Small Business SEO Services
Most small business owners are looking for done for them, full service search engine optimization (SEO). They search Google for "top SEO agency," "best SEO company," or "top SEO consultants." From the search results, they then find one who offers a local SEO package or monthly small business SEO service within their budget, swipe their credit card, and get started!
Ultimately, they don't care how the SEO service is accomplished - they just expect their web pages to have increased traffic and their website to be ranked at the top of Google for a few target keywords. Over the next few months they see increased traffic and higher rankings, but their core problem remains - they lack customers. No phone calls, no orders, no new business! Search engine optimization (SEO) starts to feel like paying for snake oil, they get discouraged, and move back to social media and other online advertising methods.
What small business owners fail to realize is that just because someone can boost their website rank, doesn't mean that web traffic and search rankings alone will win them new customers! SEO experts usually focus on improving website performance versus targeting user search intent, the ultimate secret, the one tweak that actually increases conversions & sales. You must find a data driven marketing agency with SEO services or small business SEO who can target existing consumers with high purchasing intent. High intent searchers are primed clients who are ready to buy your products & services online!
Researching target market, competition, demand, and positioning an offer to the best fit target audience is much more important than the search engine optimization itself. Search intent is where all the money making opportunity lives! Small business SEO companies and consultants typically let the small business owner pick their own target keywords list vs. listening to their analog business goals and converting it into a digital marketing strategy. Did you notice that all of the SEO packages for sale guarantee your web page will rank for specific keywords in search results, but don't mention anything about increasing your revenue? Small business SEO services have it all wrong!
Is your goal to increase your website rankings or is your goal to make your small business more money?
Before you sign up for any small business SEO services, remember why you considered search engine optimization to begin with. I bet it was to increase your bottom line and provide ROI to your business!?
SEO Coaching
SEO service? Hold up, what about actually learning it?
First hand experience tells me most business owners don't need small business SEO services, they need an SEO coach! An online business coach can be a catalyst to success, save you years of trial and error, and thousands of dollars. An SEO coach's job is to flatten the technical learning curve and expedite your results. With so many unique digital marketing, content marketing, and SEO strategies it's easy to get lost. The internet is a digital jungle - you need an experienced guide more than SEO services!
SEO experts are typically NOT small business owners themselves. They help with content creation, web design, digital marketing, and enhance search engine rankings. They will argue that they are indeed a small business themselves, but I have found they truly lack the traditional operational experience to create impact. Most small businesses are transitioning online from archaic, non-digital industries.
This is why I believe SEO for small businesses can't simply be "done for you." SEO efforts need to be a joint investment process, done together in phases, between a coach and a student.
My SEO Coaching approach:
We discuss your analog business goals.
I perform a technical SEO audit on your website and make suggestions in a recorded SEO strategy video.
I teach you SEO best practices in one on one coaching sessions for maximum growth.
You hire me back for your needs, on your terms, at your own pace vs. getting a monthly bill.
I don't believe locking customers into small business SEO services on a monthly basis. I charge you per session. Together, we design a plan for success! When you see results, I know you will be back for more one on one SEO Coaching sessions.
Personally, I rather teach you to fish vs. buy you a fish!
I already own multiple profitable eCommerce stores in the special events industry. Small business SEO services isn't my full time job! In a post COVID19 World, everyone needs to understand more about SEO small business basics.
SEO Strategy
In full transparency, I am going to walk you through the elevator pitch version of my small business SEO strategy & digital marketing plan. Regardless of your small business website technology, small business type, or small business goals the steps and process typically flow in this order:
SEO Website Audit
SEO Competitor Analysis
Keyword Research
Keyword Mapping
On Page SEO
Conversion Optimization
SEO Content Audits
Off Page SEO
SEO Website Audit
My Website Ranking
The most common question is "Does My Website Rank?" The very first thing I do in a website audit is to figure out if your website ranks on search engines. I want to maintain the integrity of any desirable keywords already ranking on Google or other search engines before changing them. Without monitoring what searches your visitors are finding you through, I have no idea how I can help your search visibility. Once I establish your websites' page ranks, this gives me a starting point to improve from.
Sitemap Audit
I run a crawler bot on your site / domain to paint a picture of it's digital marketing footprint. This reports factors like: pages, links, categories, images, blog posts, title tags, meta descriptions, etc. It is a comprehensive reporting tool providing information exposure at every technical level.
