When you’re doing SEO for small business, you want to know what you need to be focusing on. SEO can seem daunting, especially if you’re running a small business. Fortunately, you have help. We will break SEO for small business down into three broad areas and help you focus on what you need to do.  Ready? Let’s go.

Research

Before you can fully take advantage of SEO for small business, you need to take on the important task of research. The research part of your SEO checklist can be broken down into five smaller, more manageable chunks. These five sections are: market research, niche research, competitor research, keyword research, and data gathering.

  1. Market Research – When you research the market, you get a better understanding of what’s going on in your industry in real-time.
  2. Niche Research – This is where you narrow down your research to your specific niche sector. You look at the landscape and what various search engines show you when you search using key industry terms. Knowing what shows up locally will help you prioritize what you need to do to get on that all-important first page on the search engines.
  3. Competitor Research – Who are you competing against for customers? What are they doing online? How well or poorly are they performing? What can you do to mirror their results or improve upon them? You may want to create an Excel spreadsheet of your competitors and gather data based on their website, how they’re using SEO and what they’re doing on their social media.  
  4. Keyword Research – After you research your competitors, you will already have an idea of what keywords your competitors are using and which ones are the most popular. This helps you start your keyword search. If your competitors are getting results for certain keywords, you might too. You can use their SEO strategy as a guideline for how you approach your own SEO for small business. This is a good time to use Google’s Keyword Planner (in Google Adwords) to compile a list of keywords you can use as part of your own SEO.
  5. Data Gathering – Your research has been solid. Now it’s time to compile it all in one place. This will help you analyze where your small business’s SEO is currently at and where it needs to go.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is a huge part of SEO for small business. If done properly, on-page SEO, can be broken down into four sections. They are: general, optimizing content, performance changes, and URL optimization.

  1. General – This deals with all of the basic on-page SEO. If you haven’t already, add an XML sitemap, include navigation on your site, a robots.txt file and an SEO plug-in for your website.. Check the SEO as it currently is. Then, look at the SEO for all of your pages. Don’t forget to include meta tags, meta descriptions and titles of pages. Fix what needs to be fixed. This is hard work, but a very worthwhile endeavor.
  2. Optimizing Content – Look at all of the existing content on your website. Do you need to make changes to that content to make it more SEO-friendly? Look at things like duplicate content, visual design, media usage, keywords, internal links, bounce rate, outbound links, and the instances of new content.
  3. Performance Changes – Is your website mobile friendly? If not, now is as good a time as any to make it so. Mobile viewers need to be able to find your website. Most people now search for businesses on their mobile devices. You don’t want to be left out.
  4. URL Optimization – Do you have a good URL structure? Aim for below 100 characters with your URL links, use 301 redirects where necessary and use your keywords in the URLs to define your content for your readers.

seo for small business

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is also known as link-building. There are a few ways you can optimize this for your small business.

Brand Alerts – Use Google Alerts or Mentions to let you know when someone mentions your business. It’s always good to reply if you can and thank the individual if it’s good news. If it’s bad news, don’t ignore it. Reply and try to rectify the situation.

Social Media – Use your social media accounts as links under keywords in your content. This will not only help with your link building, but it will also grow your social media audience. Social media is becoming a key component of successful SEO for small business.

Broken Link Building – Go back through your website and find all broken URL’s. Replace them with links that are not broken. Broken links are bad for your SEO.

There are other things you can do if you have time like guest blogging or podcasting. However, if you can master the ones we mentioned, you’ll be way ahead of the game.

We hope these areas will help you focus your SEO for small business efforts. If you have questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us at www.soloseo.com. We’re here for you.