You could have the best product or service in the world, and an awesome website, but if no-one knows you exist, it’s all for nothing. Search engine optimization (SEO) is about getting found online, by people who are looking for what you’re offering.
There are a number of things you can do to increase the visibility of your website on search engines when people type in keywords and topics related to your business.
Since Google currently enjoys over 83% of the global search engine market share, most SEO strategies are geared toward making them happy, so that their algorithms rank your site higher in search results. But generally, these SEO tactics will work on all search engines.
This guide is designed to help small businesses with a new website quickly get to grips with SEO. We’ll break down content optimization steps, explore pro tips and mistakes to avoid, as well as clarify the myths that SEO agencies may use to keep you paying high fees.
SEO can be simplified – let’s clear your path for gaining 247 ‘organic traffic’ i.e. more potential customers viewing your website.
And if you're looking to bringing new ideas to life without any cost barrier, check out the Business Starter Kit – get all this for free: LLC registration, a .com domain, business email, easy website builder, SEO tool to get found online, and social media tool to for fast posts to grow your reach. What’s stopping you?
Are you thinking SEO can wait because you have more important things to do at this early stage of your business? Here’s why SEO is important to get right from the get-go, and worth your time as an ongoing activity:
Getting your website SEO-ready means enhancing it so that Google’s algorithms rank it high in search results. Search engines are all about rewarding websites that match what people are looking for, and deliver great customer experience.
The two most important factors for effective content optimization are:
Now let’s roll up our sleeves and get your new website up to speed with SEO:
These are arguably the three most popular, low cost tools for small businesses that are getting started on SEO with a new website:
Our suggestion for busy small businesses is RelateSEO, because it handles all your SEO, not just keywords. This tool gives you an ongoing To Do list customized to your website, along with short step-by-step video guides to walk you through them.
And it’s also budget-friendly for small businesses. In comparison, the Moz monthly pricing plans for SMBs are the $99 Standard or $149 Medium. Semrush has the $149.95 Pro and $249.95 Guru monthly plans.
Targeted keywords are the specific phrases you want to rank for based on what people type into search engines. You’ll want to choose keywords that best represent your content, have a decent amount of traffic, and that’s not too difficult (meaning competitive).
Types of Targeted Keywords:
Here’s an example of a fitness instructor, who also sells related products:
Semantic keywords (also called LSI keywords) are related terms or synonyms of your targeted keyword. They help search engines understand the context of your content better.
Google uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to analyze the relevance of content based on related terms. It improves your content's contextual depth, and helps your pages get ranked for a wider range of search queries.
For example:
Your primary keyword for each web page is the main focus of the content, designed to target the most relevant and high-value audience. While secondary keywords support the primary keyword by adding context and capturing related searches.
It follows then that semantic keywords will always be secondary. But to determine which of your targeted keywords are the primary, let search intent be your guide:
Here are two examples, using our fitness instructor:
For targeted keywords, this is what you need to know:
For semantic keywords:
This will naturally be a long term, ongoing project, but it’s worth your while to write at least three blog articles as soon as possible, around subjects you think your audience will be interested in, so you can start gaining traction for search ranking. And when your business is perceived as wanting to help people, they will naturally become interested in your brand.
Establishing Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) is a key metric Google now uses in deciding how high to rank your web pages in search results. These days it’s just as important if not more so, than keywords.
To learn more about EEAT, read this guide, designed for small businesses: EEAT: learn about quality content to boost your long term SEO success.
Whether helpful blog articles or product pages, here are some tips to boost their chances at ranking well in search results:
For more guidance, see the Pro SEO Tips section below. Also read this article, which includes advice on what to look for if you want to hire an SEO writer: 10 Must-Follow SEO Content Writing Rules.
No matter how attractive your website looks, if people arrive at your site and can’t quickly find what they’re looking for, they’ll click away and you’ll have lost out on an opportunity for a new customer.
These are the main things you need to know about good user experience:
Now it’s time to give your web pages visual appeal so that people want to spend more time there. Add images and/or videos, to the top of the page (called the banner or hero) and to break up content.
With images, look to make them enhance key parts of your content. Infographics are also really good for engagement, since often people are too busy to read long form text — an infographic can wet their appetite to come back for more.
Optimize these visuals by giving them clearly descriptive file names. Alt text (also known as alt tags) are a few words that describe the images, so that search engines can understand their context. These are called semantic keywords. Alt tags are also helpful for people with poor eyesight.
