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Small Business SEO on a Tight Budget

When faced with growing your website presence on a shoestring budget you may feel overwhelmed. Don’t get discouraged! Small Business SEO on a tight budget can be done successfully and produce results. The thing you have to do is compartmentalize your strategy. By breaking your small business SEO strategy into different sections, you will start to see success in driving people to your website and growing your online search presence.

Small Business SEO

6 Tips for Small Business SEO on a Tight Budget

1. Google My Business 

When tasked with optimizing your website performance with a small budget is to maximize your free resources. That is where platforms like Google My Business come into play. Small businesses and brick-and-mortar stores should focus on dominating search results in their backyard. It is the easiest way to increase your website traffic. The best way to do this is by maximizing your exposure through local SEO. 

Start by creating and verifying your Google My Business page. Once you have done that start filing in any information that is missing on your page. Be as accurate and descriptive as you can, and don’t forget to include some SEO keywords in there as well! 

Select accurate categories that best describe your business, and remember to be specific! For example, if you are a divorce lawyer, don’t just select “lawyer” as your main category, select “divorce lawyer”.  Make sure that you incorporate your business hours, photos of your location, and as much helpful information as you can.

While these changes should only take a few minutes of your time, it will go a long way in boosting your online search presence. After the page has been properly optimized, your business will have a listing that will appear at the top of Google search results in local searches. 

2. Keyword Research

Let’s face it, your SEO strategy will make it or break it based on the keywords you select. So when doing your keyword research make sure you are using the right ones for your business. If your website is brand new, don’t try and go after the keywords that every business tries to rank for. You will be wasting your time and energy on ranking for a keyword that is too difficult! 

Focus on keywords and search phrases that you can scale your business around. Essentially look for long-tail keywords. Let’s look at an example. 

Say you own a gutter cleaning business. It is going to be very hard when you are just starting out to rank for the keyword gutter cleaning. That is why it is better for you to rank for a keyword like “gutter cleaning in Baltimore, Maryland”. Do you see the difference? By being more selective with your SEO keywords, you have a better chance of being a bigger fish in a smaller pond. 

3. Build Content Around Your Keywords

Once you have selected SEO keywords that apply to your business, make sure to start adding them to your website. As a small business owner, you should focus on placing keywords within the correct title tags, meta descriptions, and the content of your website itself.

Try not to overdo it though! You can also create new content for your SEO keywords through your blog. The more keywords you incorporate into your website the better your website will perform!

4. Commit to publishing content on a regular basis

Want to ensure that your SEO strategy is working properly? Commit to publishing new content to your website on a regular basis. Every time you add new content to your website, it forces search engines like Google and Bing to recrawl and index your website. So the more that you add content, the more often search engines like Google and Bing are forced to pay attention to your website. 

Now new content does not automatically mean that you will be placed at the top of search engines. The content you publish must be authoritative, meaning it is of high-quality, unique, and provides your target audience with relevant and important information. 

5. Generate Backlinks 

One of the best ways to ensure that your website ranks high on search results is through link building. Think of backlinks as votes. The more websites that link back to you, the more other websites are voting that your business is an authoritative figure in its industry. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher you will rank in search results. 

Oftentimes the problem with backlinking is that it is also the most time-consuming aspect of SEO. Start by building out backlinks through online directories, online listings, local newspapers, chambers of commerce, and business associations. 

6. Rely on Google Analytics 

So how do you survive small business SEO on a tight budget, track everything! The more that you rely on Google Analytics the better your website traffic will appear. You can instantly know what SEO keywords are driving traffic to your site, and which ones are not. Reports like the source medium report, behavioral flow chart, and locations report are all great places to start.

Need Help with Small Business SEO?

At MarketKeep we pride ourselves on being the digital marketing agency for small businesses. Every interaction with a client is an opportunity to get better. To learn more about our small business SEO packages and services we encourage you to visit our contact us page to reach out. We can provide you with a free SEO audit on your website as well as some insight into what your competitors are doing as well. Click on the button below to get started.