Small Business SEO Services

Most individuals in 2020 use local searches to find businesses in their area.

A lot of the in-store traffic you see as a small business originates online. Whether it’s the result of social media chatter or ‘near me’ searches, people become aware of your store and make visits if you’re highly visible online.

The trick is finding a way for people to know who you are. In the face of thousands of sites in your niche and a web of difficult competitors in your geographical area, how can you trickle to the top of search results and social media feeds?

The answer is small business SEO services. We’re going to discuss the value of search engine optimization in addition to explaining why you need to utilize small business SEO services.

How Tricky is SEO?

When you look at a broad overview of search engine optimization, it might seem something of a walk in the park. We’ll give you that broad overview, but we’ll also dive into some of the specifics that turn a walk in the park into a climb up a mountain.

The point is, SEO involves a working knowledge of search engines, websites, data analytics, writing, marketing, and various tools. That, and it requires a lot of upkeep.

Take all that, and pile on our first reason for you to make use of small business SEO services.

1. Search Engine Optimization is Essential

In a country where most people use their smartphones to conduct ‘near me’ searches and a world projected to have 5.7 billion people using smartphones, internet visibility is quickly becoming more important.

We’re already at a point where online visibility greatly improves a customer’s ability to find and visit a brick-and-mortar store. Each one of us has likely experienced this from the consumer side:

You wake up on a Saturday morning and quickly realize that you drank your dinner on Friday night. You’re starving, and a brief look around the kitchen helps you to realize that there’s no way you have the energy to cook breakfast.

It’s around noon, so most of the typical breakfast places are already closed or serving lunch. You still want breakfast, though, so you pull out your phone and search “breakfast restaurants open near me” and sift through your options.

People tend to click one of the top three search results. Very few people comb through the entire page, let alone go past the first page of the results. That is unless the search engine doesn’t pull up the desired information, which is becoming less common.

This process happens all of the time, with nearly every product or service, in pretty much every town. That means that all small businesses are affected by this kind of search. This makes optimization essential.

2. Mistakes are a Big Deal

When you’re thinking about how to conduct SEO, the first thing you should understand is the perspective of the search engine.

We often think of search engines as inherent pieces of the internet. It’s almost like people see them as the gateway into the internet. This is not true.

Search engines are competitive businesses just like your own small business. They simply index all of the information that they can and do their best to lay out that information to you. When you make a search, the search engine runs your keywords against the sometimes trillions of webpages that it has indexed.

Based on that search engine’s algorithm, it will pull up a few pages that it sees as most relevant to the search you’ve entered. That’s a brief picture of how search engines work.

We mention the fact that they’re competitive and that they have specific requirements for a reason: they have an incentive to weed out results that are irrelevant.

They do this by constructing the algorithm to be as specific as possible, but what happens when a site tries to cheat or cater to the algorithm too much? Sure, search engine optimization is the process of catering to the algorithm, but there needs to be a balance.

Penalties

When a site tries to work around the algorithm or trick the algorithm into thinking that it is relevant, penalties are given. Some of the tactics used are things like spamming vast amounts of users, stealing email information, faking metrics, and boosting sites with invisible keywords.

There are a lot of other ways that a site could try to create results without putting actual work in. Broadly, this kind of activity is called “Black Hat SEO.” The honest kind is called “White Hat SEO.”

Penalties can come in different degrees, of course, but really make a mistake and you could be unlisted from the search engine’s archive. Additionally, these mistakes could be easily made if you weren’t sure what was considered punishable.

If you were to do your own SEO, you might be able to get by without any penalties. At the same time, why risk it? Working with small business SEO services is a surefire way to avoid being unlisted.

3. SEO is Time Consuming

Before your site gets a lot of organic traffic coming in, you’re going to have to work pretty hard to get off of the ground.

First, consider the many different areas of thought that need to be understood before you can start. Sure, there is a search engine algorithm with a number of search factors, but what are the specific factors? From the over 200 search factors you should be optimizing for, which ones are important?

You’ll need to understand keyword research (which is changing in a big way), backlinking, content creation, publishing strategies, web design, even back end issues like coding and how site architecture affects SEO.

