SEO for Small Businesses | Rank Higher on Google in 2022

SEO for small businesses is like air and water – essential.

If you’re a small business owner, you probably don’t have heaps of disposable cash to spend on your digital marketing strategy. So, optimising your content to help bring in organic traffic is often your best bet towards fast growth.

To give you an idea of how to rank higher on Google using SEO, keep reading. We’re sharing everything you need to know about SEO for small businesses. So, let’s get started!

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation and to do SEO, you can implement a variety of strategies and tactics to optimise your website for search engine algorithms.

These algorithms use bots to “crawl” through your website. As these bots navigate through your content, it uses certain factors to rank your website on search engine results pages (SERPs).

And to be clear, SEO for small businesses helps you rank on SERPs organically, meaning you won’t have to pay for ads on search engines if you do it correctly.

Some of the factors these algorithms take into consideration include:

• Quality of your content including text, images and videos
• Bounce rates (number of people who click away from your website)
• Website navigation and design
• Number of errors or duplicate pieces of content
• Keywords from the search
• Number of links to and from the website
• Geographic specifications

While no one knows exactly what factors are most important as these algorithms are made by thousands of people in myriad iterations, the goal of these algorithms is to present its users with the best, most relevant search results to solve their search query.

So, while doing SEO for small businesses, the idea is to optimise your website so that search engine algorithms can easily crawl your website and rank it higher than your competition.

SEO for Small Businesses: Why is it important?

SEO for small businesses is important because it’s a cost-effective way to make your website more visible to future customers. The three main reasons why SEO for small businesses is important are:

• To build authority
• To save money on ads
• To find new customers

Let’s go through each of these benefits in a little more detail.

Build Authority

If you’re a small business, chances are not a lot of people know about you. While people the world over trust brands like Apple and Nike, the chances that they trust you right off the bat are slim.

That’s where SEO for small businesses comes into play.

Since most people start their search for any new product or service on search engines, it’s essential that you show up in those search results.

If there’s a keyword that lots of people are searching for and that query is a problem you can solve with your business, SEO should be your first step.

When you have high rankings on SERPs, future customers begin to trust you more. Even if they don’t buy from you straight away, you can think of your high rankings as a form of PR. If you get in front of future customers enough times, eventually you’ll start to build authority in their minds.

Save Money on Ads

Another reason why SEO for small businesses is important is that it’s a cost-effective digital marketing strategy.

Since most small businesses don’t have the biggest advertising budgets, it makes sense to do SEO where you’ll be driving organic traffic via search engines without paying for ads.

Simply by optimising your website for search engine rankings, you can instantly become more visible to customers and, in fact, many people trust organic results over paid ads anyways.

And even if you hire an SEO agency to take care of the strategic side of things, you’re still likely to save money in the long run. Any investment in SEO for small businesses is a good investment.

Find New Customers

Last but not least, SEO for small businesses is essential for finding new customers. And while, yes, some niches are better suited to SEO than others, again, most people start their search for products and services on search engines.

If someone needs a new GP, they generally ask Google.

If someone needs a new battery for their watch, they generally ask Google.

If someone’s looking for a dog sitter in their suburb, they generally – you guessed it – ask Google.

So, if you have a product or service that solves a customer problem, you need to be optimising your website for search engines. By boosting your visibility and finding new customers, SEO for small businesses helps you find motivated leads who are ready to buy or book.

How to Do SEO for Small Businesses

Now that you know why SEO for small businesses is important, it’s time to go over how to get started with an SEO strategy of your own.

Here are some of the basics of SEO for small businesses.

Set clear, measurable SEO goals

Just like any other goal you set for your business, the first step towards effective SEO for small businesses is setting clear, measurable SEO goals.

Before you start on a strategy, it’s key to have something to aim for. They’re the only way to know whether what you decide to implement is working.

Just remember that your goals should be clear, specific and actionable. To give you an idea of what we mean, some common SEO goals you might make include:

• Increasing organic traffic by 25%
• Reduce overall bounce rate to 30%
• Improve page load speeds by 50%
• Rank higher on SERPs in 6 months
• Appear in 3x as many “near me” searches

Once your goals are well-understood, then it’s time to start strategising.

