The 7 Must Know SEO Tips for Small Businesses & How to Get Started

There are some secret SEO tips that can double your business visibility drive traffic to your website and improve your sales but most of the time, these tips are top industry secrets guarded behind the pay wall by experts.

They want you to pay to learn these tips so, they do everything to keep it away from you, even when these information should be readily available online.

In this guide, you’re not only going to uncover these SEO tips, you’ll find ways to use them as part of your digital marketing strategy to boost sales and drive your own business growth.

Now before we get started, let’s find out what SEO is all about below…

What is SEO?

SEO is the short term for Search Engine Optimization. It is is a collection of digital strategies that can help you make your website and your business to be more visible to search engine users.

As a small business owner, blogger or content creator; search engine optimization helps your website or blog to be more visible on the search engines like Google, Bing etc., when people use keywords to make searches on those platforms.

Neil Patel Defines Search Engine Optimization as optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.

It is not true that your website will not work without SEO. But, search engine optimization is usually a cheaper, popular and more realistic way to get traffic to your website. That’s why it’s always the top options for bloggers and website owners.

How SEO works for Small Business Websites

Just the same way SEO optimization works for big brands, it works for small businesses too but on a different level.

As a small business owner, the first thing you must know is that although search engine optimization can still work for you, you have to take a different approach.

For example, you need to have an SEO approach that is dynamic, strategic and targeted at driving a set result within a specified time.

What this means is that you must map out your goals and then set out a search engine optimization strategy, based on those goals.

Now, the following are the key SEO tips to revamp website visibility and double your traffic…

Set an SEO Goal for your Business

Whether you’re a small business, medium enterprise or large conglomerate, having a specific goal for your Search optimization is one of the best kept SEO tips you’ll ever get out there.

A lot of small business owners do not realize this. I was like this a long time ago so, it’s quite understandable.

Today, a lot of small business owners are comfortable with building a website or writing content on their blog.

I can understand a lot of people do this ignorantly but SEO optimization is far more than updating a blog post.

After building your website, before you hit the button to create the next post, you have to create an SEO goal for that post, based on your overall purpose.

How to set an SEO goal for a Small Business

If your business goal is to get more exposure for your brand, your SEO strategy will be slightly different than what you’d have, if your goal is to make direct sales.

Bearing this in mind, instead of working on the general search optimization strategy, map out a plan that will lead towards brand exposure specifically.

This would also apply, if your goal were to drive more sales.

To drive clean results as a small business, you need an SEO optimization strategy that will work for you, based on your specific goal.

Having a clear goal for your SEO strategy is the first step towards knowing the result you want to Optimize for and being able to measure them when the time comes.

Define your Target Audience

After setting out the strategic goals for your search engine optimization, one of the next key SEO tips for small businesses you need is to clearly identify your audience.

Now, let’s look at this as someone going for shopping…

If you were a shopper right now, your SEO goals would have been the items you have written down on your list while the grocery store would be your target audience.

Now based on the above analogy, your “target audience” (store) must be identified. And they must have the things you want to buy otherwise you won’t go to their store.

This is the same thing that should happen to the target audience for your SEO goals. You need to know them clearly. This is the first step towards achieving the goals you set out in step one above.

So who exactly, is your target audience?

To answer this question clearly, you need some data. Having real data to back up your projections will give you a more realistic result.

Besides using existing data, to get started with this, you can always look at your competitors and see the kind of audience they are targeting with their content and marketing strategy.

Of course your business is not to go drag their existing audience with them in their own way. But, you can always use a different approach.

Additionally, with a tool like Google Trends, Google Keyword tool, Wordstream etc. You can always find out what matters to your audience, where they are and how you can get across to them.

Furthermore, you can ask direct questions, follow user conversations in your niche and then find out ways you can provide solutions to the things they really need.

PS: Remember that as a small business, sometimes defining your online audience and their attributes can need a lot of research and data.

Create your SEO Strategy

You can’t achieve a lot with your SEO without having a clear strategy you’re working with. This is one of the crucial SEO tips for small businesses that can make or break your effort.

