SEO Tips to Grow Your Small Business

How can your small business compete in Google search results against brands, large media businesses and other major players?

Don’t be discouraged! One of the main benefits of internet marketing and SEO, in particular, is that it allows businesses of all sizes to compete more effectively, reducing the impact of budget differences.

Furthermore, SMBs should strive to obtain a competitive advantage over larger competitors in the same digital area. Moreover, they should also maximise the opportunities of being a smaller entity online.

Here are some practical SEO tips for small businesses to rise above their competitors.

1. Establish yourself as an expert in your field

As a small business, you have an ideal opportunity to place your expertise at the forefront of your business through yourself and other essential employees.

You can present a credible, trustworthy and real-world face to an often colder perceived online approach of many larger brands within the internet community.

Smaller businesses are often perceived as being closer to their customers. This means when SMB can pivot, identify, nurture and share their offline ways of doing business online, the benefits can be enormous.

An SMB has a number of advantages over a larger company, including:

• Less red tape and internal barriers to obtaining access to the conversation sooner.
• Established people-orientated ways of working often demand smaller businesses to function.
• Sincere offline experience inside the community can be adapted for online gains.
• Real opinion and opportunity for open commentary discussion.
•  SMB has the agility to adjust strategies and taking larger risks is possible with data-supported trial and error.

Larger companies find it quite difficult to have an authentic voice in the online community, thus this gives a terrific path to market for SMBs.

2. Get the basics right

We understand the term “basics” can have a variety of meanings. However, keep the focus on the basics for success when it comes to small business SEO.

Moreover, time, resources and budget are limited for experiments. So focus on the known aspects that influence SEO and the success of your website visitors.

Forget about vanity metrics or success measurements that prohibit you from investing those gains into more SEO and digital marketing.

There are a lot of basics to prioritise and they will vary depending on your SEO starting point. But keep it simple and consider these:

• Access to key content. How easy is it for visitors to locate, understand and convert from your content cornerstones?
• User Experience. How quickly does your content load and are there any distracting elements that hinder the user from moving forward?
• Technical barriers. Do you make it easy for search engines to understand, index and rank your content?
• Understanding the page. How can you reinforce the content’s theme and improve the signals you’re providing to search engines based on headers, URLs, internal links and other elements on the page?
• Hierarchy of content. How intuitive and easy can someone navigate to your most essential pages using your website navigation and supporting content access elements (sub-navigation, footer, etc.)?
• Mixed content types. Do you make it simple for your content to rank for a variety of different sorts of relevant search results (pictures, video, etc)?
• Comprehensive content coverage. Is it possible for someone to obtain a deep and complete understanding of a topic without leaving your page? Are there any better instances of content that logically should outperform yours?
• The local advantage: Can you use your location to boost your claim to SEO success greater than other national, regional or global brands?

3. Build authority by creating credible content

SMBs tend to have a better knowledge of their audience. When this is combined with SEO and a data-driven approach to content creation, it can result in significant marketing benefits.

The production of high-performing digital content does not have to be entirely dependent on the business or only available through outsourcing to an agency.

Often there are combinations of both to explore to give optimum capture of the moment without overstretching resources or budget while maximising both.

Once you’ve committed to a content strategy, focus on the value to your audience vs the commercial value to your business. Adapt your course as needed to strike the correct balance.

Credible authoritative content will typically:

• Include inherent and tangible value for the audience.
• Serve a unique function and is more useful above competing examples.
• Have opinions, data and unique insights that are relevant to your expertise and specialisation.
• Have value in terms of public relations and media, particularly for local publications.
• Have authorship that can be trusted when it comes to content creation and ideation.
• Have layers of impact for multiple persona types.
• Repurpose mixed material to appeal to a variety of user preferences.
• Have a message that is simple to understand, absorb and promote.

To begin, it’s better if you produce your first key content elements based on the areas of your company specialty where you are most known.

Consider the variables that demand the most of your company’s service or product. Don’t forget about why customers will choose you over the competitors.

From here, you can take advantage of this significant differentiation to turn many of your lessons and advice into a genuinely useful content asset that will work hard for your link-building and authority-building efforts.

Great content needs expertise, energy and ongoing effort to generate the optimum potential from it.

4. Take advantage of local optimisation

To outperform your competitors in SEO, you must get each value out of the time you spend online.

Local optimisation for small businesses will always provide an opportunity to improve your ROI.