SEO club at Idea Digital Agency is an opportunity to listen to a presentation on an interesting topic and share something new in the world of SEO with colleagues. This time, Dmitry Markov, Middle SEO in the English-speaking team, shares ideas on how to promote small businesses in organic search.
In this report, we will talk to you about SEO for small businesses, how to develop an effective strategy, what to consider, how to set goals, and about small business promotion tips that will be interesting not only to SEO specialists, but also to company owners.
You can view the presentation here.
Why Is SEO so difficult for small business owners?
Many people think that SEO is too complicated
Often business owners do not understand how search engine optimization works, what stages it consists of, how to build a promotion plan, where to start. Of course, SEO is not just optimizing a page with metadata and titles, but still, it is not nuclear physics, and if you get acquainted with the basic principles, everything becomes much clearer.
There is an opinion that SEO is expensive
Sometimes, company owners are quoted very high prices for promotion, whether by an agency or freelancers. If the client has not done SEO before and does not understand how it works, he may be put off by the announced check for promotion services. In addition, SEO is a long-term process. Depending on the niche and competition, achieving results can take a long time, but this is an additional expense. However search engine optimization is not always expensive. In fact, you can start with small budgets, and move gradually, and along with SEO promotion, sales will undoubtedly come, because this is the main goal - to bring customers to the site.
There is no understanding of the value of SEO promotion for business
One of the most common problems is when a business owner cannot relate how SEO promotion helps the company grow and develop, and achieve commercial goals. This requires a well-thought-out SEO strategy at the initial stage, a full analysis of keywords and competitors, setting short-term and long-term goals, as well as a transparent reporting and analytics system that shows how we are moving, at what speed, and with what result.
Unreadiness to scale and grow
Take, for example, an online store. When analyzing competitors, it turns out that the assortment needs to be expanded in order to somehow compete in the market. The business owner is not ready to scale, is not ready to hire new employees, and transforms the business. But do not forget that this is an investment in the future, and with the growth of targeted traffic, sales will come to the site, all investments will pay off and profits will increase.
Lack of time
The business owner must still participate in SEO promotion. You can't completely leave everything to the contractor, but it's also very difficult to optimize it yourself. The owner has a business goal, strategic development of products and services, and financial and other work aspects. Sometimes, this prevents you from fully starting to promote the site, because it requires a certain degree of involvement: controlling the contractor, participating in the content strategy, analyzing data, participating in calls, etc. This can also be called an investment because growing a business is not easy, but it bears fruit.
SEO specialists are highly specialized
There are specialists who promote large companies, and there are those who specialize in promoting small businesses, blogs, online stores, and so on. It is important to choose the right contractor at the initial stage.
SEO is constantly changing
One of the arguments of company owners is that search engine algorithms are constantly changing, so it is difficult to keep up with them, and this is money from month to month and it is unclear why to engage in search engine optimization if everything can be completely different in the future. But do not forget that SEO has fundamental principles, based on which you can build a successful strategy, adjusting it as search engine algorithms change.
No understanding of where to start
One of the main and important problems is that clients often do not understand where to start promoting a site. Optimizing titles, rewriting content, reworking the site, buying links, running a blog, collecting a semantic core - all this falls on the head of the company owner and he simply gets lost in terms and tasks that are incomprehensible to him, and, not understanding the value of certain processes, throws everything at the initial stage when search engine optimization has not yet had time to give the first results. This is why you need agencies that help you organize everything into a clear plan that you can follow and track the results.
Balance short-term and long-term goals of all promotion
It is important to understand that some things can be done immediately and will give results faster. Some things require months or even years. That is why SEO requires setting goals correctly and distinguishing between what can be achieved in the short term and what will take more time.
Next, we will talk about the balance of these goals, and how to define and track them.
SEO goals can be divided into two categories - short-term and long-term.
For example, some of the most common goals of website owners include:
- Improve visibility in search engines
- Increase conversion of website visitors
- Improve brand perception
- Increase website traffic
- Improve website reputation
- Get positive reviews
- Dominant first page in search results and others
Short-term goals
What can you expect from SEO promotion in the short term?