And in case you didn’t know, alt text can be found on any web page by right-clicking on the image and selecting ‘Inspect’ or ‘View Alt Text’.
Google gives website pages a ‘freshness factor’ rating, which wanes from the moment you publish a page.
This is why it’s highly recommended to schedule in some touch ups of your site content every six months or so. The changes don’t need to be extensive, here are some of the key things to target:
Once you’ve made your changes, add a sentence with the date at the bottom in bold, to show people. Or some websites platforms like WordPress have plugins that automatically list the date and time every time a page is updated.
When it comes to understanding how well your site is performing on the SEO front, you’ll want to set up Google Analytics and Search Console. These videos will walk you through it:
Now that we’ve explored the fundamental steps to getting your new website SEO-ready, let’s cover what experienced professionals do, to maximise your platform’s potential for building visibility, improving your search rankings, and driving more visitors (organic traffic).
Some of these points we’ve already looked at in the section above, but we’ll repeat them here so you'll be sure to tick them off your To-Do list. Not doing these tasks also represents mistakes small business owners make when doing SEO. Also find tool suggestions to make the job much easier.
To rank faster and get ahead of large companies with big marketing budgets, target low-competition, long-tail keywords e.g. "easy yoga poses for beginners" vs. “yoga studio”.
Effective keyword optimization in your website content means matching what people are searching for. And there are different types of search intent search intent, since people are at changing stages of their search journey:
This is about structuring your content so that search engines can easily understand its context and value:
Reputable websites that link to a page on your site signals to Google that your platform is trustworthy. But you want to avoid spammy link-building tactics, focus on quality over quantity when it comes to getting backlinks. These are ways to get them:
Content is the heart of SEO. Be sure to:
Since Google considers page speed a ranking factor, you’ll want to optimize speed by:
With over 60% of searches happening on mobile, this is an important factor in getting more site visitors. Choose a responsive design template that automatically adjusts to mobile screens. Learn more, including Google’s free tool to help you do this: 10 Best Tips on How to Make a Website Mobile Friendly.
Submit your XML sitemap to Google Search Console. Tools like Yoast SEO can generate one for you. Google Search Console also helps you to monitor search engine crawling issues, see which keywords you’re ranking for, and track your site’s performance.
Make navigating your site intuitive and clear, by using short paragraphs, bullet points, and visuals. Engaging, easy-to-digest pages.reduce bounce rates, showing Google you have a high quality platform.
Also known as ‘semantic’ or ‘clean’ urls, these are web addresses that are short and describe exactly what the page is about. This makes them easy to read for both users and search engines. Also include primary keywords. Also avoid unnecessary characters or numbers, like “mysite.com/p=123)”.
WordPress and some other CMS platforms let you install tools like Yoast SEO or Rank Math. These will give you tips on keyword use, readability, and meta tag creation.
If you have a physical business, it’s important to optimize for your location so people in the area can find you:
Also called ‘structured data’ this is a piece of code you inject into a page or post to help search engines better understand your content. It results in better indexing and higher content ranking for related searches. Learn more, including Google’s free tool to help you do this: How to Improve Your SEO by Using Schema Markup.
If you’re looking for a tool that can identify all the SEO tasks needed for your individual tasks, and give you step-by-step video guides to show you how to implement them, check out RelateSEO. It’s like having an optimization pro in your pocket.
As a busy small business owner wearing many hats, it’s hard to wrap your head around the many facets of marketing to attract more customers. SEO has a reputation for being really difficult to get a handle on, with algorithms and opinions changing constantly.
There are many ‘SEO experts’ out there who foster this view, to charge large amounts of money.
Let’s dive in to clarify some of the confusion around SEO, confirmed by true SEO experts like Google.
While there’s an initial burst of tasks you need to do to get your new website SEO-ready as described in the steps above, that’s just the beginning. SEO is a marathon, not a race.
It’s important to keep a close eye on performance, so you can improve on pages that aren’t doing well. And as we;ve also already covered, it’s important to freshen up pages with new content every six months or so to let search engines know they’re current and relevant.
It’s commonly thought that Google is very strict about duplicating content on websites, so that you have pages that are nearly the same, either on your site or different sites. .
But Google has confirmed that they don’t penalize duplicate content if it isn’t intended to deceive search engines.
The problem though is that duplicate content can still hurt your rankings, because if there are two very similar pages on the web, their search engine will struggle to decide which is the primary page that should be displayed.
This is the reason you want to make each of your site pages as unique as possible, and if you find that someone has duplicated your content, you can report it to search engines. Google and Bing would be the two main ones.
