO tips to save you time (and money) — all without using paid advertising.
As someone who helps businesses rank on Google (and other search engines) for a living, I get asked many questions about search engine optimization (SEO). Most of these questions are asked by business owners themselves. I get the feeling that most know they need SEO, however, they just don’t know where to start.
And this struggle doesn’t only apply to startups! I’ve seen larger established companies push SEO to the backburner too.
The truth is, SEO includes a lot of repetition. Yes, it takes time and energy upfront to learn and play around with…but what part of business doesn’t?
In this article, we’ll be touching on 5 small business SEO tips you must implement to rank on Google. I’m not against paid advertising, but once you stop paying for the campaigns, your lead generation and website traffic stops.
With SEO, on the other hand, you build long-term relationships with search engines. You ensure your content is as optimized and helpful as possible for your readers. Your work today will pay you dividends in the future.
Here’s what we will cover in this article today:
- List of the 5 most important steps to get right when starting your SEO journey for your business
- Actionable checklist of small business SEO tips after each section
- How to outsource SEO so you can focus on new ideas instead of repetitive tasks
Since this article goes in-depth on several SEO processes, I assume that you already have a beginner’s understanding of SEO. If this is not the case — and this is your first exposure to SEO — then I recommend reading this article first.
Sound good? Let’s get started.
1. Prioritize On-Page SEO
As explained in this article, on-page SEO is one of the 3 pillars of SEO. Don’t let this intimidate you though — it’s vital, but also very repetitive once you get the hang of it. Practice and repetition are key.
Simply put, on-page SEO is any action you take on your website to improve your rankings in the search results. Remember: the entire purpose of SEO is to rank as high as possible on the search engines. On-page SEO just encapsulates the process of optimizing your website content for SEO.
Your website has pages, posts, and all sorts of content. Making sure all of these things are fully optimized will increase your chances of ranking higher in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
For on-page optimization, knowledge of HTML or CSS is useful, but not necessary. Below is a quick checklist for on-page SEO. I recommend you go through page by page and ensure each element is optimized.
Of course, on-page SEO has many steps and rules, so it’s impossible to list them all here. But here are the most important steps to get right to increase the visibility of your content.
On-Page SEO: Quick Actionable Checklist For Small Business Owners
1. Is each blog post and page optimized? Double check you have a title tag, meta description, heading tags, and that your content provides a good user experience. This is the basic structure of your page.
2. Do all images (if any) have alt text, add to the article, and are stored in an optimized file? If a website is slow and laggy, this is most likely due to the file size of your images. Use .jpg image files instead of .png.
3. Are internal and outbound links properly formatted? Sponsored posts, fact-checking, and user-generated content use different HTML rel attribute tags. When linking to content, make sure you use the correct link type.
2. Publish Well-Written, High Quality Content
Tying into the point above, publishing high-quality content regularly on your website is excellent for SEO.
A large part of on-page SEO is balancing your website’s SEO needs with the reader’s needs. Provide relevant, engaging, and helpful content for your readers. After all, there’s no point in having an optimized website if your readers exit without the answer they were looking for.
The best way to do this is to start a blog. A blog is excellent for establishing yourself in your industry/niche, getting leads from readers, and building trust with your target audience.
Blog SEO: A Quick Checklist
1. Have a content calendar. What are your most popular products/services? What do your customers frequently ask questions about? Plan your blog posts ahead of time. Don’t publish just to publish — quality over quantity.
2. Implement keyword research. Before you write a word for your blog, complete thorough keyword research. You don’t have unlimited time, so you must get the most out of your work.
3. Ensure Website Is User Friendly (UX Design)
Of course you want a nice looking website for your business, but it should be designed with SEO in mind.
We’ve now moved onto an aspect of technical SEO, another pillar of SEO. Technical SEO encompasses the optimizations done to help index your website. It includes topics like site structure, indexation, and user experience (UX).
