A lot of new companies operate on the assumption that since they are small and not many people visit their site, they don’t have to waste money on SEO. However, the opposite is actually true. As they are small and hardly anyone visits their website, it is precisely why they need SEO. The article explains seven SEO hacks for Small Businesses that will be highly fruitful in 2020.
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7 SEO Hacks for Small Businesses
The goal of SEO is to make your website more visible to internet users and attract traffic. Taking care of SEO can be the difference between having no visitors and getting steadily increasingly leads from your website.
But won’t SEO cost money, a lot of new businesses ask.
The truth is SEO is the most cost-effective marketing strategy. For small companies, paid advertising can be heavy on the wallet and as soon as they stop paying, their traffic will trickle down to nothing. In contrast, SEO focuses on gaining sustainable, non-paid natural traffic.
Today SEO pays a crucial marketing role for low-budget small businesses. Here are some SEO Hacks for Small Businesses that can bring you a lot of ROI:
1. Developing a Content Strategy
Great SEO starts by making a great content strategy. A lot of businesses hesitate to create a content strategy since they believe it takes a lot of effort.
It does take effort — but it is one of the few surefire SEO hacks that work over a long time.
These days, people want authoritative answers to their question. If you can provide detailed answers to their queries, people will keep coming to you. Companies that use content marketing witness six times more conversions than their competitors who don’t use content marketing.
Successful content marketing requires just two steps:
That’s it.
Your content will not just reflect your business’s message, but will provide answers to what the audience is searching for. For example, if you are working on SEO for a dermatologist, you would need to understand that people are looking for dermatologist-specific issues like:
Pay attention to the patients who have given the dermatologist a low rating. Take a look at what their complaints are about and understand that these are the issues that the audience would like solved.
Positive reviews are also helpful as they can help you understand what things audience value in a dermatologist.
Then you can get a clear idea of what you can write on.
2. Blogging with Long-Tail Keywords
Ultimately, your content should not be about how many competitive keywords you can stuff into it. It should be about user intent. What do your users want? What sparks their interest? These are the questions that will determine what keywords would bring more users to your website.
A great way to share useful value-adding content is to use blogging. And when you are blogging, you need to focus on finding long-tail keywords.
To look for appropriate keywords, you can use free tools like the Google AdWords Keyword Planner. Although small generic terms like “dermatologist office” are a good target, when people write queries, they usually create long-tail keywords.
You can create a great blog post on the topic “What Can a Dermatologist Do For You And How Can I Find One?” and cover a lot of ground. With sub-headers like “Services Offered by a Dermatologist” and “List of the Most Experienced Dermatologists,” you know you are going in the right direction.
Blogging can be wonderful for SEO, and long-tail keywords can help guide your efforts for free.
Your goal should be to publish at least two posts per week and stick to your schedule. Later, once you start getting traffic, you can increase the frequency of your blog posts.
Also, bring some variety into your content. Start with one type of content and once you get used to it, branch out to another type of content. Variety is the spice of life, and it is the same when it comes to content.
3. Business Listings – #1 SEO Hacks for Businesses
For a local business, getting their business information listed across several online directories can be the key to getting them found.
The first thing you can do is to claim your Google Listing and then add your business to Yahoo, Bing, and Yelp as well.
You can also submit your business information to major data providers that search engines get their listings from:
You may have to pay a fee to these providers but it won’t be huge.
4. Add Products on Amazon, eBay
Amazon is the number one online marketplace, and eBay ranks first in terms of profitability.
Amazon owns the Alexa ranking site and the Alexa voice assistant on Echo devices so it is best not to ignore it. The tech company wants to bypass Google Search and it is well on its way.
To get the maximum benefit from Amazon, sign yourself up for the Fulfillment by Amazon account and ship your products to Amazon’s warehouse. This is probably one of the best SEO Hacks for Small Businesses. Remember that Amazon will almost always beat your own website when it comes to shopping online.
As for eBay, its sellers’ account comes with a lot of SEO perks. With 15 custom pages, promotional material, email templates and eBay’s listing feed, your sellers’ account is likely to get more traffic than from your own website. Plus, you can also subscribe to its affiliate program and get a referral percentage.
Remember, that if you want people to click on your products, always write an engaging and value-adding product description. If you can’t do that on your own, don’t hesitate to hire a product description service to do the job for you.
5. Share Your Content
Even the best blogs will be useless if you don’t share your content.
Social Media Sites
Some obvious choices for content marketing are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. However, you don’t need to go on every one of these platforms. Just go where your users are going.
Despite the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook still has the most evenly-distributed demographic of all social media sites so there is a high chance that a huge percentage of your target audience uses Facebook.
Online Communities
Also share your content on online communities like Reddit, Quora, and Stack Exchange. These are places where people go to get answers to their questions, find unique content, and socialize. You can join these sites for free and build authority from here. But remember not to spam.
5. Optimize Your Site to be Responsive
Since over 50% of your audience use mobile devices, your business website needs to be mobile-friendly.
Some of the key characteristics of mobile-friendly websites are:
7. Copy Competitors
Although it may sound unethical, it really isn’t. If you want to rank high on Google, you need to copy the style of competing sites that rank high.
Look for the sites that offer similar products and services as you. You can do this through SimilarWeb, which is a wonderful online tool designed specifically for this purpose.
Not only will you see which sites are your competitors, but you can also find out what they are doing right, and where they get their backlinks from.
You can then follow their marketing strategy and make changes along the way to customize it specifically for your business.
SEO Hacks for Small Businesses: Conclusion
SEO is a complicated process and not every website can find success by following the same tricks. These hacks are just a starting point for your small business. So don’t just get stuck on these. As you work on your business’s SEO, you will learn even more tricks. Don’t be afraid to use them!
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