- Increase in traffic to the site for targeted queries
- Increase in conversion rate
- Improvement in conversion quality due to targeted SQ
- Increase in time spent on the site as a behavioral factor
- Increase in positions for targeted SQ and others
Long-term goals can be:
- Get into the top 1-5 for specific target keywords
- Increase in brand awareness
- Increase in brand traffic
- Positive dynamics of brand mentions
- Positive PR
- Brand ambassadors
- Increase in the number of loyal audiences
- Number and/or quality of backlinks brings not only an increase in the domain ranking but also referral traffic
What should you consider when developing an SEO strategy?
- Set goals that you can control (for example, the number of visitors to the site, the number of requests from organic search, etc.)
- Share responsibility for achieving the goal (a good example is an online store, where the SEO specialist's task is to bring the client to the site and help him order the product. But the sale itself occurs during the next contact with the business - this is the sales department, delivery, price, etc.) )
- Avoid using “vanity metrics” (for example, the number of positive reviews in Google My Business)
- Identify your strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and obstacles (for example, using SWOT analysis)
Image source - https://hurma.work/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/hurma_swot_scheme_2.png
Follow the SMART goal setting framework. The goal should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Plan SEO goals based on historical data
Ideas and useful tips for promoting your small business
Set up Google Alerts to always stay up to date with reviews, mentions, and automatically created lists
Google Alerts is a very useful tool, it only takes a couple of minutes to register, add keywords or a brand name, and you will receive a summary of these keywords or mentions of your company in your email once a week.
Check for new ads that could have been created automatically or by a user
You need to monitor search results so as not to miss, for example, negative reviews or black PR that affects the brand's reputation and SEO promotion. Check from time to time what users are saying about you on various resources, this will help you understand what can be improved in your business and processes. This can be done, for example, by searching for brand queries, or company name + reviews. This way you can find a variety of information, from reviews to a mention of the company on a local news site.
Re-optimize old but relevant content
This applies to all types of content - media, blog, online store category, product card, etc. You need to monitor the relevance of the content on your site because search engines like to show in search results those sites that most closely match the user's query. If the content is outdated, the search engine may be pessimistic about it, and the positions may drop, because the user comes to your site and sees, for example, an outdated article on a topic from 2018. without solving their problem with your website.
Choose the right competitors
You need to choose the right competitors at the initial stage. This means that for a small business, those competitors are on the same level as it is relevant. For example, you cannot, being a regional furniture manufacturer, compete with IKEA. This applies to landing pages, product variety, link strategy, and so on. The strategy for promoting a small business should be built in accordance with the same small business in organic search.
Create evergreen content
There is a fairly old type of content, this term came to us from Western SEO specialists. Evergreen content is content that does not become outdated, and relevant year after year. It can be a blog article, or an online store category, for example, “iPhones”. These are those pages that are relevant from year to year, and collect maximum traffic for high-frequency queries, and it is important to keep this content relevant and interesting for the user. Then the search engine will love such content and show it more often, and positions and traffic will grow. And traffic is potential sales.
Increase visibility and interaction on social networks to improve social signals
It has long been no secret that social signals indirectly affect search engine optimization. It is important to maintain company pages on social networks. It is important to present your brand on various resources where there is a target audience, to maintain its interest by regularly publishing content with brand mentions and links to your website. Google has long been tracking social links and it is possible that they take them into account as a ranking factor and attitude towards the company and site.
Attract quality users with long-tail keywords
If you are a business beginner and have a new website, it would be logical to start with low-frequency keywords (often called long tail keywords, because the keyword phrase itself consists of 3-4 or more words). You can use high-frequency keywords, but setting yourself the goal of reaching the top for such keywords in 3 months when there are companies with many years of experience in promotion and brand growth in the search results for these keywords is not worth it. It is better to take the first steps with low-frequency ones, take good positions on them, then start working with medium-frequency ones and gradually grow.