Earlier in this article we said that you should write long-form content as this performs better. We’re not contradicting that here, just adding a caveat.
If you have a long article that waffles on without getting to the point, has unhelpful sub-headings that don’t serve the main topic, and is poorly written, you’ll be doing yourself much more harm than good. People will think you’re an amateur and not a business looking at.
If you don’t have a lot of ‘meat on the bone’ with the information you’re sharing, either weave in a relatable human story around it, or keep it short and simply highlight how it solves a problem.
A 900 word article will perform better than a 2,000 word article that is unhelpful or badly written.
In other words, what matters ultimately is search intent and solving problems, not volume.
That said, if you can create longer pieces of content that are genuinely useful, it will perform better than short articles that cover things superficially. That’s because these days anyone can find short, generic information in seconds using ChatGPT. Comprehensive information based on deep research and experience is much more valuable.
There has been much debate about how many times on a page to use keywords. You can calculate it by subtracting the number of times a target keyword appears in content, from the total number of words in that page.
Some SEo experts say 2% to 3% density is ideal. Others say you should aim for 4% to 5%. But Google has confirmed multiple times that there is no such thing as ideal keyword density. The focus should always be on writing natural, high quality content.
In fact, search engines see keyword stuffing as an indicator of low quality content, because it’s not customer focused. You can find a number of free SEO writing tools that count keyword density, so you can make sure you’re not overdoing it.
There has been a lot of hype about Google boosting search rankings based on latent semantic indexing (LSI), which evaluates the relationships between words.
LSI keywords are words or phrases that relate to your target keywords, but aren’t synonyms e.g. if a target keyword is “wooden table”, the LSI keywords would be “wood work” and “hand-crafted furniture”.
But Google has confirmed that LSI keywords don’t actually exist. What does matter is semantics (the meaning of words and topics), context, and search intent.
A good way to boost this is to add an FAQ section on each page, even blog pages, which questions you think people would search for around the topic of that page.
Some SEO pros advise only targeting popular keywords, typically shorter ones, that get thousands (or millions) of searches per month. And they’re typically shorter search terms.
But high-volume keywords are extremely competitive, and often too broad to really describe more niche products or services.
It’s better, especially for small businesses, to target low-volume keywords, which are more specific to your business and easier to rank for. Staying with the “wooden table” example, that would be high volume. Instead, a small business should go for “hand-crafted wooden tables made in Nebraska”.
A meta description is that introductory text you see in search results briefly describing the company or page. a code snippet that provides a brief explanation of the content on your page.
Many people think that this snippet is a ranking factor for search engines, when in fact it’s not. Meta descriptions are used by Google to help them decide if the site is relevant, and if written well they can help you get click throughs.
But don’t let anyone tell you they need to be packed with keywords for SEO ranking. Simply make sure they introduce your business or page in the clearest way possible, focus on the customer not search engines, and you’ll be flying right.
This term means how strong and trustworthy a website is. But contrary to what many claim, Google has said it’s not a factor that search engines use to rank your website pages higher.
But as opposed to what some SEO experts claim, it isn’t a ranking factor. And has no direct impact on rankings.
But building trust is important overall, and this is indicated by the quality and quantity of people linking to your content, and your monthly organic traffic. Learn more about building trust, and what Google looks at on this side of things to rank you higher: EEAT: learn about quality content to boost your long term SEO success.
Google has confirmed that it IS a ranking factor for websites which operate smoothly on mobile devices. In other words, you could have the most beautiful site in the world, but if it’s not mobile-friendly, search engines will rank you lower.
As mentioned above, this is the reason why it’s important to choose a website template that automatically adapts to screen size.
Since backlinks (links to your site from other websites) tend to indicate that your platform is trustworthy because people like it, some ‘SEO experts’ focus entirely on getting them.
There are still ‘Black Hat SEO’ companies that operate ‘link farms’ which sell backlinks. But let’s be clear, not all backlinks are good for your SEO ranking. Google’s algorithms have evolved, and now look for the relevance and reputability of the websites linking to yours.
In other words, if you sell jewellery, and you have multiple sites on car manufacturing, or cheap knockoffs, your backlink is identified as irrelevant, meaning it’s not worth anything at best, and it makes you look like a suspicious, low quality website at worst.
Compared to this, a single backlink from a popular website that’s relevant to your industry carried more authority than ten weak backlinks.
