SEO Strategies All Small Businesses Should Be Adopting

Listen in! Pick up some expert advice to a reader's question that we selected from CyberSchmooz.

As a small business, SEO is essential for growing your business. But many small businesses are cash poor and time strapped which means that their owners often assume that SEO strategies are either too expensive or too time consuming to be the right choice for them. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Securing SEO backlinks, focusing on off page SEO, and ranking more highly in popular search engine searches will all help to grow your business in a way that is much more affordable and simpler than any other popular form of advertising growth.

With this in mind, here are some of the key SEO strategies that all small businesses should be adopting:

Create Quality Content

Regularly updating your website with high-quality content that adds value to your audience, or your potential audience is one of the very best ways to impact the search rank of your site. This will increase your online exposure and drive more traffic to your website: and more traffic tends to mean more customers! What’s more, this will show your customers your authority on the subject that you specialise in; whether you’re writing about the best pet food for dogs (and you own a pet shop) or the best shoes to wear to a wedding, in a bid to promote your shoe shop, focusing on your niche and creating content that is genuinely useful will enable you to harness the power of your website and grow your audience without spending a penny. If you’re time-poor then there’s no need to post every day, but sticking to a routine and posting at least once a week will have the best impact on your SEO.

Focus on Link Building

The number of quality links to your website from an external source, as well as any internal links that you can add to your own content, might seem like a small thing but can have a key impact on your SEO. The number of links your website has will help to indicate the quality of your website to the search engine, meaning that the more links you have the higher you will appear in search listings. And the higher your SERP (search engine results page) ranking, the more likely it is that you will generate new traffic and leads. You can build these links yourself, or you can hire the services of a link building company, to harness the power of link building for your SEO.

Consider Your Local SEO

35% of all traffic from the most popular search engines is local, so focusing on and growing your local SEO will have a huge impact on your SEO ranking: this is particularly true if you are a locally-based business, such as a local store or restaurant. Sharing reviews, having a local Google ‘my business’ profile, and focusing on sharing news and articles from your local environment will all help to increase your local SEO profile, as well as brand awareness in your local community, which is another sure-fire way to drive traffic to your business.

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