Not every business can spend thousands on SEO strategy. But small business SEO can be just as effective as the big budget brands. Check out these 5 free small business SEO tips.
Every business can benefit from search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to boost their search engine rankings. However, there are still a lot of marketers and small businesses that are not. The reason? They think it’s beyond their budget. What they don’t know is small business SEO can be maximized and refined with just a few simple, accessible techniques. Brendan M. Egan, guest writer for Entrepreneur, lists 5 free small business SEO tips to make the most out of a little when vying for page one results.
Google My Business
Small business SEO strategy should focus on local exposure instead of trying to target potential customers nationwide. One way to improve your local SEO is by optimizing your business’s Google My Business page. Start by making sure you own the page and can make edits to your listing. Work on filling out your page with as much detailed information as you can. Once it’s complete, your business will now have a local Google listing that will appear in searches. 
Target long-tail keywords
There are two types of keywords — general competitive keywords and long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are phrases that are very specific to your customers’ needs. For example, if you owned a small guitar studio in Los Angeles and wanted to target new clients for lessons, you would want to use “guitar coach in Los Angeles” instead of the general “guitar coach.” Why? More people are likely to be using “guitar coach” meaning you have more competition for search engine results pages (SERP).
Incorporate keywords in key spots
Once you’ve developed your long-tail keywords, start using them throughout your site. Focus on placing them in page titles, URLs and content on the website, but don’t overdo it. Using them within the header and first paragraph of the content will be enough to get Google’s attention.
Write fresh content
Creating fresh content is a great small business SEO strategy to improve your website’s ranking within Google’s search results. Each time you add new content, Google’s web crawler reanalyzes your site and indexes it. This means that Google’s web crawler will analyze the site and recalculate how to rank it. The more often you post, the more often you get analyzed. It’s important to make sure this new content is high quality, unique, and relevant to your audience. Google won’t rank you higher just because the content is new.
Get some links
Link building is still a critical factor for both large and small business SEO. Search engines essentially view a link to your site from a third party website as an indication that you should be ranked higher. The more quality links you have, in general the higher you rank. This can be time consuming, but by targeting business directories, yellow page listings, chambers of commerce, business associations, and news publications, you can build a dozen links in just a few hours.