You have to create a strategy that outlines the steps you’ll take to implement your SEO goals.

To get this sorted, you want to answer questions like what steps can I use to achieve these goals with the resources available to me? or how can I get to reach out to my target audience in a way they will respond positively?

Finding out the above is very important. And when you do, your answers are going to form the core of your SEO strategy.

Your SEO strategy should clearly outline the steps you will take to cover key SEO specifics like Keywords Research, On-Page Search engine optimization, Off Page SEO, Technical SEO, Link Building, Content Marketing etc.

Answering these together will help you in defining your SEO strategy.

It will affect everything you have to do as regards building your business…

From your target keywords, the kind of content you want to create, the social media you want to focus with and the marketing strategy you’ll want to choose etc., your SEO strategy will be at the core of everything you do with your small business website.

Implement your SEO Strategy

This is one of the most under rated SEO tips that can transform your outcomes. Beyond creating an SEO strategy, to get an actual result, you must implement the strategy.

To get started, work on finding out what you want to achieve with your SEO strategy. This means you’re going to have to take steps to evaluate what is already in place.

The moment you assess and understand what is already working, you’ll now have an idea on how to pivot and create a workable strategy that will deliver your goals.

That said, after you’ve been able to identify key areas for improvement, rejig your SEO strategy and then start with the most basic to the most important.

Now this is what I mean. If you’re starting from scratch without anything on ground, just know you’ll start with keyword research and optimization.

Even with an existing brand, sometimes you may still need to start with keyword research. But just to be sure, you have to run an assessment first so you know where to get started from.

Prioritize Quality over Quantity

Content is the hallmark of search engine visibility. This is one of the SEO tips for small business you won’t get anywhere.

With the recent changes in search engine algorithm, quality content has once again stayed at the center of SEO relevance.

So, you don’t just want to create and publish content, you want to post high quality content that is valuable and relevant to your target audience instead of creating irrelevant content.

This is very important.

While it is good to publish a decent number of content, it is even more important to publish high quality content if you plan to attract online visibility.

Diversify your Traffic Sources

As far as SEO tips for small businesses is concerned, search engine optimization and search engines generally is a great source of traffic for many content creators.

However, search engines are not always the only source of traffic for all brands. There are many other sources of traffic you can leverage to grow your brand. And you have to leverage them as much as possible.

This is because outside the fact that a certain search engine update can cause a traffic disruption for you, running on only one source of traffic can be generally risky especially where you’re not the controller of that traffic source.

As much as possible, diversify. From social media platforms, to third party and paid options, find other avenues to promote your brand for visibility.

In fact, I’d say you can consider keeping search engine optimization for the long term while leveraging other traffic sources for bumps in traffic every now and then.

Rinse, Edit, Implement

In the SEO optimization world, things do change a lot. And sometimes, at a very fast rate.

That’s why, setting out an SEO strategy that works may not happen at the first time. This is one of the SEO tips I had to learn the hard way.

Even if you have the best SEO strategy, it’s possible it might not get you the exact results you expected due to one reason or the other.

If you come across outcomes like this, know that it’s time to review your strategy, study your outcomes based on set goals and then work on taking a different approach.

Always keep in mind to measure, analyze and review your SEO strategies at intervals.

Final Words

In a nutshell, evolving an search engine optimization strategy that works is the first SEO tips that will lead you towards improving your search engine visibility.

And you have to be very committed to going with the trends, updating your strategies and listening to what your audience really wants, if you want to get the right results.

Again, beyond optimizing for humans, you also have to Optimize your website for the search engine in a way that will work for both your human audience and the search engine bots.

Also, do not forget the place of paid advertising in creating search fast visibility results, Link building, Guest Posting, Collaborations and other top SEO tips that will deliver your outcomes.

And of course, you will learn more about search engine optimization and the real strategies that works, when you sign up for our content marketing course, here.

Now, it’s your turn. What’s bugging you the most when it comes to search engine optimization for small businesses? Just leave your questions down below.