Fix any errors and improve load times

One of the first things you should do when you implement SEO for small businesses is to get all the simple stuff out of the way. By this, we mean you should clean up your website, get rid of any 404 errors and improve page load times.

If there are any errors on your website, people aren’t likely to stay long. The same goes if they’re waiting ages for your pages to load.

By fixing errors and compressing any large photos or videos that are taking too long to load, you can instantly improve your rankings on search engines. All of these little things matter to the algorithm.

Improve the user experience on your website

The user experience (UX) design of your website is another factor that matters when it comes to search engine rankings. If people have trouble using or navigating your website, they’re more likely to click away and look elsewhere.

So, not only does your website need to be error-free and fast to load for effective SEO, for small businesses, you can’t afford to have a clunky website. The UX has to be pristine for customers to choose you over big names that have their own teams of developers working on their website.

A few things you can do to improve UX and boost SEO for small businesses include:

• Improve your menu and navigation bar
• Ensure all your buttons and links work
• Improve the content on your website
• Make sure your content isn’t leading people in circles

Do relevant keyword research

Now that your website is functioning optimally, it’s time to get into more of the nitty-gritty of SEO for small businesses. Keyword research is one of the best ways to truly optimise your website for search engines and can help you focus your other SEO strategies.

Keyword research involves finding the words and phrases that people are searching for. You can find data on search volume, competition for those keywords and more when you use a keyword research tool (which we’ll go into a bit later).

However, instead of trying to rank for the trendiest keywords that have a lot of competition, keyword research can help you rank for keywords that are the most relevant to your small business and that have the least amount of competition.

In other words, keyword research is all about having the data to back up your approach and reach people who are actually searching for things that you can help them with.

Create an SEO content strategy

The next stage in SEO for small businesses is to create an SEO content strategy. As the saying goes, content is king and a solid SEO content strategy is essential for any effective SEO campaign.

SEO content includes things like:

• Web page content
• Blog posts
• Articles
• Whitepapers
• Product descriptions
• Metadata
• URL slugs

While high-quality writing is always the most important aspect of any good content strategy, ensuring that you incorporate relevant keywords and an authority-building style are also highly effective in terms of SEO for small businesses.

In other words, it’s important to not only reach more people through implementing keywords and copywriting but also to add value to your customers through content and solving the problems they’re using search engines to solve.

Build your backlinks

As we mentioned, search engine algorithms crawl through your website using links. This means that another huge factor that determines your website’s rankings on SERPs involve links.

Backlinks in terms of SEO for small businesses refers to the number of links that point to your website. So, if a different website links to your website from theirs, that’s considered a backlink.

Backlinks are used by search engine algorithms as a ranking factor since the assumption is that a website that other website’s trust must, therefore, be trustworthy. So, building your backlinks is another effective SEO strategy.

To build backlinks, there are a few ways to go about it including:

• Writing guest blog posts
• Working with affiliates and influencers
• Posting your information on reputable directories
• Participating in reputable forums

Keep track of the analytics

Once you’ve implemented some strategies to improve your SEO for small businesses, it’s essential that you keep track of the analytics. After all, how will you know if you’ve met your goals if you don’t measure the data?

By using tools like Google Analytics (which we’ll explain in more detail below), you can keep track of how well your SEO is working. Plus, you’ll also see where mistakes might be and what could use some improvement.

While it’s not necessary to check your analytics daily – SEO for small businesses usually takes months before you start to see real results – checking out the monthly reports on Google Analytics is usually a good measuring strategy.

Stay up to date on changes to SEO for small businesses

The truth is, SEO for small businesses is always changing. The algorithm gets smarter and smarter all the time and as more and more websites engage in SEO strategies, the entire space adapts in response.

So, as a small business owner, it’s important that you stay up to date on what’s changing in SEO for small businesses.

Plus, technological advances like AI tools, voice-activated search and visual search results continue to change the landscape of SERPs and SEO.

