The Fundamentals of Small Business SEO Strategy

If you market online, even if it is a small business, you need SEO strategy, very basic SEO strategies at the very least. These very fundamental and basic strategies will enable your business to gain some marketing traction online even amidst the huge and at times suffocating competition. Essentially there are four marketing fundamentals your small business needs to focus on to have a successful SEO strategy. Many expert marketers generally agree on the following.

1.    Content Marketing
2.    Link Building
3.    Technical SEO
4.    Local SEO

 

1. Content Marketing

If you market online, the success of your marketing efforts depends largely on good content.  This content must be authoritative, informative, educational and even entertaining. That is what helps it to attract a good following. In the SEO world, content is king. No matter how user-friendly your business website is, without good content, it can hardly attract good traffic. For this reason, it is fundamental for your business website to house web pages and blog articles that contain high quality and valuable content. When this content is optimized with the right keywords for search engines, it attracts organic traffic from search engines.

2. Link Building

Link building is a digital marketing technique of driving links to your website, through a variety of methods. Your business website gets backlinks when another website or online platform links to your website. If such linking websites are reputable and authoritative online, they help boost your own site’s authority. This is why marketers deliberately use online techniques to earn more of high-quality links, as against massive volumes of low quality links. Better still if your website earns these links organically through search engines. Major search engines like Google tend to rank websites with high-quality backlinks higher. That way, Google’s algorithms strive to show more of high-authority sites to web surfers. This translates to good organic traffic back to your business website.

3. Technical SEO

Technical Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is yet another fundamental requirement for a small business SEO strategy. It allows the business website to be technically sound for online search operations. For your business website to be technically sound, it must:

•    Have a fast load time, say about 5 seconds or less.
•    Be optimized for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
•    Be easily found and indexable by search engines.
•    Be easily navigable.
•    Be secure, by always having an up-to-date SSL certificate.
•    Avoid broken links and 404 pages.

Form the foregoing, it clearly shows that Technical SEO involves the technical optimization of your entire website. It affects the site structure, navigation, load speed, and link structure. Without a fast, functional, and user-friendly website, no amount of content or backlinks will be enough to maximize your rankings. Meaning, without it, no other activities will be sufficient to attract the required traffic back to your website. Technical SEO requires real knowledge and skills of website management and development to put in place. If as a marketer you do not have this requisite knowhow, it is advisable to hire the services of a technical SEO expert and or webmaster to handle the technical optimization of your website for you.

4. Local SEO

Most major search engines like Google now recognize that most small businesses are essentially local. Hence, the need to make local searches a priority in their search results. Welcome to local SEO. Local SEO is a type of SEO that is unique to local businesses. This is because many local businesses serve specific geographical areas. Moreover, their potential customers are often using geo-specific terms to find these businesses in their local area. When searchers type a search term on Google with “near me” phrase, Google usually sends search results nearest to the location of that searcher. That makes is easy to find local businesses online if they are optimized for local SEO searches.