If you’re a small business owner, you’ve likely been told to work on your SEO. You’ve probably been quoted for some crazy expensive SEO packages too. And most of those packages were probably a minimum of six months long.
SEO can be expensive because it can be complicated. This article sticks to the need-to-know basics that will bring big results to your business because if you’re doing nothing for your SEO right now, there’s likely some low-hanging fruit that could make a huge difference today.
If you want to learn about the in-depth and complicated side of SEO, this Ahrefs article should do the trick.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It’s a set of actions you can take to optimise your website to perform well on the SERPs. Search engines, like Google and Bing, read your website and match it with the queries users type.
SERPs: Search Engine Results Pages are the pages on your chosen search engine (eg. Google) that show search results. To get lots of clicks, you want your website to ‘rank’ near the top of the first results page.
With time, your site’s SEO authority will build and it will be easier and easier for you to rank. But as a small business with a new website, your best chance is to target the right keywords and use features like Google Business Profile.
Why do Small Businesses Need SEO?
In short, SEO helps get more eyes on your business, helps new customers find and fall in love with the work you do, and boosts brand awareness. All of these mean more sales and more money for your business.
For example, imagine you had a brick-and-mortar store and five people walked in. Great, right? But with an effective SEO strategy, you can get way more than five new people ‘walking in’ to your website every day.
The brick-and-mortar store requires you to be in a good location to get the foot traffic and not everyone that walks past and sees your storefront is looking to buy what you’re selling.
With SEO, the people who see your website in the SERP are looking for the content you’re producing, so the traffic is usually higher quality.
How DB Tackles SEO for Small Businesses
SEO is one of the services we offer our clients at DB. We’ve got a few areas that we focus on that we’ve found to be the most impactful for smaller businesses.
1. Local SEO Workshop
When someone types “restaurants near me”, Google brings up a list of restaurants in the local area which it ranks by content, reviews, images, and other things. By optimising for local SEO, you give your business the best chance of showing up in those results.
We’ve turned this into a one-day workshop where we give your team the knowledge and skills to manage your own GBP in-house so you aren’t reliant on an external agency.
The proof is in the bread and butter pudding: Our local SEO client grew from having 50 new customers in June to 119 in December. That’s a 238% increase!
2. On-Site SEO and Content
The foundation of any SEO strategy is keyword research. Optimising your website content for the terms and phrases your ideal customers are typing into the search bar.
We conduct keyword research to find the keywords relevant to your business but also attainable for small businesses or brand-new websites. For example, we’ll find keywords that apply to your products or services but have low enough competition that you’ll be able to rank for them while your site builds authority.
We optimise your site using this keyword research and, for ongoing SEO growth, we’ll also guide you and your team through the best practices for creating blog posts that will drive quality traffic to your site.
3. Website Management
We only offer website management to clients whose websites we have built and host. This allows us to maintain the highest quality maintenance services across our clients and decrease lead times for ongoing site updates.
This affects SEO as we’re constantly improving our infrastructure and working on ways to improve your website’s speed and performance. And search engines love speed and performance.
That’s everything you need to know about SEO as a small business owner. At DB, we believe in simple strategies that yield big results which is why we’ve kept this (and our SEO offering in general) so simple.
If you have further SEO questions or want to improve your SEO game with us, let’s chat!
