A Must-Read SEO Guide For Budding Entrepreneurs

Young entrepreneurs and small business owners are always looking for new customers. In today’s brutal competition of online businesses, if you are not equipped with the right tools, you will find yourself in no man’s land – making no sales at all.

SEO is one of the most important things you have to work on for the progress of your small business. Proper SEO strategies help you identify your customers, build an audience, and provide you with ways of developing your business.

Although the acronym of “SEO” is tossed around in all business guides, only a few Chosen people understand it all about it. The good news is that understanding SEO is not difficult. Keep reading this article, as we are going to make it easier for you to learn SEO from the start!

1. Value Your Audience

The gist of doing SEO and spending hours and hours finding new ranking opportunities is providing value to your customers. If you think of SEO this way, you will have no trouble at all understanding it. SEO allows you to find what your audience values – and you then think of creative ways to provide them what they want.

But how can you use SEO strategies to understand the mindset of your audience? For starters, you should locate where your customers are the most active online. If most of your target audience is active on social media, for example, then the next step is finding popular social media accounts among your customers. Locating what blogs are popular in your target industry also reveals insight into your audience.

2. Keyword Research And SEO

Keywords are the phrases that users search online for finding relevant information and products. Keyword research is the most important pillar of an SEO strategy. If you have ever searched about SEO strategies in the past, it’s more likely that you’d have already come across the topic of keyword research.

Many small business owners who are new to the world of online marketing get scared when they hear the phrase “Keyword Research.” Contrary to popular belief, proper keyword research is not difficult and doesn’t take much of your time either.

Several trusted tools like “Google Keyword Planner” and “SEMRush” are used by both beginners and SEO pros to find relevant keywords. Once you identify the keywords that your target audience uses, you can then use them in all your SEO strategies. But make sure that whenever you are doing keyword research, you do it following the Google core update guidelines.

3. Power Of Content Marketing

Content Marketing is a strategy that you have to work alongside your SEO strategies to attract more prospects and make more sales. In its essence, Content marketing provides valuable content to the people in your target industry.

A difficult thing about implementing a content marketing strategy is that you might get worried about what strategies to choose and what to neglect; therefore, a better idea is reading a content marketing guide and implementing the most relevant strategies to your business.

4. Link Building Strategies

Link Building is the process of building quality backlinks to your business website. A backlink is proof that you are trusted by the website that’s linking to you. Websites having tons of quality backlinks are considered authoritative by Search Engine bots, and they start ranking on top of SERPs. The two most-used strategies for Link Building are discussed below:

●  Guest Posting

Guest posting or Guest blogging is the process of publishing guest posts on authoritative blogs. Most websites have a section for guest contributors where they allow people to contribute content. You can write for such websites to get a backlink and increase your readership at the same time. Here’s a valuable resource that can help you learn more about Guest Posting and how you can use them for SEO efforts.

●  Blogger Outreach

Blogger Outreach is the process of reaching out to authoritative bloggers and asking them to mention your brand in their content. Doing so allows you to build a backlink, plus it gives a chance to take your business offerings to a bigger audience.

The difficult thing about Blogger Outreach is that it’s a time-taking process. You have to use tools like BuzzSumo to find authoritative bloggers, then write a proper outreach email and get into proper communication with the blogger.

5. A Clear Sitemap

One of the best things you can do for your business is improving the business processes. In a similar fashion, if you want to improve the visibility of your website, you have to ensure that your business website is easier to navigate – a proper sitemap helps you achieve this goal.

Here are some actionable tips for making a clear website sitemap:

• Identify the primary and secondary pages of your website.
• Keep the aspect of content expansion in your mind.
• Come up with a consistent URL Structuring strategy.
• Build a proper hierarchy on the content pages.

6. Removing Some Pages

Website owners of all the pages of their website are extremely valuable. But the bitter truth is that not all web pages are equal, and getting rid of the ones that are not serving any purpose is a bad idea. Removing useless pages like old promotional pages is good from the SEO point of view. Make sure that you utilize the power of 301 redirects before deleting any pages of your website.

7.  Local SEO

Local SEO consists of all the SEO practices that you adopt for ranking higher on local search results. When someone in a specific area searches for local restaurants, then Search Engines shows them the top restaurants in their area rather than the best restaurants around the globe.

In the same manner, when someone looks for local businesses, they will get search results about local businesses instead of businesses that are famous and trusted anywhere else. Local SEO allows you to rank for the local residents to get the most customers in your vicinity.

The good thing about optimizing your website for Local SEO is that the strategies are not much different from your usual SEO strategies. You have to do everything with a “Local” touch so your website can climb the local rankings.

Here are some strategies that you should adopt for Local SEO:

• List your business on the “Google My Business” account.
• Think about listing your business on “Bing Maps.”
• Utilize the NAP consistency.

8. Responsive Websites

Think about it, what’s the first thing someone finds about your business when they search online? It’s your business website. You have to ensure that your website is welcoming and gives the impression that you are the only reliable solution provider.

The bottom line is that focusing all on SEO is not enough. A poorly setup website can leave a bad impression on your business. Therefore, you have to ensure that your business is up to the industry standards and provides an amazing user experience.

But it’s not all about proper branding and leaving a good expression. If your website is not responsive and mobile-friendly, search engine bots will not find it helpful, and your rankings will drop over time. Websites that don’t load up quickly on smartphones are also pushed downward by the search algorithm. Make sure that all your business websites are responsive, have a unique design, provide a welcoming experience, and answer the queries of the customers.

9. Digestible Blog Content

Blog content is the best section of your website from the customer’s point of view. It’s a harsh fact that people don’t have to do anything with the “About Us” and “Mission statement” pages on your website unless they already have a deeper connection with your business.

Therefore, if you want to ensure that people find it engaging to visit your website from time to time, you have to give them a reason to do so – and the best way of providing them a compelling reason is to keep the blog section of your website updated regularly.

Blogs allow you to provide proper questions to the queries of your customers. Your blogs allow you to build authority online, rank for keywords, and claim higher rankings on Search engines. Blogs allow you to earn backlinks too. If the content you publish is unique and authoritative, people will mention your content in your blogs, and you will be able to get the link juice necessary for top SEO rankings.

10. Keep An Eye On Your Progress

Suppose you have been reading so far; congratulations because you now understand the basics of SEO! But we have not discussed anything about tracking the results so far. You might be thinking if SEO is all about learning technical terms and learning new skills. But the good news is that SEO is far from theoretical work – it brings results!

SEO strategies allow you to find new opportunities and track the results at the same time. Tracking allows you to make any required changes at any stage of implementing your strategy. Let’s talk about keywords: If the keywords you are targeting are not producing any results, you can always go back and make any necessary changes.

There are several tools that you can use for tracking your SEO progress. Using Google Analytics allows you to find out all the important statistics about your website. Furthermore, you can use SEO SaaS tools to check the number of backlinks of your website and other important factors that affect your search rankings.

Conclusion

Learning SEO is not complicated. SEO is not Dead either, as some of the marketers suggest it nowadays.  If you focus on learning proper SEO techniques and implementing if, for your business, you can claim #1 rankings on SERPs and claim more sales online!