7 Ways to Build a Robust SEO Strategy on a Small Budget Business

Today’s internet users are demanding quick information. They are getting more fickle each day. So, when searching for information or products online, they are more likely to choose one of the top suggestions on the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Now that the internet has become a chock-of-block of content and information, it’s become challenging, especially for small businesses like you to make your website sit on the top pages of the SERPs for certain keywords. Therefore, you need a solid strategy to boost your website visibility so that you can get the business off the ground seamlessly.

In this case, you need to invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to higher your website ranks. This robust strategy is affordable and even would not cost you hundreds of dollars. However, it takes constant effort before you see a visible result.

That being said, as a small business owner, you can say that SEO strategy is a powerful tool to make your business stand out from the competition. In this article, we will dive more into SEO practices and how your small business can implement them effectively.

Why Does Your Small Business Need a Solid SEO Strategy?

When you start a small business, not so many people are aware of your products or services. It means that you have to grab the attention of your target market and familiarize them with your brand.

No matter what industry you’re in or what size your business is, today’s internet users are always searching for brands like yours every single day. That’s where SEO strategy comes in handy. It makes it much easier for your target customers to find your business first.

Not convinced yet? Below are some reasons why SEO strategy is crucial for your small business.

Drive More High-Quality Traffic

SEO boosts your website visibility. It makes it rank higher on the search results page. This means that you have a higher chance of getting more traffic to your website. The more traffic you drive, the higher your chances of increasing conversion rates – which also translates into more loyal customers.

The number of visitors to your website becomes the number of opportunities you have at creating impressions, generating leads, and building meaningful relationships with your audiences.

Remember, more traffic does not only mean more sales. It also means a powerful way to grow your business, expand your business and product line, and develop more high-quality products and services. And all of them are crucial for small businesses to thrive and survive in today’s fiercely competitive marketplace.

Increase Online Credibility

Investing in SEO strategy allows you to boost your website reputation and online credibility. Most website visitors are sceptical. They can spend minutes, even hours just to make sure that they browse trustworthy information from trustworthy websites. You can also say that they need to be persuaded before they feel comfortable interacting with your website.

Your small business is new. And your website is pretty much unknown to most people. It means you are unsafe. In this case, SEO can make your website more reliable.

By optimizing your website and content, you make your content well-structured. Visitors can tell that you take your business seriously and aim to cater to their needs. Online credibility can help you to generate more visitors’ trust, so they will have no problem purchasing your products or services. After all, people will buy only from a website they trust, right?

Expand Reach Seamlessly

SEO is so much more than making your website appear on the top of search result pages. It’s also about making it much easier for visitors to navigate through all the content, giving them the best browsing experience possible.

In other words, SEO allows you to engage more visitors and make them stay longer on your website. It also makes your website easily accessible – both for desktop users and mobile users. This way, you can cater to their needs and expand your reach.

When you give every visitor – regardless of devices they use, a seamless browsing experience, they will tend to come back to you whenever they need other related information.

Bypass the Fierce Competition

Small businesses are prone to a lack of budget and resources when it comes to digital marketing campaigns. But SEO offers you an easy way to keep up with your competitors and even bypass them.

For instance, let’s say there are two small business websites that sell the same product and have similar target customers. One of them is well-optimized, while the other just simply focuses on selling items. Which one has the bigger chance to be found on the SERPs and attract more customers? Of course, the optimized one.

So, when you know that your competitors are jumping into the SEO bandwagon, then you have to ask yourself why your small business hasn’t built such a strategy too.

How to Build a Solid SEO Strategy: A Small Business Guide

Now that you know the key benefits of having a solid SEO strategy, there is no reason to ignore this robust tool to grow your small business. SEO might sound too technical and a bit daunting for a small business that has just started its SEO strategy.

But, below we’ve listed some handy and actionable tips (of course, and affordable too!) you can start building your SEO campaign so that you can strengthen your business online presence effortlessly.

1) Conduct a Solid Keyword Research

We can say that keyword research is a must-mentioned step when starting an effective SEO strategy. You need to choose the right keywords to target. So, when a potential customer looks for products with certain keywords, they will find your website on the top pages of SERPs.

Make sure you choose keywords that have such a decent amount of volume and quite low competition. You might also consider investing in long-tail keywords to appeal to even more targeted potential customers.

For example, if you sell scented candles, then you might choose keywords like “buy candles online” or go more locally “candle shop near me.”

2) Increase Page Load Time

Your visitors are always expecting they can get straightforward information about what they are looking for in a matter of seconds. So, when they decide to click on your website from the organic search, they want it to load completely as soon as possible.

When they have to wait for so long before they can even see what the page is all about, they will immediately close it and go for another website. They leave you for your competitors and never return.

This is why a faster page load time has a great influence on visitors’ satisfaction. A pleasant browsing experience feeds a positive word of mouth. It helps boost your website popularity and potentially increase your conversion rates.

To increase your page load times, you can reduce the size of your media; images, attachments, explainer videos, etc., that you put on your website.

3) Focus on Giving Values

Google always prioritizes websites that offer users valuable, accurate, and relevant content. Not only will it have users’ information they want, but it will also tempt them to keep coming back for more information from you.

Providing your visitors with helpful information can also make your website less hard-selling. It shows that your brand cares about them and is determined to give them what they need. This way, you can also improve visitors’ retention. It’s safe to say that giving valuable information on your website content should be one of your main priorities when creating a website for your small business.

