Looking to ramp up or start up the SEO for your small business? Good idea. SEO for small business is the best long term strategy for increasing your flow of new leads.
What is SEO?
A very good question and a good place to start.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the blanket term for all the actions you take to make sure that your website shows up when your potential customers are searching for your service or product.
It is a BIG subject and covers a lot of actions. Some actions are simple and some are complex. They all add up to your business getting the customers it needs though search engines, rather than ads or word of mouth.
I could write for hours to detail all of these actions but for now lets keep it simple and just start here.
Do I Need SEO?
Nowadays having a website for your business is as necessary (or often more necessary) as having a building. If the website is the building, then getting SEO done is as necessary as connecting the plumbing and the lights to that building.
The part of SEO that you start with is building your website in a way that it can be read properly by search engines, so they even know you are there and what you do. From there it is a matter of connecting to the search engines so that you become part of their database.
If your small business has ANYTHING to do with the internet then SEO for small business is an absolute necessity.
Is Search Engine Optimization a One-Time Thing?
Simply put, no it isn’t. As I said, SEO covers a lot of actions. Some are the actions you perform at the time you set up your business. Building the website around the right keywords and structuring the website, so the search engines can read it properly are things you want to make sure are done at the start.
But once the website is there, you have ongoing actions to do to make sure your website rises up the ranks of the search engines and stays there.
These actions include blogging and social media postings. You write and publish blogs to keep your website updates with fresh content, and you make social media posts to bring up interest in your business.
How Can I Show Up in Local Search?
The good news is that if you focus on your local area for your small business it can be very easy to get at the top of the rankings for Google Maps. This is one of the most important ways that people search for local small businesses.
Registering your business with Google My Business is simple and free and immediately puts your business on the map (so to speak). Most business in smaller niches only have a few competitors in their immediate area. Most of them will not be taking all of the SEO for small business steps to show up on Google Maps and you can easily rank ahead, or at least in among them.
