My SEO Services for Small Businesses

Small businesses can compete

When you hear SEO industry statistics – like for example that last year, more than 65 billion dollars was spent on SEO in the USA alone – it's easy to start wondering if you could ever compete for good search engine rankings when you run a small business and you don't have a huge budget for SEO work.

However, in my experience helping small businesses with their SEO, you can definitely achieve very good results even without a big business budget. There are some basic, solid, proven SEO principles and strategies that any business, large or small, can and should follow to make sure that they'll be found on Google or Yahoo or Bing searches.

I'll start you with the basics

Many small business owners are too busy to even know where to begin when it comes to optimizing their websites for search engines. When they call me to help, I follow these important steps:

1. I ask you to identify the top key words and phrases that you think people will type into a search engine to try to find you (or your kind of business). A key factor, that will allow you to hold your own against those big budget competitors, is to identify the "long tail" phrases that are more specific to your business or area than to others in different niches or geographical areas. The more specific your target phrases, the more success you'll have ranking high on them.
2. I do some research to identify other related keywords and phrases that are commonly used by search engine users. There are very useful tools that let you review search history statistics to discover which other words and phrases people are using to find people like you. These are phrases that you should consider optimizing for in addition to the ones that you identified yourself.
3. I review your existing website's content to see whether, and how frequently, your target keywords appear now.
4. I optimize each page of your website on one of your target keywords/phrases. This includes modifying the copy (the written content) that's visible on that page, as well as modifying the underlying code to ensure that those keywords are also contained where necessary.
5. Whenever possible and appropriate, I make recommendations on creating more content on your website, both as a way to use your target keywords more, and as way for you to demonstrate your expertise both to your customers and to the search engines. As they say, "Google rewards content."
6. If you don't already use them, I set you up with Google Analytics and Search Console accounts, and add the Analytics code to all pages of your website, to maximize the amount of web visitor traffic information you can get. This gives you valuable insights into the effectiveness of your site, and can inform you about the success of our SEO efforts.
7. I can make a SEO and Google Analytics training video for you, to give you a tour of our changes, the tools that we've set up for you, and how to track your SEO progress over time.
8. Then, we give it the time that's required, because typically, the effects of SEO improvements usually start to appear after weeks or months, not just hours or days. I monitor the progress weekly, and communicate with you to report on results when they start to appear, and to suggest further measures and tweaks if I think they'll lead to further improvements in your rankings.

If you'd like some help with your small business website's SEO, please do contact me, either for an initial consultation and review of your existing SEO status, or to get a quote, within your budget, for helping you to improve your search engine rankings.