Best Page Titles for SEO
A global website crawl also gives me perspective to call out positioning changes and make recommendations for every page name, heading title, and individual URL. Renaming pages to align with market search volume is the fastest way to improve on a SERP.
SEO Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are no longer of high importance. Too many people were keyword stuffing and the search engines noticed how this was effecting user experience. Meta descriptions are your sales pitch enticing clicks to your page. Crawling every page lets us edit and rewrite descriptions with better keywords.
SEO Competitor Analysis
Sometimes people know or (think they know) exactly who to go after and how they want to improve their SEO campaigns. Other times they have absolutely no idea what to do to get better results online. The best way to start is to run a marketplace analysis for a specific niche or industry.
Market Analysis
I use a suite of SEO tools to dissect your market niche. I research known competitors, discover unknown competitors, and find profitable & best fit opportunities for your small business SEO. Analyzing organic traffic and doing a PPC competitor analysis let's us pin multiple competitors against each other and your website for comparison. This comparison shows content & keyword gaps and gives us ideas for more organic traffic & paid advertisements from other brands.
Keyword Research
After reviewing SMBs market wide, I start to cherry pick keywords for best fit opportunities and ability to rank. I qualify opportunities by crunching keyword competitiveness (KC score), keyword search volume (monthly searchers), and users' search intent. Tracking these three elements is the perfect combination to choosing profitable winners! I avoid keywords that have SERPS that are saturated with high authority sites and those domains with old age.
Keyword Mapping
Once I find all of the best keyword opportunities for you, it's time to map or remap your website's structure. When you rename or reposition a page, you don't want to lose the power / strength it has, you want to pass any rank credit it has to the new version of itself. This is when 301 redirects are needed! These "forwards" permanently pass the SEO juice / rank credit / content potency from the old page to the new page. If this operation is not performed, you lose all of the ranking history and position credit from the search engines. Without the redirect, users who find your old indexed page in a SERP, get served a 404 error page / broken link. URL remapping is critical after making major changes to page names & website structure.
On Page SEO
Every single page you have on your website can be audited. There are dozens of on page SEO factors to optimize for, but these are a few of the heavy hitters:
Title Tag
URL (Address)
H1 Tag
Meta Description
Headings: H2, H3, H4, etc
Word Count
Keyword Density / True Density
Partial Match & Exact Match Keywords
Image File Name, Alt Tag, Description / Caption
Video File Name, Description
Internal Linking with Anchor Text
Mobile Friendliness
Load Time / Site Speed
Conversion Optimization
Everyone believes an SEO company should be increasing their traffic. Honestly, you should could care less about traffic because it's entirely dependent on the industry, niche, and what you target. I own websites that have done millions of dollars in sales by attracting 3,500 - 5,000 visitors a month. Traffic doesn't equal money and it never has!
Online shoppers are smart and if you are not giving them a "best fit" offer, they go purchase someplace else. I analyze how well your money pages capture leads and convert sales. SEO for small business should spend 80% of the time on the landing / sales / product page. The only way one can afford to grow & expand is by making money!
Conversion optimization matters more than any other single factor. Example: One highly optimized page ranking at #7 might convert at 12% and therefore makes more money than a poorly optimized #1 ranked page converting at 2%. SEO for small business providers need to stop prioritizing performance services over content services & conversion services!
Correlational SEO
One of the newest and hottest SEO practices is data correlation. Pay attention to anyone offering Correlation SEO Services! What is correlational SEO? It is a mathematical content analysis of the search results page to identify universal similarities and ranking factors among the top results.
Each analysis takes hundreds or thousands of data points between competing sites and crunches them down into overlapping snippets of measurement. These overlaps are ranking triggers which are actionable recommendations to apply to your page to increase rank. This is an extremely overpowered method when implemented correctly. SEO services that offer it bring massive value to any project - it is a completely unfair advantage! Ask your SEO expert if they utilize a correlation tool for on-page optimizations. Otherwise, find the expertise of someone who does or you will be missing out!
With my small business SEO services, I include mad lib style (fill in the blank) content strategy templates for my customers to write inside. This ensures their page content is aligned to websites already ranking for the keywords they desire. Essentially, we force the robots to rank a page by modeling the content precisely after what is already working. No, we don't plagiarize or write word for word, we simply model the existing content structure and include NLP terms which feed the BERT algorithm.
