Enhancing Small Business Growth with SEO Tactics
If you’re a small business, it’s probably safe to say that you want to attract new leads, increase your business revenues or simply both. Search Engine Optimisation can help with that – especially if you’re limited on budget and resources.
SEO matters because it’s a marketing channel and tool that you can utilise to drive more traffic to your website without having to shell out for expensive ad campaigns. When your website appears at the top of search engines like Google, you become more noticeable to your audience and ultimately more competitive. This drives more traffic to your site, however not just any traffic, in-market, highly qualified traffic that can improve your customer engagement, leads, sales and ultimately your bottom line, revenue.
What are the first steps in creating an SEO strategy?
A strong SEO strategy can help your small business reach its potential by giving you the tools needed to drive organic traffic. Some key steps that can be taken are:
Understanding your business and its requirements
Your small business SEO consultant will want to understand what you want to achieve in terms of business. What are your business objectives and goals? Do you want to increase sales, website traffic, or generate leads? Or are there other actions you’re working towards?
It’s paramount your SEO specialist works with you to understand your business so they have an accurate idea of what makes your business tick.
SEO Audit
Ensuring objectives of your business are identified is important as this will help form your SEO strategy. Another early step in creating your SEO strategy will be for your SEO consultant to conduct an audit on your website. An SEO audit analyses your website’s current status when it comes to SEO, and if there are any barriers to its success.
A website audit acts as an opportunity for your SEO consultant to identify where your website lacks certain implementations that may be stopping your website from growing SEO wise. A significant amount of information should come out of this, which should help form your overall SEO strategy.
Current SEO Performance
Your SEO consultant will analyse how your website is performing currently for keywords and will use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, ahrefs and more to understand where you’re getting your customers from. They will also evaluate your content to determine its quality, relevance, and optimisation level. This is an opportunity to identify and highlight where there are gaps in performance or specific areas that are just not performing so we can work out how to get these underperforming areas performing.
Internal Resources
Last on the list, your SEO consultant will want to understand the skills and availability of the internal team such as content writers, web developers and marketing. Understanding the internal resources available with help in planning the SEO strategy.
As an SEO consultant, we’d want to understand if we have access to your internal team and resources for various tasks or if we need to provide it for you to ensure your SEO strategy can be executed without any interruptions.
How to identify what your customers are searching for?
With limited resources, keyword research needs to be on point to ensure that the resource and budget can go further. To identify what customers are searching for, we recommend:
Competitor Research
Competitor keyword analysis is the process of identifying the keywords your competitors are targeting. Using this information can help to inform your own SEO strategy.
Often completed manually by looking at competitor websites using SEO tools, it can help you to quickly and easily uncover keywords that you can start to explore for your SEO strategy.
Using Keyword Research Software
Keyword research software can help you to research competitor keywords and rankings. Using software like Ahrefs can help as you can gain valuable insights into your competitor’s backlink profile, including a snapshot of wins and lost rankings. Ahrefs also lets you filter through keywords based on metrics like keyword difficulty, cost per click and position changes to dive deeper into competitor rankings.
Using Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free keyword research tool that can be a great starting point for your small business keyword strategy. It can track your impressions, clicks and ranking positions for a set of keywords so you can see how they’re performing. As long as you already have an existing website with Google Search Console already setup, you’ll likely find there is useful information to be utilised.
On-Page SEO: What changes should you make on your website?
On-page SEO is the process of optimising your webpages for visitors and search engines. It’s everything you as a business owner and website owner can physically do to your website to help users get the information, product or service they need, but also ensuring search engine bots can read your website freely to understand it well, so they can rank it in search engines.
It ensures your site is optimised for humans and search bots.
With limited resources, it can be tough to implement a lot of on-page SEO, but we can focus on the most important ones that should help to increase your websites visibility and user experience, including:
A targeted landing page
You want to ensure that your website has targeted landing pages specific to user search queries. Each landing page should be optimised for specific keywords relevant to your business and the users searching for what you offer. Landing pages could include service pages for each individual service you provide, product pages or category product pages, informational pages answering specific questions.
