The first tip for seo small business is to figure out what you want to achieve. Small business websites can serve a number of purposes. The most obvious is probably as an ecommerce site. However, sites that provide information or access to a sign up page can also be valuable. A good example of an information page for a small business is for an electrician. The service cannot be sold online however; the contact details can be provided to the customer. A sign up site is a very valuable asset and can be integrated on both ecommerce and information site. A sign up page’s purpose is to create a mailing list of people who are already interested in your product or service. This means you can develop a more focused email marketing campaign, to accompany your seo for small business.
This affects tip two, which is selecting the right keywords. Seo small business varies in this respect from the campaigns for larger companies. This is because the use of long tail opportunities opens less competitive markets. Going back to the electrician example, the term “electrician” generated 823,000 searches on www.google.co.uk. However, if you lengthen the keyword it dramatically reduces the searches. For example “electrician uk” only produces 8100 searches and even more localised ie “electrician ulverston” produces even less competition. The less competition there is equals a more cost effective way to a page one ranking. However, if there isn’t any traffic in the first place, then no one will see your site. This is why the careful selection of keywords is of vital importance for seo small business campaigns.
The next tip is focused on content, specifically in relation to your keywords. Google assesses thousands of sites every day, including both new and old sites. Understandably, this requires a large amount of time and to optimise this process, google allocates sites a crawl depth allowance. A large crawl depth is best as it caches sites more quickly and thoroughly. To this end google like to see new and relevant content. For example, if our electrician has only one page which features a logo, a address and a telephone number, it is less likely to rank compared to a site with all the above detail but with a detailed description of the services offered. In this description the keyword that is being optimised would have to be present as much as possible, without compromising the validity of the text. At heart google just wants to produce the most accurate search results for the user. So creating content that is illegible from “keyword stuffing” will ultimately not produce positive results for your seo small business campaign. The catch here is that good content takes time to write, time which many small business cannot afford. Many companies small and large say that they can produce their own content, focusing on the short term saving. However, they then generally fail to maintain the content creation rate, undermining the whole seo campaign. It is arguably a better long-term plan to invest in good quality content from a specialist provider from the onset. Good content is invaluable for achieving higher positions in search engines. Better positions in the search engines, unquestionably lead to increased sales. Therefore, the return of investment is higher for professionally written content. The issue of content is no less important when considering Seo for small business.
The next step in seo small business is link building into your website. Google is looking for a positive role in the link building community. This means having links not just going in but also well placed outbound links. For example, if our electrician linked to the Electrical safety council (ESC) it would show that he is in the same community as the well-established and relevant site. This should not be overplayed, as linking to too many sites (however, well established) will lead to page rank being leaked from your site. Creating links to your site can be difficult for small businesses, as they don’t have access to a very large Internet community. Professional search marketing companies spend time developing contacts and as such have access to vast online communities from which to create links.
In conclusion, seo small business is as valuable as seo for large companies. Especially in the current economic climate, where people generally turn to the Internet to gather information on most purchases.
Tags: local search marketing, Search Trafficker, Seo small business