SEO for Small Business Website: How to Start & Most Effective Guide for Beginners

SEO for small business website is a key foundation for success. How would you compete with thousands of other competitors if you’re not available in places they use the most? How would you get many chances to be around their mind and trigger their decision? We would describe the result of SEO as like Netflix and chill, tempting and easy to choose. Bad SEO feels exactly like a piece of advertisement at 8 PM between shows. Therefore, if you don’t appear on Google Search, high chances people won’t find you.

With SEO for small business website, you will see an immediate growth in traffic. The longer you can keep they stay, the stronger and faster your brand will grow. This would lead to more revenue with just a few steps. SEO could be applied for both B2B and B2C entrepreneurs, as long as you make it right. 

In today’s post, we’ll walk you right through all the basics of SEO for small business website. Plus, why not get a free guide for a great SEO campaign that you could use now? Scroll down to learn more!

Understand the key basic of SEO for small business website

1. What is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization could be the term that you’ve heard somewhere online, yet have no idea what it is. Let us make it simpler for you. SEO is the process of optimizing your website so that it can be found on Google search better. There are many key elements that create the whole vision of SEO. With those fundamentals, you could never get lost when starting SEO for a small business website.

Keyword research: 

Normally on search engines, users tend to type in keywords (aka phrases) that are relevant to what they’re looking for. So, with SEO for small business website, it’s important to figure out what people often search for, both in phrases and topics. From that, you’ll be able to develop a whole content & SEO strategy to meet these needs. 

Content: 

In the blooming stage of the digital world, content is king. With SEO, content in all forms of blogs, videos, and infographics that focus on one or some keywords. And all of which, you post on your website. Content strategy must answer every question users have before they enter your web page. Therefore, once people know that your web is really helpful, they’ll be likely to stick around for more. 

Internal & external links: 

Internal links are contents that link to each other within your website. Meanwhile, an external link is getting linked by other sites. Although it might not sound familiar to you, it’s a factor that determines your web page quality. 

UI & UX: 

The technical quality of your website also refers to loading speed, website design, and easy-to-read content. It’s also a common mistake when first making an SEO strategy for small business: try to SEO while the website design is not at its best. Just remember this, when people are confused, they tend to leave. So choose a simple, comfortable and relevant design, and you’ll see how it would help. 

2. SEO issues of small business

When it comes to SEO for small business website, there are many things that would affect your result. And normally, those elements would come from your company. Let’s see what’s keeping you from ranking higher on search engines! 

SEO Specialist: 

Yes, as a small business, we understand deeply how many hats you have to wear to keep your brand running. But this also means that you have little time, motivation and technical skills to work on those SEO projects. Meanwhile, hiring a specialist seems out of our league. Thus, SEO is a long-term task, and not every small business could keep working on it for long. 

Budget: 

Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is the main problem that many SEO strategies for small businesses fail. With SEO for new business, the budget tends to be small, and couldn't cover most of the expense for a marketing team/ agency. And to that, the situation only gets more difficult. 

Timeline: 

Another problem you must face when starting SEO for a small business website is time. Don’t underestimate how time-consuming those projects are. And it’s not just an overnight task to make your website from nowhere crawling to the top. Invest some decent amount and effort into it, by then you’ll see the results. 

We must say that when you encounter SEO for a small business website, there are many investments and decisions you need to make. However, trust the process and you’ll be able to boost your brand’s visibility & revenue soon. 

Why do small business need to take advantages of SEO 

Why is SEO for small business website so important? Is it the most effective way to advertise your products and services? 

Traditionally, business owners would showcase their brand and products on newspapers, radio, TV commercials, or billboards. But since the demand for advertising grows dramatically, the cost for these tactics skyrocket as well. Thus, with the development of the digital world, advertising and users’ behavior have completely changed. 

1. Make your site more user-friendly

Let us be honest, there is a slim chance people could actually find out about your site on their own. With a little boost from SEO, they will know about you faster whenever they type in some relevant keywords. And it’s not just that. Once your website is fully optimized for SEO, it’ll create a much better experience. No more confusing headlines, irrelevant meta descriptions, and useless blogs. 

You’ll eventually change your site design, buttons, and content to fit into a more well-structured form. At this point, you’re convincing users to stay a little bit longer, watch more things, and try to solve their problems. People won’t leave so soon since they’re got all their questions answered by you. SEO for small business website is not only to satisfy your users, but it would also make you happy about the results as well.

