3 steps to improve your SEO marketing for small businesses with a limited budget.

Small businesses face many challenges with their digital marketing. They generally have smaller budgets, fewer resources, and weaker brand recognition. One of the best ways small businesses can compete with larger brands is by generating more organic traffic. According to BrightEdge, more than half of web traffic and up to 40% of total revenue comes from organic search.

Fortunately for small business owners, you don’t need to have a major budget or large team to be successful with SEO. You just need to understand a few basic best practices and put them to action.

Here are 3 simple steps you can take to improve SEO for your small business:

1. Go beyond keywords.

Back in the early days of SEO, marketers would stuff their content with dozens of keywords in hopes that Google would see the frequency and boost the page ranking. The result was often disjointed text that was difficult to read and not beneficial for the user.

Today, Google will penalize content that includes too many keywords. Ideally, your content should have been 2 and 5% keyword density, which means you’re mentioning it no more than five times for every 100 words you publish.

However, you need to understand more about why people are searching for specific keywords. Search engines are focusing more on user intent and will return websites that they feel best match what a person wants to do when they search for a specific topic.

The bottom line: You need to focus on creating quality content that answers questions and provides relevant and useful information the people who land on your page expect to see.

2. Create a Google My Business profile.

The number of online searches using the term “near me” have jumped by as much as 900% over the past couple years. If you’re using your online presence to drive people to your physical business location, it’s imperative that you set up a Google My Business profile.

The process is free and it only takes a few minutes, but it adds authority to your business and provides more information that’s helpful to users. At the very least, you should include your name, address, and phone number.

3. Create backlinks from other sites.

Link building is a major factor of off-site SEO that big brands might spend a large portion of their digital marketing budget to master. You can do some of this on your own.

It might take a little bit of time, but you can start an outreach program to contact relevant organizations to develop reputable backlinks to your page. The higher the domain authority of the page linking to you, the better the backlink in the eyes of Google. You can also drive some traffic back to your site by creating listings for your business on other directory sites.

Don’t forget about combining email marketing with your SEO.

Emails won’t help improve your Google SERP position. However, the engagement from those emails could send positive indicators to search engines that will in the long run.

The most immediate impact will be additional traffic to your site, which shows search engines that your pages are active and popular. If people spend time there without immediately leaving, it’ll also improve your bounce rates. Finally, the more people click around on your site, the more it shows Google that users are trusting your pages to learn more information about specific topics.

Remember, the goal of SEO marketing is to get people to discover your website and take actions when they’re there. It’s the same goal as your email marketing.

Wrap up

Small businesses are sometimes backed into a corner when competing against bigger brands. They often don’t have the money and resources for advanced digital marketing campaigns and paid methods. The best way for small businesses to even the playing field is with a strong SEO strategy. To best optimize websites for search engines, small businesses need to focus on best practices, including:

• Creating great content that provides value for the user and gives them what they expect and hope to receive.
• Updating a Google My Business profile with basic information like business name, address, and phone number.
• Building an email campaign aimed at improving engagement to your website.

You can track your SEO results in Google Analytics, which integrates with your Campaign Monitor dashboard. It can take several months to notice an impact from your tactics, but, if you follow these steps, you’ll begin to see an increase in your overall traffic and revenue.