Not to mention that quality content helps you generate more high-quality backlinks. Other authoritative websites will link to an informative piece of content as their resource. From all those links, you can create a solid backlink profile. For Google, a strong backlink profile indicates credibility and trust. In other words, the more quality backlinks you have, the higher you are likely to rank on the search engine.

4) Make the Website Interface User-Friendly

It’s essential to create a clean, easy-to-navigate website — not only to give the user a pleasant browsing experience but also to signal the search engine crawler to index it better. Make sure you format the blog posts neatly, make embedded videos accessible, design the landing pages straightforwardly, and structure the homepage simply. What’s more important: make sure it’s mobile responsive.

The key here is to use a lot of headings to improve readability and consider putting your keywords in the headings. Remember, don’t stuff your website with too many keywords in this case, though. It can confuse the search engine which keywords they should rank.

When you make the website well-structured and all the content is readable, you can make the visitor stay longer on the website. This, in turn, will increase the dwell time and reduce the bounce rate. The higher dwell time you have, the higher opportunity to get to rank higher on the SERPs.

5) Measure Results

Other than spending hours on your SEO practices, you also need to see how well all those strategies work and perform. That is why you need to pay close attention to the analytics and measure the result you have got so far.

Having a solid understanding of the result helps you understand which strategies work best and which ones are less effective. It makes your strategies more focused and efficient.

By analyzing and monitoring the results, you can also spot the top-performing content. This way, you can understand what type of content your visitors like and interact with the most. So, you can create similar content to engage them continuously.

6) Go Social

To maximize your SEO practice, you need to go beyond your website. You might consider using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Not only do social media platforms boost your brand awareness, but they are also effective for allowing search engine algorithms to take note. Search engines like Google care about social media too.

You can use social media to get your keywords out there. With more than 4.2 billion users, you have massive opportunities to attract target customers who may stumble across your business social media profile at any time and see that you’re offering just what they’ve been looking for.

The best way to use social media as an extra boost for your SEO practices and get the search engine’s attention is to create a keyword-based post and add a link to it. One thing you need to bear in mind is that you need to make sure you are not too spammy. Don’t include a link to your post too often.

Also, it’s always best to put the link of your website on your social media bio to guide your followers if they need further information about your small business.

7) Optimize the Multimedia Content

SEO and text-based content (blog posts, articles, and more) go hand-in-hand. But you might as well optimize your multimedia content (e.g., explainer videos, infographics, featured images, etc.,).

For static images, make sure you give alt tags to give visitors a better user experience — which can lead to both explicit and implicit SEO benefits. For video content, it’s essential to include transcripts and make them accessible for mobile devices.

By doing so, you make it much easier for search engines to understand what your visual or multimedia content is all about – generally comprising a short and accurate impression of the page’s content.

6 Top Affordable SEO Tools Small Businesses Need

SEO strategy might sound and look too technical for a small business with no experience and no a thousand-dollar budget like you. Thanks to the internet, though. Now you can utilize SEO tools seamlessly and get benefits from them without burning a hole in your pocket.

SEO tools can simplify your efforts and strategies. It helps you eliminate mundane, repetitive SEO tasks so you can focus on other necessary marketing strategies. We’ve listed some affordable, little-to-no-budget tools you can use to take the SEO effort to the next level flawlessly.

1) Google Analytics

This is probably the most basic yet powerful SEO tool you need: Google Analytics. This free SEO tool helps you with website analytics, including content performance, visitors’ behaviours, and more — you name it.

This tool allows you to get a solid insight into your whole website and SEO performance. You can also easily select a certain period you would like to monitor and analyze to compare it to a similar period.

2) Google Search Console

With this tool, you can understand how Google crawls your website. It allows you to index your website and all the content effortlessly. Google Search Console is also an ideal place to get reliable keyword data. Another best thing about this SEO tool is that it’s totally free and easy to use.

3) UberSuggest

UberSuggest is a perfect tool for choosing the right keywords for your website and content. As the name suggests, it provides you with a list of suggested related keywords based on the keyword you try to rank.

It also will give you in-depth, detailed data on keyword difficulty, monthly search volume, and more.

4) Keyword Hero

Keyword Hero uses machine learning and advanced math to help you solve keyword data issues. This tool comes in handy if you struggle with defining tight keywords even matching keywords with your conversions. You can use this tool for free and get up to 2000 sessions per month.

5) MozCast

Google algorithm is fickle. There’s always an update and it makes it challenging to keep the track of the changes. In this case, MozCast can help you out.

This algorithm tracker tool helps you to stay up to date with the algorithm changes. Therefore, it would be much easier for you to adjust the strategies and make them more effective.

This tool allows you to keep an eye on your competition. It gives you a list of the most popular types of content and sites in your industry. This way, you know how well your competitors are performing so that you can copy what they are doing — even do a better job and outsmart them. And of course, this tool is also free.

Final Thoughts

Overnight success is a myth when we talk about SEO. It might be an affordable yet powerful way to boost your online presence — even completely free, but you need to be patient and consistent. After all, SEO requires a long-term relationship with the search engine. But all those results are beneficial for your business in the long run. So, all those efforts and times will get paid off.

Search engines like Google often change their algorithms a lot. Therefore, you need to adjust and maintain the strategy on an ongoing basis. Routine maintenance of SEO strategy will ensure that you are still on top of any algorithm changes and ahead of your marketing game. With those guides above, you now understand what you need to bring to the table when it comes to optimizing your small business website.

Author

Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).