SEO for Small Business: Boost Your Revenue [7X Faster] in (2021)

What can SEO do?

Before we talk about all the things SEO can do, we first need to understand what SEO is. 

You can see SEO as the process of adapting your website and each of your individual pages towards a specific keyword.

But, how does this process affect searchers finding your business and converting? 

By implementing SEO, you can increase the rankings of your website for specific keyword queries that searchers have. 

As a result of being found in the top search results, you significantly increase the amount of search traffic your website can potentially receive for a given keyword. 

One example is when you are searching for something like “dentist near me” on Google or any other search engine (e.g. Bing, Yahoo. or DuckDuckGo), you will mostly click on the first results you see. 

In some cases, you may even click on the following two pages.

However, you are less likely to click on sites after the first three search results because you probably already got what you are looking for in the first few sites.

To get searchers before other businesses, you can use SEO to help increase your site’s ranking and boost the number of people clicking on your site. 

How to start your SEO for Small Business?

You know the benefits of SEO for small business, but how do you start?

Starting SEO can seem hard, but here are some things that anyone can do if you want to start your SEO campaign. 

But, it is important to note that search engine optimization is a long-term marketing investment that won’t bear results right away.

Now with that out of the way, it’s time to talk about the very first step to SEO which is keyword research.

1) Keyword research

Keyword research can be seen simply as what people are searching for. For small business owners, it’s whatever your services or products you offer. 

For example, if you have an auto repair shop, you would look up how people are searching for services like oil change, brake replacement, broken windows, etc. 

Once you find the keywords that people are searching for and the keywords you want to target, you implement the next step which is on-page SEO.

If you need help doing keyword research, here is a guide by Ahref that can provide more information for beginners.

2) Optimizing Your Content Using On-Page SEO

Now that you have the keywords you want to rank for, it’s time to utilize them throughout your business’s site.

Here are some of the places that you can add the keywords you found using keyword research:

3) Page Content

The first and most important place to add your targeted keyword(s) is in the page content. So, places like the title, subheadings, and paragraph text should have your main keyword and other supporting keywords.

Here is an example of adding keywords to your page. In this example, we will look at an orthodontist’s service page. Their main keyword is “wisdom teeth removal.”

You can see that they include “wisdom teeth removal” and other relevant keywords in the title, subheadings, and paragraph. 

However, it doesn’t mean you add your targeted keywords all over the page. You’ll need to add keywords that support your main keywords. These are called LSI and keyword variation. 

If you are making a page about wisdom teeth removal you’ll need to add keywords like:

• Tooth extractions
• Wisdom teeth extractions
• Extractions
• And more related keywords

By adding all of these to your page(s), it lets search engines know that your content has relevant content towards a specific keyword query. This increases your page(s) SEO ranking. 

4) URL

The next place to put your keyword is in your page’s URL. This gives search engines indicators of what the page will be about when they crawl throughout your website. 

Optimizing your URL structure is very important especially if you have various types of products on your eCommerce store.

For example, here is an eCommerce website that has a specific URL structure for their collections page:

Then here is the image of then the URL structure for their product page:

By separating it by a broad keyword in the category pages and a more specific keyword in the product pages, it helps improve SEO by making it easier for search engines to understand what your site is going to be about. 

As a result, small business owners that optimize their URL structures will see better SEO results than those who simply put random keywords or random texts. 

5) Images

After your URL, you can put your keywords in your images with alt-tags. This is good for two reasons. 

The first is that it increases your SEO for a specific page by providing more information to search engines about a topic.

The second reason is that there is a percentage of people that discover websites through image searchers. 

Note: When including images on your website, it’s recommended to compress your images. This increases page loading speed and reduces users leaving your site.

Optimizing your Content Using Off-Page SEO

When it comes to SEO, it doesn’t stop on just what’s on your site. There are some things you can do to improve your SEO outside of your site. This is called off-page SEO.

Link Building

The most common and effective off-page strategy is link building. This is the process of building backlinks to your website or specific pages. 

What are backlinks, and why are they important?

They are links from other domains. You can see them as a thumbs up from another website. This tells search engines that other domains trust in your authority over a given niche. 

By adding backlinks to your website or a specific page, it’ll boost your site’s rankings. If you want to learn the different ways to build Authority backlinks read this Authority Backlink Guide.