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[/frame]Most small businesses require an expert SEO company to help create and implement marketing strategies that work. A lot has changed since the days of keyword-based SEO and websites now need rich and useful content in order to positively affect their brand. Generating SEO ideas can be challenging even for experienced marketers and the components required to formulate an SEO campaign are somewhat extensive.
Some of the factors that go into the average SEO plan include content, organic search, coding, paid search, etc. Small business face specific challenges in SEO and we’ll look at some of the more common ailments, their symptoms, and solutions that work.
Content creation
Majority of small businesses are betting on content marketing when fishing for visitors as new trends in search affect the way users view information. Quality content has always been a central factor when optimizing a website but the major challenge for a small business is the overwhelming task of creating new and fresh content. It takes time to formulate new ideas, conduct proper research and actually write useful content.
There’s a couple of ways small business owners could get around this:
- Set up an editorial calendar and set up content in chunks, by month, week or day- tackling each project systematically. You may use common “triggers” such as trade shows, seasonal or community events to develop the calendar.
- You never really have to reinvent the wheel when creating new content. You may however, repurpose used content all over the internet and reformat it for use as an article, a link on social media or perhaps a blurb in your weekly post.
Content promotion
The first hurdle is creating content but once you’ve done that you can then move on to the next chapter and that is promotion. It doesn’t matter how good your content is; if your prospects can’t see it then it’s all a waste. The easiest way to start promoting content is to connect with subscribers via email or social media. Ensure your prospects share the content to their own networks, and in the process create a wider network of your own. You could email people who’ve created and established their brands if their audience matches yours.
Brand recognition
Not all marketing efforts focus on clicks, immediate sales and conversions; the ultimate goal is to create and sustain consistent growth and sales for the business and one of the surest ways to do this is to build solid brand recognition. Google’s Matt Cuts cemented this idea in a recent interview. He said Google doesn’t necessarily think about brands, but instead the search engine focuses on trust, authority and reputation.
Search engines display results from reliable sources and one of the ways you can get your website listed along major authorities in your field is to develop brand recognition. Some of the ways this is done includes uploading and updating relevant content, offering customer reviews, through webinars/videos/podcasts, hosting conferences to discuss and shed light on common problems, setting up charitable causes, etc.
Handling the Social Angle
If you’ve already set up a page on all key social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and so on, well that’s good news but it doesn’t end there. When posting content on social networks, you may have to apply the same SEO approach used to create content for the web pages. The reason for this is that more people are conducting searches on social networks. Twitter handles billions of searches per day and this trend doesn’t appear to be changing soon: so you need quality content for your social networks.
Information overload
It can be stressful for a small business owner taking on all these factors but an expert SEO company would advice, focus first on the quick wins, and as you gradually clean up your SEO strategy, you will gain confidence and see positive results. Google is watching all these features and more, and they will not rank your site until your web pages have relevant and useful content to share with the masses.
One last tip is mobile browsing. It accounts for over 13% of all internet browsing so obviously it can’t be ignored. Try to focus more on mobile strategies because more people use their phones to browse and the trend is expected to continue. When in doubt, let the experts handle it. Hire an established SEO company to help create effective strategies.
[box title=”Author Info” color=”#f00″]Larry Smith is a publisher and author of over 200 article on SEO related topics, and is also a consultant at Neueseo. His experience has led him to consult all types of business on online marketing and web design aspects. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook to read more of his articles.[/box]