Follow trends, and create content on popular topics, even if there is no frequency yet
From an SEO point of view, it may sound absurd, but you don’t always need to create only content where there is some frequency when collecting semantics. First of all, you need to think about the user, what content will be interesting to your target audience, solve their problem or answer their question, introduce them to a product or service, or dispel doubts before buying. This strategy will be one hundred percent winning, so you shouldn’t get hung up on frequency if you know that you can create content that will really be useful. Write in such a way that people want to share your content on social networks or messengers, this is one of the indicators that you wrote cool. Read about how to select non-standard topics for a blog or outreach texts in this article.
Optimize Google My Business. Bring it up to date with COVID changes
Google My Business is a powerful promotion tool, especially for local businesses. It is relevant even for large companies because you can create branches in different regions, so users will be able to find the company on maps. If you have registered a company profile in GMB, you need to enter all the relevant information about the business, try not to leave blank spaces. Enter your business address, opening hours, and attributes, fill in your services or products, upload photos and videos, add a description, etc. Google My Business can already be considered a kind of social network, which means you need to regularly update your company information, publish news or announcements on your profile, respond to reviews, and upload new photos.
Understand why people leave. Analyze not only the increase/decrease in traffic but also how traffic behaves depending on the channel/entry page/country and city/demographics
Google Analytics is one of the must-have tools for both SEO specialists and business owners, which helps analyze traffic behavior on a website. In particular, GA4 allows you to analyze such parameters as entry and exit pages, user engagement in viewing and interacting with content on the website, the number and value of conversions, goal achievement, and much more. After all, it is not enough to simply say "Everything is going well for us, because traffic is growing" or "Everything is going badly for us, traffic has dropped." You need to dig deeper and understand, for example, where the traffic came from, how many conversions this traffic had, what is the user demographics, what is the geography, what keyword the user came for, etc.
Use a blog to solve customer problems, especially for Local SEO
It is not always important to write content only for keywords. It is also important to consider the problems and pain points of your target audience, and what content you can create to partially or fully solve this problem. For example, you can create a section of answers to frequently asked questions by asking the sales department what difficulties customers face when contacting you. You can even divide your content strategy into two directions: the first is to collect CTR and write by frequency, and the second is to write about what is important and relevant to your customers.
Work on the site's conversion factors
These are all kinds of buttons, lead magnets, lead forms, conversion blocks and forms - everything that contributes to targeted action on the site. Visual highlighting and emphasis on conversion elements is an important stage of site optimization and SEO promotion. After all, our task is to achieve commercial goals, and targeted action on the site best reflects the success of search engine optimization.
Get popular locally: GMB, local sites and news, micro-markup, offline events
In addition to Google My Business, there are many other ways to find your audience and help SEO optimization with at least links. For example, you bake incredibly delicious bread and know that there are several city Telegram channels, as well as news TV channels and publications that could talk about your product. This will help not only increase sales but also attract traffic to your business website and Google My Business profile since these information resources can leave links when publishing the material. SEO marketing goes beyond simple website optimization, so unconventional solutions and campaigns are welcome and sometimes give better results than proven promotion methods.
Business channel on Youtube
One of the effective promotion methods, because with each code, visual content is more relevant, it is easier for users to watch videos than to read articles, and with the help of videos you can tell about the company better and more effectively. A good example is our agency's channel. If you decide to use this platform to promote your business, then think about the brand positioning, target audience, content format, publication frequency, create a content plan, and most importantly, get started. The hardest thing about YouTube is getting started, but with your first videos you will understand what your audience expects from you, and with each new video you will improve your expertise, which will help attract customers and visitors to your site.
Loading speed, site structure, image optimization, and technical SEO
These are certainly the cornerstones of SEO promotion, but we won't go into detail about them now. Suffice it to say that this is very important, and you should not forget about them.
You can read more about technical optimization in these articles:
7 UX mistakes that all designers unwittingly make
Google Search Console: how to add a website and life hacks for SEO
Mistakes that should not be made when creating landing pages
Conclusions
SEO promotion may seem complicated and incomprehensible at first, and cannot even be compared with the company's development strategy.
However, having understood the basic principles, as a business owner you will be able to determine realistic expectations for yourself from promotion, build a basic strategy, and understand what tasks to set for the SEO team and how to track results.
We hope the article was useful and we wish you success in business!
