Small Businesses and SEO

If you’re a small business owner, you’ll know how hard things are right now. The current economic climate isn’t exactly yielding to our needs. On top of that, government help and incentive has all but vanished, leaving very little room for very little businesses. Getting off the ground was hard enough and keeping up is going to be just as hard.

Many companies turn to the internet for additional income. It really doesn’t matter what you do, there is a place for your business online and there will be a market. But how can your small business thrive amongst so much online competition? It’s overwhelmingly likely that if you Google your business using only what you do as the search phrase or word (not using the company name), your company won’t show up. That’s what someone looking for your products or services would be doing if they didn’t know who you were.

The search results you’ll get are for companies that do similar things, in a similar area – all of them competitors. They might not have a better website, be better than you at what you do or be cheaper or faster or anything like that. So how come their website comes up in search engines and yours doesn’t?

They did some SEO, or search engine optimization. Actually, they probably did a lot of it to be near or at the top. SEO is not, as many believe, a simple fix that you make to your site, like putting all the words you want to be shown up for in the content and tagging popular phrases. Optimizing on-site is a balancing act that takes a delicate touch. And besides, SEO is much more than that. There are a host of off-site activities like link building and content publishing that make an SEO campaign what it is.

So what can a small business gain from SEO? Let’s say you own an online only shoe store and want to take orders for delivery. And let’s say you’ve set up shop in Reading, for instance. You’ve set up a fantastic website with all the bells and whistles – looks great, works great. But you don’t seem to get many orders and the site won’t show up when you Google phrases like ‘online shoes’ or ‘shoe store’. Start thinking; SEO Reading. Make it local first – if your business is in Reading, SEO efforts should be focused there first, to get you on the map so to speak.

First off, a group of key words and phrases like the ones above will be researched by a professional SEO. Reading will probably be involved in most of them, but as your business expands, other areas can be targeted to, until the day your humble little home-start shoe store becomes a globally recognized brand!

So remember – SEO Reading first, once that’s been optimized and your results start picking up, you’ll get more local traffic. That means more local business, which means more money, which means growth… You get the picture!