Posts tagged small business SEO

A question I’ve had a few times is whether SEO is worth doing for small businesses. The short answer is yes, although the strategies you will employ will differ from an e-commerce, or advertising orientated website. Generally a small-business website should be easier to SEO, but the targeting becomes very important. Every website should be optimised for the search engines, as even if it drives minimal traffic, it can increase profile and credibility.

While traffic for certain small businesses from the SERP’s may be small, conversion rates tend to be quite a bit higher than for more highly traffic keywords. For example, people searching for “hair salon Lane Cove” more than likely are looking for a hair salon where then can get a haircut sooner rather than later.

Select Your Keywords Carefully

The keywords you choose to optimise for are very important for small business. Generally, the users searching for more niche search terms are searching for very specific sites, and even if you rank for the term you will more than likely be skipped as users search for the specific results.

Brainstorm what you would search for if you were a prospective client searching for your business. For Green’s on Blenheim some keywords might be:

• “Green’s on Blenheim”
• “pizza North Ryde”
• “pizza Ryde”
• “North Ryde takeaway”

Your list should be longer than this. Once you have completed your list have a look at what ranks at the moment. Do they obviously use SEO? What are their titles? Where do they get their links from? Don’t forget to use Google’s Keyword Tool to find some good keywords…

I would recommend trying to rank for industry and geographic location (i.e. “pizza North Ryde” or “plumber Dubbo”), as this would result in a high level of conversions.

Keep the On-Site SEO Simple and Targetted

Obviously, as a business website, your site’s content can’t be 100% customised for SEO purposes. This need not affect rankings, since Google rewards totally unique content (which yours should be!)

• Make sure you have the main keywords in your titles once
  • Do this for each page of your website so they all rank
• Ensure your site is easy to navigate
  • Have a simple HTML navigation structure that is easy to use for users and for search engine spiders
• Don’t be too fancy
  • Google can’t read Flash (for now), so best to keep to HTML as that is the best for SEO

Customise Your Off-Site

I would never deny the importance of links in SEO, but for small business SEO it is a lot more efficient and effective to customise your link gathering. Generally, competition will be lower for the keywords you have selected, thus a wide-ranging and all-encompassing link building campaign, while it may have it’s benefits, will be superfluous. Here’s a few tips for good off-site small business optimisation:

• Submit to all the relevant directories
  • Yahoo Local and Google Local are perfect examples. A submission to Google Local can often result in an appearance above the search results in Google.
  • Submit to industry relevant directories

• Try to gather links from sites that would genuinely link to you. That might be clients, suppliers, or even competition!
• Create and submit a Google sitemap using Google’s Webmaster Tools.
• Would it be worth creating a Twitter or Facebook account for your business? Often the answer is ‘no’, but if you think you have something interesting and relevant to share of actual value then this is a great way of gathering links and increasing profile.

Tracking and Maintenance

As I said in earlier posts, the importance of using Google Analytics effectively cannot be stressed enough. By monitoring traffic flow daily, and finding where it came from will allow you to fine-tune your SEO over time.

Also monitor how your site goes in the SERP’s. Track the results weekly to see what you begin to rank for, and what is dragging the chain. This way you will learn what deserve attention and focus, and what can be left by the wayside.