“What is small business SEO?”
SEO can deliver and endless stream of free traffic
For a small business, SEO (search engine optimisation) can literally deliver a hungry crowd of customers with credit card in hand, looking for exactly what you’re selling.
But only if you get your SEO right!
If you get SEO wrong, you’ll get booted out of the search engine results pages (SERPs), and you never receive a single visitor from Google ever again.
SEO is arguably one of the best marketing investments, a business can make, but getting it right is not easy.
It’s very easy to rank high in the search-engines for keywords that no one is searching for! But that’s of little commercial value to you. You want to rank for keywords that:
- Get hundreds if not thousands of searches a month
- Are ‘buying’ keywords rather than ‘research’ keywords
- Are competitive (which suggests they’re valuable) but not so competitive that you can’t break into the top ten positions on a results page
- Have multiple variations, all of which are commonly searched for, all of which your site is optimised and ranks for
- Will result in either customer acquisition or at a minimum generate leads that could be developed into customers for your products and services
Achieve those objectives, and you can look forward to an endless supply of leads and customers all delivered at zero cost courtesy of Google (who currently has 90% plus market share in the UK).
SEO for small business, is big business, but there are a lot of companies that will promise fast results, which are generally delivered through poor practices, that can quickly get you banned.
Our approach is much more data driven and starts with an assessment of the factors that will determine whether or not your site can appear in the top ten for a keyword that is of commercial value, and has high monthly search volumes.
For an assessment of your site join our membership site and you’ ll learn how to carry out an audit or your site using free tools, which will answer the key questions of:
- How many searches a month are there of your main keyword and close variations, in Google.co.uk on a monthly basis?
- What is the strength of the competition for those keywords on a “strong, medium, weak” scale
- What is the commercial value of the keywords (which is another way to determine the competition, and the benefits of achieving top positions)
- What are the chances of your site ranking in the top 10 for your chosen keyword
This will give you an immediate view on the merits of investing in SEO for your small business or not, and provide you with a view of how much time, effort and cost ill be involved in achieving your objectives. You can then balance this up against other competing marketing priorities.
Whilst SEO is important it’s not the only way of securing free traffic to your website, there are a vast number of alternatives, and some of those may be more appropriate if securing the top positions in Google is not going to be cost effective.
Many small businesses will do a bit of research online, and look to conduct their own SEO on their sites. This is not a sensible approach for a number of reasons including:
- Search engine algorithms change regularly and what works today will no longer work tomorrow, or worse could result in your site being penalised
- SEO is not a one time event, and requires regular monitoring and tweaking to ensure optimum results. The top results will change regularly with new competitors entering and others leaving, and you probably have you hands full already running your business to worry about this
- Arguably the most important reason not to attempt to SEO your site is it’s a bit like:
“Doing your own SEO is like learning to drive a car to make one journey”
Contact us to find out more about what we can offer.
