The objective of this post is to help small business owners increase traffic. This won’t happen overnight, not with SEO. You’ll have to give SEO about 3 – 6 months before you start see results. For many companies, competitors have a 3-5 year head start. Let’s make one thing a little more clear. SEO normally relates to rankings which leads to traffic to your site. There are many other aspects of online marketing like email marketing, paid search, link building, community building, forum, social media, video marketing, blogging, etc. If your small company can’t afford or come up with the time to do all those, we suggest writing blog posts on your own blog. And write kick-ass content.
Rand Fiskin from MOZ made this great White Board Friday (May 22, 2015) video explaining the type of content that will get your site to rank.
Kick Ass Content is the Lifeblood of Small Business Websites
Writing kick ass content takes time and you have to be consistent. You’ll have to look at your competition to see how often they are posting and not only that, see how good their content is. If you can put out better content, then go for it. This doesn’t mean you’ll start ranking for the keywords you want though. That’s where the 3 – 6 month wait window comes in. Your site will need to gain authority. This is a slow process. Google must see you are consistent. One great blog post will not mean you have a credible website, but 20 great blog posts may start to move the needle.
The good part about this is all employees have at least one good topic to write about. I’ll let you into a little secret with Planet Marketing. We use a free program called Trello. We create a List for blog topics. In this List, there are about 20 – 40 topics in the queue. We then have our content writer bang em’ out one-by-one. This process has ensured that we always write relevant topics for our clients. Once the author gets a good topic to write, she goes into writing mode and knocks out a blog post in 1 – 2 hours.
We hope that you’ll be able to see the SEO light at the end of the tunnel. At a bare minimum, you should write kick ass content for your own site. And try doing it once per week if you have the time. If you don’t have the time, but have a small budget, consider outsourcing the work. You can read our post How to Outsource Your Work.
Other things we recommend is checking out your competition using paid tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush. If you’re on a tight budget, just get ahrefs for 1 month and cancel the subscription. Make sure you download all the competitor’s info. Here are a list of paid tools we use for SEO:
Ahrefs – Great for competitor backlink analysis.
SEMRush – Great for competitor analysis and keyword research
MOZ – Great for their blog and their Opensite Explorer backlink analysis.
Majestic SEO – Good backlink checker and website analysis
Relenta Email Outreach – An OMG email out reach program for either sales emails or even link building
Rank Ranger – I spent two weeks searching for the best keyword tracking software. Rank Ranger took the cake.
Managing the data of short-tail and long-tail keywords can be challenging at scale. A tool like Linkio to keep your various keywords organized.
Check them out and see if your company can use them.
Small Business Websites Thrive on Fresh Content
If you’re able to write great blog posts once per week at a minimum and consistently, then you have one piece of the puzzle. The other part of other part of the puzzle that covers SEO for small business websites is getting links. Again, this is for SEO ranking purposes. We aren’t talking about community building or anything else. It’s very hard to build a community when you don’t have any rankings at all. Get good backlinks. This is where you’ll do outreach and hopefully get people to link to you. I’m not going to go over link building here because that subject can be a book. In fact, this is were we learned link building. We at Planet Marketing vouch for the author Paddy Moogan.
