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.

5 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies that Get Quick Results

Digital marketing appears to be growing and deepening in tandem with the internet. For digital marketers to get quick results and remain relevant it is of huge importance for them to make sure they plan their inbound digital marketing strategy very well. What they really need is a budget-friendly digital marketing strategy that works for their customers. If well designed and effective, digital marketing can be relatively low cost to implement even while offering high returns on investment. For this reason, marketers must always try to understand exactly where their businesses fit in the market. That is key to the success of any digital marketing strategy they may choose to adopt. For your own digital marketing journey, I like to recommend you try the following strategies if you want quick results.

 

1. Market with Captivating Online Ads

This is a given. The more captivating your ads, the more traffic they attract and the more clicks they get. If you want to succeed as a digital marketer, it is very important for you to ensure your online ads stand out from the hugely competitive crowd. This is in addition to ensuring your ads are at all times relevant to your audience. This you can do by making sure your ad texts are optimized for your chosen keywords in addition to their aesthetic and attractive designs, particularly banners. Using the right language and vocabulary that your audience understands adds to the appeal and effectiveness of your ads. For best results, marketers must always have a good understanding of the audience they are targeting, why they are targeting them, the stage they are in the buying cycle and exactly what type of message that can affect them the most.

2. Consistently Write Engaging Blog Content

Blogging is one of the cheapest and most effective forms of content marketing available to digital marketers online. If your blog is authoritative, informative and educational, it easily attracts loyal readers. That translates to regular traffic to your website. Marketers use their informative blogs to enhance the knowledge that customers have about the products they are marketing. That knowledge helps to build brand authority and popularity for marketers. The more and consistent a marketer writes good content, the more popular his brand becomes. If the content a marketer consistently writes is SEO-friendly, search engines help people searching for related information to that website. That translates to very valuable organic traffic.

3. Market with Social Media

Social media is increasingly becoming indispensable to digital marketers because of the huge popularity of the platforms. With nearly 4 billion users around the world, social media is now the ideal place to market for most digital marketers. Now without a doubt, that is quite a huge market. Depending on the product/service you are marketing, marketers have a host of social media platforms available to them. They always have available to them many different social media platforms from which to choose. What matters most is to be sure to choose and work with such platforms where your targeted audience hangs out. That is the right place to engage them. This engagement can be very crucial in building brand recognition and loyalty. Brand recognition results from your marketing messages getting the desired results and more. Social media platforms most popular with marketers are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok. They all have their individual peculiarities, advantages and restrictions though. Marketers always choose which is best suitable for their type of business and which helps them to get the best results.

4. Engage with Email Marketing

Effective communication is inseparable from digital marketing. Marketers use good communication to push products, engage with customers, prospect new customers, get leads and make sales. Communicating by email is usually a preferred choice for marketers who genuinely want to build engagement. This is because email is cost-effective, super quick and quite convenient for marketers to reach out easily to a very large audience that can even be in the range of hundreds of thousands just by pressing a computer button. Once a marketer builds up a credible email-marketing list over time, periodically reaching out to everyone on this list with all forms of marketing messages becomes relatively easy.

5. Efficiently Track and Measure Inbound Traffic

It is very difficult for marketers to gauge the performance of their marketing campaigns without efficient tracking and measurements. That is where online analytics tools become very handy. With these tools, particularly free Google Analytics tools, marketers can easily find out what sources are driving visitors and the webpages that are most popular with searchers. Marketers get insights into what sources web searchers used to find their websites. They get information about how long they stayed where on the site and what they looked at while there. They get information about what kind/types of smart devices through which visitors accessed their webpages. This information helps marketers to rejig or redesign their marketing strategies and provides lots of historic information against which to benchmark the future performance of their marketing campaigns.