SEO for Small Businesses: How to Get Noticed

SEO for Small Businesses - The Facts

Yesterday was launch day; you unveiled your website to the World, and today you are wondering why Google isn’t showing it anywhere in its listings. In addition to that, you haven’t been flooded with traffic! This is your reality check. Websites do not work like that. So, let's take a close look at SEO for small businesses and how you can eventually succeed!

Why Doesn't Google Love You?

Did Google not receive the memo that you launched your site yesterday?

Well, did you tell them?

Unfortunately, rankings don’t happen overnight because it requires a LOT of SEO work first. What is SEO, I hear you ask? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Basically, it covers everything you need to do to get your website seen in the search engines. For example, Google, Bing and Firefox.

So what do you need to do? Let’s discover how to get noticed…

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is the first place to start. You can sign up for a free account at search.google.com, and they will guide you through connecting your website. You will then need to submit your sitemap. This is like a personal invitation to Google to come in and check your new website, which is now open for business. You can access your site map through SEO plugins such as SmartCrawl and Yoast.

Information won’t be displayed straight away. However, Google will now start gathering information, and after around 24 hours, you will see data starting to come in. It's a very useful tool; not only will Google Search Console tell you about any errors accessing your website, but you will also see a performance tab. Here you can see what visitors typed in to find your website (if it is shown in the top 100 of that search term), how many people saw your website for that search term and also how many people clicked on your website after typing that in.

So, how is this helpful?

SEO for small businesses is essential. The information you gather here will give you:

1. More of an idea of what people are looking for and also how they word their enquiry. You can use that in your keyword research. If it’s something you don’t have covered on your website, then create a landing page or a blog using the term.
2. Feedback from Google and what it thinks your website is about (or they wouldn’t be showing it for that search term). You can see if your efforts are paying off or if you need to do more work.

Google Analytics

After you launched your site, did anyone even visit? Tracking SEO for small businesses is essential. Fortunately, there are tools like Google Analytics that provide excellent insight into your website. You can sign up for free. Instead of using their tracking code on your website, however, I suggest using the MonsterInsights plugin to easily connect the two together. Tracking will start from when you install analytics, so make sure it’s one of the first things you do.

Now, from your WordPress dashboard (if you used MonsterInsights), you can access how many visitors you had in the last 30 days, where they came from, and what pages they vi

Site Speed

This is crucial when considering SEO for small businesses. If your site is taking forever to load, then your visitors will get bored, and so will the search engines. If someone closes your site before it gets a chance to load, then Google will know. They then mark this against you. I like to think of Google giving and taking away points for completing or not doing certain things. These points then determine how far they push you up in search rankings (it may not actually work this way, but this helps me explain!). So, a slow site loses you points.

How can you fix it? The biggest reason for slow site speed is incorrectly sized images. WordPress likes you to upload your images in the correct size. If they are incorrectly sized, then the website itself has to resize them before it can load – every single time! So just think of WordPress sitting there resizing your images before it can even show them – it puts seconds on your load speed. Seconds may not seem like much, but anything over 10 seconds and your visitor is gone!

Other things that can affect site speed are not having browser caching (use WP Fastest Cache), which is like your browser taking a snapshot of that page to save for future use (to load it faster next time on your browser). Image optimisation is another negative in website speed loading. Therefore, consider the Smush plugin to speed things up.

To find out what’s slowing your site down or how fast it’s loading, visit GTMetrix.com. As a bonus, it will also tell you what size your images are meant to be.

Back Links

It's important for anyone dealing with SEO for small businesses to remember backlinks. Backlinks are one of the best ways to show the search engines that you are an authority in your niche. Think of it as a referral scheme, or the Internet’s version of word of mouth. If another website links to yours, effectively they are recommending you, and Google LOVES that. If you use Moz.com’s free tools, you can take a look at your domain or page authority (so another scoring system!), how many websites link to yours, and how that gives you more authority. Sites with higher authority are generally listed above sites with lower authority.