However, do your best not to let these changes overwhelm you. Instead, embrace the ebbs and flows and as long as you’re maintaining a high level of content, you can stay on top of SEO for small businesses.

Best Tools to Start Doing SEO for Small Businesses

One of the best things about doing SEO for small businesses is that, nowadays, there are countless tools and software out there to help you along. Here are some of our favorites.

SEO Audit Tools

Before you begin doing SEO for small businesses, it’s a good idea to start with an SEO audit. Using SEO audit tools, you’ll be able to see how well your website is currently doing and what needs some special attention.

Some of the best SEO audit tools include:

• SEMRush
• Seomater
• Google Search Console
• SEOquake
• Ahrefs

These tools will show you which keywords you’re ranking for, how many backlinks are active and more. You’ll get a full audit of the SEO within your website and is the best place to start with SEO for small businesses.

Keyword Research Tools

When you’re starting out doing SEO for small businesses, one of the first things you’ll need to get a handle on is your keyword research.

Keyword research is essential before you start planning out your content strategy since you won’t know what you’re aiming to rank for if you don’t do keyword research first.

Still, it does take a bit of creativity to come up with keywords to do research on. And that’s where keyword research tools come into play.

Some of the best keyword research tools include:

• SEMRush
• Ahrefs
• KWFinder

However, search engines themselves are often great ways to find relevant keywords. For example, Google’s “People also ask” section, as well as their “related keywords” section at the bottom of every SERP, are great ways to find keywords for your small business.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is another powerful tool that every website should definitely incorporate. In terms of SEO for small businesses, this free data includes everything from:

• Which pages on your website are the most popular
• Your bounce rate (meaning how many people leave your website instantly)
• Where your traffic is coming from
• Audience demographics
• Page load times and more

By showing you where potential problems lie and which website pages are working really well, you can measure your organic traffic from a variety of sources and make sure that your SEO strategies are working as well as they should.

Just keep in mind that Google Analytics can be quite overwhelming. Some big companies have employees who work solely on Google Analytics. So, start by focusing on the data that matters most to you and take it from there.

SEO Agencies

Arguably the most valuable SEO tool in any small business toolbox is your SEO agency. Having a team of SEO experts on your side can prove to be invaluable to the growth and success of your small business.

So, if you’ve made it this far and still feel absolutely overwhelmed by the prospect of doing SEO for small businesses, you’re not alone. In that case, hiring an SEO agency is certainly the best tool for you.

Want to learn more? Book a free consultation with our SEO experts here at Maple Cloud SEO Agency Sydney and we’ll give you all the details on what it means to work do SEO for small businesses.

What’s Next for SEO?

As we’ve mentioned, search engine algorithms are always changing and evolving. So, when doing SEO for small businesses, it’s important to stay on top of what’s next for SEO.

Here, we’re going over the top 3 trends that are likely to become even more popular in 2022.

AI Tools

AI or artificial intelligence has been a reality for digital marketers for years. But especially in terms of SEO for small businesses, it’s smart to get a better understanding of AI tools both for content creation and analytics.

If anything, AI tools are expected to only be more prominent in 2022 and beyond, so keep an eye out for that.

Voice-Activated Searches

With digital assistants like Alexa and Siri becoming a staple for many people, voice-activated SEO is another aspect of organic traffic that you’ll want to think about.

Make sure any audio or video details on your website are also SEO optimised to take advantage of voice-activated searches.

Moving forward, you’ll want to keep an eye on the voice-activated search trend as there are likely to be new ways to improve SEO for small businesses in this way.

Visual Search Results

While visual search results have been common over the last few years, this trend is only expected to continue. It’s why images and videos are more important than ever to include in your SEO for small businesses.

Now that Google separates visual search results and places them at the top of SERPs, this is a key aspect of SEO for small businesses that can help you get ahead in 2022 and beyond.

Ready to get started with SEO for small businesses. Leave it to us! Here at Maple Cloud SEO Agency Sydney, our team of SEO experts are here for you. Book a free consultation today!