If you’re paying an SEO consultant or agency, it’s a good idea to do a quick check using Semrush’ free Backlink Analytics tool, to make sure they’re delivering quality backlinks, not empty numbers.
Given that SEO has traditionally been seen as so complex it’s like rocket science, many small businesses think the only way to guarantee higher rankings is to hire an expensive agency.
But the fact is that no matter how much you spend, nothing is guaranteed with SEO. One day you could be ranking at the top of page one in search results, the next there’s an algorithm change and you’ve disappeared into page fifty.
If anyone tries to promise you high rankings, run a mile. And SEO is also not just about the ‘traffic’ numbers. Because what does it matter if you drive high volumes of people to your website, but fail to turn them into paying customers?
Know that SEO is about the long game Your main focus should always be on making sure your site has high quality content that closely aligns with what users are searching for, and easy navigation for great customer experience.
RelateSEO makes things super easy, by giving you a task list customized to your website, with short step-by-step tutorials to walk you through it. Say goodbye to the headaches of rocket science.
And if you don’t have time to create compelling, useful content on a regular basis, or writing simply isn’t your strong suit, it’s much cheaper to hire an SEO copywriter on platforms like Fiverr than it is to hire an agency.
For more of a steer on easy tools that can help you achieve your goals, including a short Quiz that offers recommendations based on what stage your business is at, check out the Build & Grow Hub.
We also think this will be a helpful read: Three Pillars of a Successful Startup – Ultimate Guide for Small Businesses.
And if you're looking to bringing new ideas to life without any cost barrier, check out the Business Starter Kit – get all this for free: LLC registration, a .com domain, business email, easy website builder, SEO tool to get found online, and social media tool to for fast posts to grow your reach. What’s stopping you?
Is SEO worth it for small businesses?
Unlike paid ads where the big companies win because they have bigger budgets, SEO can level the playing field. If you consistently publish quality content that matches what people are searching for and solves their problems, you’ll rank high and get large volumes of people visiting your website.
How much does SEO cost for a small business?
How much you pay for SEO to get your website ranking high in search results all depends which route you go down. You could choose an agency which typically charges $200 to $1,000 per month (depending on the package), or a consultant who could charge a monthly fee of anything from $100 to $500.
These fees would usually cover one to three new blog articles each month (content being the main driver of SEO ranking), but generally it won’t be high quality, since it’s basically conveyor belt work that they do for lots of clients.
Then there’s platforms like Moz with monthly pricing plans for SMBs at $99 Standard or $149 Medium. Or Semrush has the $149.95 Pro and $249.95 Guru monthly plans.
That’s a lot of money for a new small business just getting on their feet, and you don’t need all the complex bells and whistles. That’s why we recommend RelateSEO. For just $9.88/month, it gives you a customized task list covering all the SEO tasks to optimize your website (not just keywords), along with step-by-step video guides to walk you through it.
Then if you don’t want to create new content yourself, you could hire an SEO writer from platforms like Fiverr. That way you have full control over the quality and volume of the content you pay for.
Why is local SEO important for small businesses?
If your business has a physical location, SEO is really important for getting more customers through your doors. This is because people these days search online first for local products or services.
Having a website that has the right keywords, such as “best bakery in New Jersey”, along with good content, makes sure they’ll know how to find you. What business can only rely on word of mouth and the good luck of people noticing you as they walk or drive by?
What is content optimization?
Optimizing your website content for SEO means enhancing it so that Google’s algorithms rank it high in search results. Google is all about rewarding websites that match what people are looking for (relevance to user intent), and deliver great customer experience.
What is the best free keyword research tool?
There are a number of keyword research tools out there if you do an online search. These are the most popular:
Our suggestion for busy small businesses is RelateSEO, because it handles all your SEO, not just keywords. This tool gives you an ongoing To Do list customized to your website, along with short step-by-step video guides to walk you through them.
What is semantic analysis for SEO?
Semantic SEO is a content creation strategy that focuses on the meaning of words and topics, rather than just keywords. It's used to create content that helps search engines understand the context of that content so they can decide whether it matches what people are searching for i.e. user intent and relevance.
What are the best SEO tips?
Here’s a shortened summary of the SEO Pro Tips section in this article:
What is the difference between Google Analytics and Search Console?
Google Analytics focuses on user behavior and engagement metrics, such as page views, sessions, bounce rates, and conversion tracking. Google Search Console, on the other hand, offers insights into search-related traffic, including clicks, impressions, click-through rates, and average search position.
From content creation to SEO, here’s everything you need find customers and keep them.
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