Ideas for backlinks are swapping links with businesses that complement yours, listing your site in directories, guest blogging, and writing articles. But remember, these recommendations need to come from good-quality websites. Spammy websites or buying backlinks will only associate your site with that kind of thing, and who wants to go there, right?

Keywords

I’ve left keywords until last because this is the first thing people think of when it comes to SEO for small businesses, but it’s also something that will be picked up organically; the other stuff I mentioned won’t, and you need to do the work.

The first thing I would say, when it comes to keywords, is don’t use a keyword.

You what?!! Don't panic, I haven't lost my mind. Keywords are essential, but notice the plural.

Using one word as a keyword is just far too general. You need keywords to corner a niche. SEO plugins are now catching up with this and referring to them as key phrases, which I prefer a lot more. Just think, if you go on Google, do you just type in one word? Well, unless you are looking for a dictionary description of a word, the answer is probably no. Over the next day or so, take note of all the things you type into Google and see how often you just type in one word. The answer is probably rarely, because the results just won’t be specific enough for your query. This is a key thing to remember when planning SEO for small businesses.

There’s a quote I saw on Moz.com that talked about shoes. If you typed in the word shoes what results do you get? Do you want to buy shoes? Do you want to know how shoes are manufactured? What type of shoes do you want? Do you want to learn how to sell shoes? The questions are endless! But what if you typed in Nike Air Jordan white size 6? Well, you are now looking to hand over your money to someone!

Single keywords are also taken up by the big-name brands. Type in WordPress, and see what comes up! So, for example, if you were selling Avon, don’t even bother wasting your time optimising your website for the keyword Avon, as I think Avon has that all sewn up! It’s just more time wasted, time you probably don’t have. Can you see how Key Phrases are better for SEO for Small Businesses?

So, how do you choose key phrases?

You niche and you give the people what they want!

What do they want? I hear you ask.

Well, there’s a website called answerthepublic.com that can help with that, along with your Google Search Console performance terms. Additionally, let’s not forget about the ever-popular ‘ask the audience’. Ask your ideal clients what they would type in if they were looking for your service.

A good example is I am also an NLP Practitioner and Coach, one of the techniques we use is called Fast Phobia. But if I were going to write a page about that, would I use those words? No, of course not, because people are looking for solutions to problems, they probably have never even heard of Fast Phobia. They are more likely to type in something like ‘how to get over my fear of flying’, so if I used that search term, then bingo, I have your solution!

When it comes to planning SEO for small businesses, remember each page needs one primary key phrase. You need to use that in your headlines and copy, and I suggest using one of the following plugins: RankMath, SmartCrawl or Yoast. Each provides a score system highlighting how to optimise your page for that phrase. But please use common sense; these are only plugins. Ultimately, you want to attract humans to your website, not just crawling search engines. If things don’t read right, the reader may have no idea what you are on about, so they click off anyway (remember a bounced visitor is a big SEO negative!). You can, of course, use secondary phrases throughout your copy, as at the end of the day, these are only little nudges to Google. It’s up to them and the algorithms what search terms they show you.

I know I’ve mentioned Moz.com a few times, but they have some nifty little tools that can help you with SEO for small businesses. You can find out if those search terms or phrases are popular and how big the competition is. They even have a 0-100 scoring table that allows you to see if the competition for that key phrase is so large that you don’t even bother wasting your time on it unless you want to work REALLY hard.

So there you go. What I want you to remember is that SEO for small businesses is always hit and miss. You will need to try a few things to see what works best for you and your business. One last tip when it comes to SEO for small businesses: Google loves you updating content. Therefore, this is not a job that once done doesn't need to be revisited. It’s an ongoing process that takes a LOT of time.

Give it a go. But if you find it too overwhelming or time-consuming, there are also specialist agencies available that will help you, for a monthly fee. We work closely with Heather from The Content Creator. She specialises in SEO for small businesses and is passionate about helping them succeed.