Competitor websites need to be carefully considered and vetted before you correlate your own content towards them. Correlation is equally as dangerous without experience because the calculation goes both ways. In the hands of an inexperienced SEO, a correlation tool will do more harm than good!
SEO Content Audits
After you make improvements it's important to monitor the effects. Every 21 days you use content audits and tweak your written content based on natural language processing (NLP). Any SEO who isn't considering NLP, latent semantic index (LSI), and boosting topical relevance underestimates the power of content. Search engines understand an orange is round and a banana is not, but how? It's because "round" appears with "orange" in written language. Google's BERT update stopped looking at phrases & sentences and started mapping every word on the page - mapping contextual relevance to each other. BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers - think of it as a spider web of relevancy.
Off Page SEO
SEO services should include off-page adjustments. You can increase results by mirroring content silos or "content stacking" on social media accounts. You can also obtain backlinks by building your own syndication network to automatically re-publish your blog posts, articles, and press releases via IFTTT & RSS automation. Mirroring your website content and claiming your brand on other high DA (domain authority) services provides reinforcement and builds trust with the search engines.
National SEO Services vs. Local SEO Services
If you are trying to rank for a keyword no matter who types it in, your efforts should be national / location agnostic. If you are trying to rank your website for a specific state, city, town, or geographical area, then you should focus on local SEO. Local SEO requires SEO services that focus on Google My Business (GMB) and Google Map Pack rankings. Google My Business is a free digital / local listing of your business that helps rank you for local SEO searches like "near me" or when someone searches nearby on mobile. Typically a 3-pack of search results sits at the top of the SERP (search engine results page) called the "Map Pack."
Schema Markup
What is Schema and why does it matter? Schema is a semantic vocabulary of tags, a glossary of microdata, a code snippet that is embedded on your website to help the crawler bots categorize and represent your content more accurately. It is estimated that 11-12 million websites (.00063%) use Schema worldwide. Given the fact there are 1.74 billion websites in existence, that means very few are actually utilizing this new tagging standard / markup. Schema won't rank your website alone, but it is an absolute winner in a tie breaker. Expect to rank at least (3) - (5) positions higher in SERPs than you would without it. Over time, sites with it with absolutely outperform those without it. If you want future proof small business SEO - find an SEO service provider that can implement Schema for your business.
PPC for SEO
After your small businesses' website has been completely enhanced with search engine optimization you may still find some ultra competitive terms that you just can't seem to rank for. Unleash inertia with Google Ads! Up to 10% of searchers will click on pay per click and display ads. By bidding on these advertisements you cause traffic (inertia) to your page. Search engines reward you for these additional human interactions causing your organic position to skyrocket quickly. Customers who jump straight into paid ads without a solid search architecture fail to maintain their ranks over time. Whereas customers who have a strong SEO foundation, can buy their way to the stop, slow down or completely shut off ads, and maintain top positions for extremely long stretches - potentially indefinitely. This is why I preach SEO first, PPC second, and Social Media third!
Retargeting Ads
Once SEO and PPC have been activated and are working seamlessly, it's time to retarget your visitor! You will acquire your highest quality traffic from search engines (because of intent) and then utilize social media as a reminder advertisement to increase conversions. Too many marketers attempt to acquire "top of funnel" traffic from social media platforms first, but typically this traffic has a lower intent and value.
On social media, you are interrupting people during their time of leisure. This means your offer has to be amazing, incredible, captivating, etc. Most things in life aren't more important than friends, family, and entertainment. Those are what you compete against for attention on social media. Therefore my advice is: SEO as the foundation, PPC as the catalyst, and Social Media as the reminder. My theory follows the natural progression of the Internet - SEO was first, then PPC, then Social Media. It's a simple and guaranteed way to get great results with digital marketing!
Bottom Line
SEO for small businesses can be overwhelming and expensive because there is always something that can be done next! The rate of your success will be slower than advertising, often taking months to see best results, but the lasting organic benefits will pay you dividends. In small business, nothing is better than generating a new FREE lead!
If you do seek an SEO company for your business, make sure their SEO team & SEO services focus on generating you revenue solutions, not just SEO results. Quality small business SEO services won't be solely pushing traffic & rank boosts anymore.