Targeted landing pages are simply pages created and dedicated to answer your users queries or to be the solution to their query. And one of the best ways you can benefit here is by ensuring you take your core business service or product specifics and create specific landing pages. They rank so much better than landing pages that cover many different topics.
Ensuring call to action (CTA) buttons are visible
A call to action should be clear and strategically placed to guide users towards making a specific business action that supports your business with how it operates so you can grow your business. Call to actions can include actions such as:
- Purchases
- Signing up to newsletters
- Completing a lead form
- Engaging with a specific part of a webpage
- Submitting a contact form
It’s important CTA’s stand out on webpages as CTA’s generally tend to lead towards an important action that helps your business to run and tick. So the more bold and visible we can make these the better.
Update content
Content is king. If you want to improve your SEO rankings, you should create new content and update your existing content regularly.
Creating content means you have more potential to drive traffic to your site and improve your rankings. While the best content is written, other types of content such as video content has started to climb the ranks as users will stay on your site longer and search engines like Google will take this as a positive.
How important is local SEO utilising Google Business Profile?
Local SEO can help your business reach a specific audience – people in your geographical area who are looking for the products or services you offer. It can help you build a stronger relationship with your consumers, making them more likely to choose you over a competitor, and can increase sales down the line.
A Google Business Profile is important for local SEO to maximise your visibility and to ensure that your business can be found by the people searching for you.
When a customer searches for a business, Google will show local results first. This means that businesses with a physical location in that area will have a higher chance of appearing in search results.
Optimising your Google Business Profile with keywords relevant to your business will help you to earn higher rankings locally, allowing you to gain new customers.
The more people that can locate you, the more opportunity there is to drive traffic to your site and business. Local SEO consultant services can help you to do this.
Link Building: Why Does It Matter?
Link building for SEO plays a huge role in small business marketing strategies because backlinks have an impact on search engine rankings and overall visibility. Link building efforts should be spread out and timed strategically based on where you’re at in your SEO campaign.
For example, you’ll want to be sure that on-page SEO is fully optimised, and your technical SEO is in good shape before you start your link building strategy. Quality backlinks from trusted sources work like endorsements for your business, and a good backlink points to your website as an authoritative source so it’s important to get right.
How to Measure the Success of Your SEO Efforts?
The best SEO programs are measured and tracked on a monthly basis with key performance indicators (KPIs) that may include Google Analytics data, keyword rankings, and organic traffic.
At Egnetix Digital, we believe in transparency and continuous optimisation for our SEO clients by providing a detailed monthly report.
Our monthly SEO report includes a full traffic trend report, ranking changes, and user engagement data. We also offer a monthly call to review results with our clients, explaining the monthly data reports in non-technical terms and discussing our SEO performance and impact.
This type of ongoing dialogue and reporting allows our SEO clients to understand where they are in the process, to visually observe the benefits of their SEO investment, and to collaborate with our team to adjust and fine-tune optimisation in real-time based on performance metrics.
Last Thoughts
SEO is an incredibly useful strategy for businesses of all sizes, but particularly small businesses looking to gain more organic visibility online. Since every business is different, your optimisation strategy should be tailored to you and your business goals.
Through keyword research, on and off page SEO tactics and a local SEO approach, we can ensure that your website begins to rank higher, and you start to see results straight away,
SEO can be an incredibly useful strategy for small businesses looking to gain more organic visibility. However, you need to ensure that your efforts are strategic and focused.
With sustained strategic efforts, small business SEO can transform the online stature of any company to be highly competitive in its niche. This can lead to long-term business growth and success.
Who are Egnetix Digital?
Egnetix Digital is a specialist SEO consultancy located in Medway, Kent, with over ten years of marketing expertise. We are dedicated to elevating the online presence of businesses from diverse sectors through our advanced SEO services. Our approach involves enhancing site architecture and fine-tuning on-page components to consistently achieve and maintain superior search engine rankings. If you’re seeking an SEO partner proficient in converting intricate digital challenges into opportunities for growth and improved online visibility, contact Egnetix Digital today.