In this article, we will focus on the absolute basics of technical SEO. When I started my personal blog years ago, I remember learning about technical SEO and feeling overwhelmed. So, I will only walk you through the steps that you must do immediately to give your website a fighting chance in the SERPs.
Of course, SEO is vital, but if you were to follow any of these small business SEO tips, ensure the following 3 steps are perfect.
Technical SEO: Quick Actionable Checklist For Small Business Owners
1. UX Design: Make sure your website looks reasonably aesthetically pleasing to readers and is easy to navigate. There’s no need to get fancy, but make sure it meets your minimum viable standard and has some dignity. Don’t spend too much time on this step.
Also under this category are website speed and load time. Linked are tools to check your website metrics. If your website is lacking, double check the on-page SEO section above.
2. Submit Sitemap: This file lists your website’s essential pages for Google to crawl. You need to download and submit your sitemap.xml. Don’t overthink this — use Yoast SEO’s article or SEMRush’s article for guidance.
3. Submit Robots.txt file: This file tells search engines which URLs it can crawl on your website. Please note that this will not block Google from indexing a page on your website, this file will just avoid overloading your website with indexing requests.
Follow the steps in this article from The Search Guru.
4. Measure And Analyze Results
Another important step in SEO analysis is to analyze the results from your hard work. Not setting up tracking is a fatal mistake for any facet of your marketing, especially for SEO.
I’m not going to lie — this part isn’t exciting and will take tweaking and problem solving to get right. However, once you invest the upfront time and energy to learn to set up analytics and tracking, you won’t need to spend much time on it in the future.
So, my advice is to do it right the first time and actually learn something new. Eventually, you’ll likely outsource SEO and analytics to someone else, however you have to be that person now. Also, it helps to be able to read an analytics report regarding your business.
SEO Analysis: How To Set Up GA4 / GSC / SEO Tools
1. Setup Google Analytics 4 (GA4). This will be your main analytics dashboard. GA4 is relatively new (compared to GA3) and allows you to integrate data into reports from several data streams and apps. Super cool!
Follow this article from SEO Setups.
2. Setup Google Search Console (GSC). This will be your main SEO hub. GSC is vital for technical SEO, SERP tracking, and more.
Follow this article from Radd Interactive. Yes, you must set up both GA4 and GSC.
3. SEO Tools: There are many tools for SEO. Though you are free to do your own research, I recommend SEMRush. Do your keyword research, domain analysis, and competitor research here.
It has a pretty good free version, and the freemium version was exactly what I used for years until it made sense for me to upgrade due to my work.
Don’t subscribe to expensive SEO tools. Though helpful, they are also marketed extremely well. Personally, I recommend you start learning SEO by yourself and by the time your SEO and marketing budget grows, I’d just outsource SEO to someone else.
Those tools are meant for businesses (B2B tools), and as such, are quite pricey. More expensive tools won’t necessarily help you do SEO better, especially if you are new to SEO. Don’t fall for it.
5. Have Patience
SEO is a little different from other parts of digital marketing, and a big part of that is because SEO is a long-term game. Building SEO for your website takes time and energy investment upfront, which is quite different from paid advertising.
Your ROI statistics aren’t available immediately, which is demoralizing.
If you don’t start ranking for keywords right away, don’t worry! Keep publishing click-worthy content, monitor analytics, optimize all parts of your website, and continue learning about SEO.
The Takeaway
There you have it! Those were the 5 small business SEO tips to help rank on the first page of Google.
If you’re interested in outsourcing your SEO check out my services page. I’m an SEO specialist/consultant who has worked for and consulted for companies/agencies. Before that, I was an SEO content writer.
Here are some things I can help you with:
- Comprehensive SEO audit of your website (technical, on-page, off-page SEO)
- Content strategy creation (best keywords to rank for, detailed analysis of competitors, etc.)
- Optimize SEO for existing articles/pages (keyword targeting, readability, optimizing HTML, etc.)
- SEO consulting (you tell me your biggest pain points regarding SEO and I tell you how to fix it — or fix it for you)