SEO Marketing For First-Time Business Owners
Do you want to help your first business thrive past its first few years? Well, it’s important that you start by gaining knowledge about your niche and preparing financially for a number of scenarios.
However, one priority should take precedence among all others: sales and marketing. Even if you have strong sales skills, you still need to constantly engage your customers and adapt to consumer demands. In today’s increasingly digital world, this involve establishing a strong online presence that improves brand awareness, recognition, and recall.
Among the best ways to get the job done? Search engine optimization (SEO), which is a digital marketing strategy that ensures your business website ranks among your key search results for queries related to your products or services. A good SEO strategy can do more than just establish long-term online visibility. Its campaigns are cost-effective, perfect for first-time business owners—and the leads they generate are eight times more likely to close compared to traditional marketing leads.
To get an idea of just how beneficial SEO can be, consider how small business owner Meredith Noble used it to save her grant-writing venture. In December 2020, her business was on the verge of collapsing, with only six weeks’ worth of money left. That’s when she decided to shift and focus solely on SEO marketing. The result? Noble’s business hit $1 million in annual revenue after two years.
First-time business owners can reap similar benefits, too! Get started with these basic SEO marketing tips:
Optimize website performance
Though it’s easy to think that web design doesn’t have anything to do with marketing, the truth is that it has so much to offer. Studies like the Stanford Web Credibility Project found that 46% of website visitors use typography, layout, and even color palettes to determine how credible your business is. With 79% of Stanford’s respondents confirming that brands need to appear trustworthy before they interact with them, web design can play a crucial role in bolstering SEO marketing success. Of course, attractive designs can also help you stand out from your competitors, and those that align with your overall brand identity can similarly encourage recognition and recall. Perhaps more importantly, your SEO rankings rely on your website providing a good user experience.
That’s why we’ve noted that small business owners can work toward an elevated online presence by ensuring their sites leverage readable fonts, provide accessible alt texts for images, are optimized for mobile users, are easy to navigate, and integrate smaller image files and streamlined coding to ensure fast loading that prevents visitors from “bouncing” away. If you’re not sure how to get these done, you can always consult web design services with experience even in crowded markets, like Infront Webworks. In 2023, it helped a bed and breakfast client optimize its website for SEO marketing by creating a more visually appealing design that was easy to navigate and use to book stays. That improved loading times by 2 seconds, reduced bounce rates, and ultimately increased the client’s SEO performance score by 24%, resulting in more bookings.
Invest in link building
If you want your website to rank high on Google, you need to optimize your small business website for its algorithm, which prioritizes authority. The best way to do that is through link building. This SEO strategy involves getting multiple websites to link back to the content on your website, which helps Google see you as an authority in your niche. Link quality matters: a reputable publication linking to your website as a reference will impact your SEO rankings more, for example.
To get those backlinks, start by ensuring your onpage content is high quality. Linkable assets, like thought leadership articles, in-depth studies on the latest trends in your industry, and how-to guides for your products and services can help you show off your expertise and provide information reputable websites will want to link back to. You can also use your professional network to feature expert insights on your website’s blog or hold article exchanges with another small business site to get backlinks.
For a more targeted approach, it’s also worth learning about professional link building services that specialize in guest posting. LinkNova, which works with businesses of every size, shows how guest posting can be particularly beneficial: the provider uses rigorous, manual vetting processes to ensure you only get high-quality backlinks from reputable websites. In one instance, those processes helped a New York-based real estate startup acquire backlinks from small business and lifestyle blogs—resulting in a 443% increase in organic landing page entries (visitors clicking on a website from a search results page) in just eight months.
Go for local SEO
This tip will be particularly crucial if your business works in a crowded market. Instead of trying to beat the SEO rankings of global brands, focus on local SEO so you have to deal with fewer competitors and can more easily stand out in terms of online visibility. For example, your website can prioritize using keywords related not just to your business’ niche, but also to its geographical location, like “car rentals in Miami.” Because Google’s search algorithm prioritizes both a website’s relevance and proximity in relation to a user, doing so will make your business immediately visible to customers in your area. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, local SEO will also drive both online and foot traffic.
One of the best ways to start is by working on your Google My Business (GMB) profile. After claiming and verifying your listing, provide photos of your establishment and accurately fill out vital information like your business name, address, opening hours, and phone number. You can also place your business under categories relevant to your business so it’s easier to find. Make sure to update your profile constantly. From here, monitor your local SEO efforts to see what you need to tweak. For this, you can use free SEO tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to monitor KPIs like keyword rankings, website traffic, and customer feedback. If you’re still not seeing results, you can have an SEO services provider check if you need to improve your website itself. In consulting YashGlobal, for example, one small business from Jacksonville was able to leverage on- and offsite SEO strategies that helped it gain visibility in the top three results for GMB, allowing it to achieve a 463% increase in local leads.
SEO is a great digital marketing strategy first-time business owners can use to establish an online presence. It’s relatively simple and cost-effective—and if you need help, you can always turn to an expert for guidance!
Keep reading here on Behind the Leaf for more valuable small business insights.
Written by Regina James; regina.james.writes@gmail.com
