Why Your Small Business
Needs An SEO Strategy

As a small business owner, you probably handle most of your business’ day-to-day on your own. It can be easy for your online presence and digital strategy to fall to the bottom of the list, but it’s an important factor in attracting new customers. 

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the way you increase the visibility of your business’ website to people who are using an online search engine (i.e. Google or Bing). 

SEO considers how these search engines work, which search engines your audience uses, the algorithms behind the search engines, and what people typically search for.  That includes frequently-used keywords and phrases. 

How Your Business Benefits from SEO

SEO is useful to your business because it moves your website up the search engine ranks, attracting more visitors to your site—with the goal of turning those visitors into customers. 

Because of smartphones, local search has become an important part of small businesses’ success.  Local SEO targets a specific area, so people can find you quickly and easily.  Local optimization focuses on specific towns, cities, regions, and even states, to establish your brand on a local level.

Although it’s beneficial to follow trends and changes and evolve with them, SEO is a viable long-term strategy whose benefits can last for years even if it’s not updated. 

How to Get Started

Optimizing your business’ website may involve editing or adding content to include relevant keywords and phrases, modifying HTML, (HyperText Markup Language—language used to create a webpage), and associated coding.  You can add things like Schema to your HTML.  Schema is microdata that you can add to your HTML to improve the way search engines read your page.  Schema is the result of collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! to help you provide the information their search engines need to understand your content and provide the best search results possible. 

Another SEO strategy is increasing your site’s number of inbound links or backlinks, which are hyperlinks leading from one website to another.   

When creating an SEO strategy for your business, knowing your business’ and your industry’s target audiences becomes extremely important.  It allows you to focus your strategy to optimize your results. 

Search engine optimization uses relevant keywords to influence the ranking of your website. Researching keywords is an important early step when establishing your SEO strategy.  This means discovering things like, “what do people actually call my services?” and “what other related services people are searching for?”  This can help you to edit your existing content or give you ideas for new content to add to your website. 

It’s not surprising that in 2019 many people are searching the web on their smartphones.  Having a mobile site, especially an optimized mobile site, makes you competitive.  You don’t want your potential customers being directed elsewhere!  If you aren’t web-savvy, consider hiring a company to help you optimize your business’ mobile site.  

Your Small Business Needs an SEO Strategy

Attracting new visitors to your website only helps to grow your customer base.  Stay competitive and up to date on trends—don’t let your business’ digital strategy fall to the bottom of your list.