Each one of those pieces is just a small chunk of what websites look for when they’re ranking. There are over 150 fifty other search factors that either need to be optimized for or discovered. Unfortunately, we aren’t aware of each factor because search engines keep their algorithms quiet.

It’s the job of SEO professionals to dig into search engines and try to discover what makes them tick. When professionals start to understand too much, search engines will introduce updates to the algorithm and get us off the trail. It’s like a game of cat and mouse.

Those updates can really affect how the algorithm ranks, sometimes sending a page far down in the search results. If you optimize heavily for one factor and that factor is changed overnight, you naturally won’t rank as well.

The point we’re trying to make here is that it takes a lot of time to understand and keep up with SEO, making small business SEO services a huge time and money saver.

4. Social Media is a Must as Well

We understand that being in control of your social media account may be a big deal to some people. When working with small business SEO services, you will still be in control of all of your accounts. In fact, you don’t necessarily need to introduce a social media strategy.

At the same time, there’s a lot of time and research that SEO companies put into understanding how search engine optimization and social media interact, as well as how those two things can be used to achieve the ultimate goal, which is conversions.

At the end of the day, the point of all of these strategies to end up in sales, brand awareness, or whatever your metric of success is. Social media is now becoming as important as, or more important than search engines in some cases.

This is true for a few reasons:

People are Always On Social Media

The consistency with which people use social media is constantly growing. As technology makes social media use more seamless, it becomes more and more common for people to be checking various sites throughout the day.

Different demographics use different sites as well, meaning that there’s usually a way to market directly on your target audience through one site or another.

Advertising on Social Media

Using social media to advertise is one of the most specific, effective ways that you can market yourself online. Because social media platforms collect so much demographic information about users, they’re able to pinpoint very specific groups of people to place your ads in front of.

All other forms of advertising require that you put your ad out there with no guarantee of whether your target audience will see it. You might get lucky, you might not, but that’s because you don’t know who you’re putting your ad out to.

With social media advertising, you eliminate that risk. It’s not like everyone will actually click on your ad, but it’s far more likely if you can choose who you’re putting the ad in front of.

There is Immense Potential for Success

Social media is fertile ground for wild, unprecedented success for your business. You probably won’t end up going viral and becoming a household name, but the potential is there for you to see a lot of growth.

In order to do this, though, it’s essential that you develop a following and make the choice needed to see actual growth. Too often, small businesses make a social media account and fail to post regularly, don’t create content to post, don’t reach out to those in the community, and end up failing to have any success.

There’s a method to the madness, and it’s important that your site is handled carefully.

5. Content Creation is a Must

The presence of keyword optimization, backlinks, freshness, and social media content are all contained in your ability to write effective content.

Content is where those keywords are placed and those backlinks are sent. It’s very important that the blog (or other) content that you’re making is relevant, engaging, and directs the user back to your site.

When you post a blog post to social media, users are required to open the post and get sent back to your site before reading. This is a great way to attract people to your site and let them explore it once they’re there. The key, then, is creating content with titles that attract your users.

You can achieve this by doing your keyword research. If you create content that is made in response to the popular keyword searches in your niche, you can know that the content is generally about something that people are interested in.

So, there’s a keyword research piece in addition to the actual content creation piece. Once find the subject matter, it’s time to write the content. Most people think they’re pretty good at writing.

But what kind of writing are you good at? In most cases, the main formal training that people have in writing is that of school papers. Most users don’t really want to relive their high school days when they’re paging through your thesis, body paragraphs, and conclusion.

Writing blog content is different, and it may help to have a pro write it for you. Small business SEO services can provide quality writing.

Here’s Our Point…

There’s no getting around the fact that SEO is an essential piece of any business, big or small. Small businesses might be even more affected by a decent SEO platform because local searches are key for local customers.

You might not have a lot of competition online yet if you’re a small business, either, meaning that you should get started as soon as possible. But taking care of the ins and outs of search engine optimization is a hard task, especially when you have a small business to run.

There are professionals out there who can do a great job optimizing your site, leaving you to take care of the things you’re passionate about.

Interested in Small Business SEO Services?

There’s a lot more to learn about SEO and how it can relate to the success of a small business. It’s important that you learn about those specifics in order to understand the process.

While doing your research, if you find that you’d be interested in small business SEO services, visit our site to see what we could do for you.