These days even small businesses are understanding the power of SEO and investing heavily in improving their search engine result.

But many people don’t understand that there’s a difference between SEO for small businesses and SEO for large corporations.

The budgets are different, goals are different and expectations are different too.

You have to approach it a little differently compared to typical SEO.

In this post, we’re going to give you four proven SEO tips for small businesses that will help you tailor out your SEO strategy according to your business goals.

And this post has been created only by keeping small businesses in mind who have a revenue of between $0 – $5 million a year.

So without wasting any further time, let’s dig in.

4 SEO Tips For Small Businesses to Higher Search Ranking

#1 Target Low Competitive Keywords

Often small businesses do one common mistake in SEO.

They target high competitive keywords because of high traffic potential or monetary value.

But if you’re just starting out and not have that much authority, then it would be very difficult for you to compete with the big giants.

That’s why as small business with limited resources, it’s better to go after the keywords that no one is targeting.

Yes, we’re talking about those golden nuggets that have very low competition and a decent search volume along with the monetary value.

It’s by far the best option to stand out in this competitive market at the beginning.

And when you start getting results with these low competitive keywords and also gaining authority at the same time, then you can go after those mid or high-competitive keywords.

But before that, only stick to the low competitive keywords.

But the main question is: how you’ll find out those low competitive keywords?

Well, with so many keyword research tools on the market, it’s certainly not a difficult task to perform.

At first, make a list of seed keywords around your niche. You don’t have to use a tool for this and you can just brainstorm some ideas.

And then take those seed keywords and put them into the zutrix keyword planner tool and hit search.

Zutrix keyword planner

You can use some other tools as well if you want, but for demonstration purposes, we’re using our very own tool zutrix here.

After that, zutrix will give you a list of keyword ideas related to your seed keyword.

Zutrix keyword list

And the best part is that it will also show you the competition level of each keyword.

Of course, the competition metric can vary and it’s not 100% accurate but it will give you a rough idea of what keywords you have to pick.

You can also export this keyword report into a .csv file for better convenience.

#2 Publish Top-Notch Quality of Content

No matter what the size of your business is, if you want to do well in SEO, you have to produce and publish top-notch quality content on your website.

The content might be king in some other space, but for SEO, it’s the heart of search engines like Google.

In short:

If you don’t produce quality content (be it in any form), you’ll have a very hard time ranking on Google.

That’s the harsh truth.

No matter what SEO techniques you use, content is the core of everything.

Also producing quality content does not only help in SEO but also helps to improve authority, trustworthiness, and the overall brand value of your business.

So in short:

Producing quality content has plenty of other benefits too apart from SEO.

But besides these things, publishing quality content is very crucial for small business SEO is because most small businesses are not producing quality content.

If you look at most small and local business websites, you’ll see that they don’t even have a properly written landing page.

And that is why producing quality content will help you stand out in the crowd and will give you an extra edge over your competitors.

#3 Have a Clean And Easy to Navigate Website Structure

We’ve seen this.

Many website owners and businesses do not pay close attention to their website structure.

And this is very harmful not just from an SEO perspective but from the overall user experience perspective as well.

It’s the most important technical SEO task that you have to perform before anything else.

Having a good website structure helps search engines to crawl through your website more efficiently and let your audience easily navigate through your website.

According to experts, it should not take more than three clicks to find a particular page on your website.

And that’s where having proper navigation plays a crucial role.

Apart from that, we all know how important internal links are for search engine optimization. Internal links help search engines discover your pages much faster efficiently and it also passes link juice among pages.

If you create a create a proper website structure that links to all of your important pages from your home page, it will help you a lot in terms of ranking your site.

And most importantly, it helps to build a topical relevance of your site.

But the main question is: what is a good website structure? And how would you build it on your website?

Here’s what a proper website structure looks like:

Website structure

There’s no rule book on how you should create your website structure but there are a few things you have to keep in mind:

  • The topically related contents should be grouped together
  • Make it simple and easily understandable
  • Give more importance to the most important pages

And besides that, before you plan out the structure, run in-depth keyword research to know the topics and keywords under the topics that you have to target.

It’s super important so that you have a clear understanding of how you want to build the website structure.

#4 Build Some Backlinks

Now here comes the most difficult part of small business SEO.

Backlinks!

No matter what, backlinks are still a very vital part of search engine optimization.

You can’t show me a website that ranks on competitive keywords without having any quality backlinks.

And even if some website does, the ranking isn’t going to be permanent, and eventually, it will fall down.

Of course, content is the core of SEO but you would also have to build quality backlinks that will compliment your quality content.

You need both of these things (especially if you’re going after competitive keywords or industry).

Every SEO professionals or expert will tell you that building backlinks are the most important that you should be doing.

But no one exactly knows how many backlinks you would need to rank on the first page of Google.

That’s why you have to run your own research to understand the number of backlinks you would need to rank on Google.

Conclusion

SEO for small businesses is a bit different compared to SEO for large corporations.

Most small businesses have limited resources and funds so they have to do everything within that budget.

The SEO tips we’ve shared for small businesses will help you create better SEO strategies with the resources you have.

I hope you found this post useful, if you did, don’t forget to share it with your colleagues or friends.