2. Attract more customers

That’s all business about, try to attract as many customers as they could. From trying to stand out from the crowd, giving more offers and deals, to appear anywhere customers often be, it’s all to beat that competitor. And SEO is the most affordable, low-cost, and extremely effective for small businesses to meet their goals. Thus, what’s better than a customer who’s already interested in that specific topic? You just need to serve them right. 

After years of creating an SEO strategy for new business, we understand that investing in SEO might seem a bit risky to business owners. However, with some extra few hours and a little investment, SEO for small business website could lead to some great satisfaction! 

3. Conversion is everything

There is no meaning in doing SEO if it doesn’t lead to any benefit for your business. You’ll always be craving for that click, that subscription, or even that phone call. Those are called conversion in general. And the key to getting what you want is to provide your customers with everything they need. Make them happy and they’ll give you what you want. Our advice is to level up your website game, including speed, simple yet helpful content, and great website design. Do what is supposed to catch people’s attention and keep them interested. 

4. Level up your Brand awareness

Getting better brand awareness is a great advantage that follows high SEO rankings. Since your web page will be very likely to appear on the first page of search engines, customers will see you first and will click on your site before others. So when you want to get more customers, build better brand awareness, you should invest in search engines. 

5. Create revenue with no boundaries

Just imagine getting new orders 24/7 and all over the world even in the middle of the night. How cool is that? You’re sure to bypass your competitors just by making one simple move. And if your rivals have already had to work on their SEO, then why don’t you invest in it as well? Good SEO will draw you more attention and revenue than any other marketing tool. 

Step-by-step guide for an effective SEO for small business website

Well, since many people said that SEO is sophisticated, we thought why not give you a much simpler perspective? At the end of the day, we’re all business owners trying to improve our sales and revenues. Through this step-by-step guide, you can now start doing SEO for small business website in just minutes! 

Visualize your target audience 

While you don’t have enough budget to start SEO with the most popular keywords, you can still always target a specific niche of audiences. Try to figure out who will be most likely to use your products and services, as specific as possible. You must collect all the information of their age, areas, hobbies, and behavior online. The more specific you are, the better collection of audiences you will have. Thus, try to have a few sets of audiences in hand to test out. 

Keyword research first 

While most SEO specialists could use more expensive tools to analyze keywords, but trust us, Google Business is more than just enough for you. As you’re doing SEO for a small business website, don’t go all-in for the short and most chosen keywords. Long-tail keywords have proven to be the most effective since it’s closer to the user's search behavior. You should also SEO your brand name since it both has much fewer competitors but still create good impacts. 

With keywords, you should always have more than enough. Choosing from closely related to your business phrases to keywords that are relevant to your customers’ questions. Remember to use only keywords that have more than 1000 searches in volume, high conversion rate, and low search difficulty. 

Creating content

Content is king, always. Especially in the explosion of digital, content is the most effective tool to reach your customers. With content development, you can easily trigger users' problems, solve all their questions while creating a deeper connection than just trying to sell things. Thus, with creating content, try to put keywords at a good density yet still relevant to the post’s topics.

One huge mistake we’ve seen many small businesses did is trying to shove more than 10 keywords into 1 blog post. Not only your content is drowning in key phrases, but your audiences will absolutely dislike it. Keep your content natural, easy to read as much as you could, your users prefer it better.

Optimize it all 

You’re absolutely close to the finish, just 1 more step. After finishing all your content, photos, or videos, now it’s time to optimize everything. 

First, you’ll have to make sure your headline contains the main keyword. Using attractive call-to-action phrases to trigger audiences' interest and most importantly, make them click.

Next is your meta description. This must consist of 1 or 2 keywords and teasing a little bit of what the whole post is about. Let’s not forget about the slug. Slug is basically that specific post address, so you’d want to keep it simple and neat as much as possible.

You then keep going with all your headings, make sure no paragraph has more than 300 words, distribute keywords evenly and naturally. Last but not least, don’t forget to check everything twice to make sure all are running smoothly and on the right track. 

By understanding and completing those steps, you’re getting closer to success with SEO for small business website. It will be a great start without any fuss to keep you going. We hope that this article is useful for you, no matter what category of your business is. If you’re interested more in SEO for small business website or website design, keep following us for more.