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The SEO benefits for small business growth are not to be overlooked! If you’re ready to take your brand to the next level, follow these tips.
In our ever-evolving society of social media and quick-paced technology, digital integrations have the power to transform a brand’s marketing strategy. Effective digital marketing could help a company connect with a broader audience that it may not have otherwise reached, driving brand recognition, loyalty, and growth.
But a digital marketing strategy is only as effective as it is intentional, requiring marketers to dig deep. At Slam Media Lab (Slam), our goal is to authentically incorporate your brand into everything searchers see through tactics like webflow design and development, content writing and strategy, brand strategy and identity, and search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is undoubtedly one of the most effective digital marketing tactics that brands should be utilizing in their marketing strategies.
The importance of SEO for small business marketing is effective when you want to grow organically. At Slam, we believe the benefits of SEO for small business marketing hinge on five different approaches:
- Content writing
- On-page optimization
- Google search console integration
- Keyword research
- Competitive SEO strategy
In this blog post, we will answer:
- What is SEO?
- What are the SEO benefits for small business marketing?
- How can a brand increase its website SEO?
- What is Slam’s approach to SEO benefits for small business marketing?
What is SEO?
toolSearch engine optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, is an online marketing strategy intended to:
- Increase organic search rankings on pages like Google and YouTube
- Drive traffic to your website
- Generate brand awareness/increase brand loyalty through search impressions
In other words, SEO is a digital marketing strategy which ranks websites in search engines based on qualifiers like the strength of specific keywords and user-friendliness of a website. A brand may reap the several SEO benefits for small business growth by designing a website catered to SEO best practices.
SEO works to continuously improve your website’s organic rankings through methods like:
- Generating unique website copy
- Utilizing trending keywords
- Content structure
- Optimizing images
- Incorporating hyperlinks
There is no “one size fits all” formula to generate the best benefits of SEO for small businesses, but using the above tactics as an outline when developing your brand’s digital marketing strategy will put you on the right path to success!
What are the SEO benefits for small business marketing?
So, what are the benefits of having a site with optimal SEO? In addition to driving site traffic and brand awareness, there are other benefits of SEO for small business growth and marketing, including:
- Increased brand trust and credibility
- Virtually no cost to activate
- Improved user experience
- Reference trackable metrics
SEO may seem daunting at first glance, we get it. That’s why we’ve chosen to highlight the most important SEO benefits and strategies to help get you started with strengthening the website SEO for your small business.
Even the smallest wins can directly impact the overall growth of your brand, thus holding the power to make or break the success of a small business just starting out.
For example, it takes virtually no additional expense to consciously improve your website’s SEO. Unlike a paid marketing strategy — which requires extra dollars put behind a piece of content to boost it to a larger audience — the only additional expense organic SEO requires is the time and energy put into developing and maintaining your website.
The more intentional you are about the way your brand’s site looks and the content posted onto it, the higher it will be ranked in a Google search.
As a direct result, the higher your brand’s site ranks in an organic search, the more traffic the site will receive and the more trust people will have in the brand.
As consumers, we are inherently inclined to prioritize websites which appear higher on a search page more than those which appear lower. If we have a positive experience with one of these high-ranking websites, we will continue to revisit the same site over and over again when shopping for a specific product or looking for a particular service.
Providing an extra opportunity to boost brand credibility and loyalty can dramatically increase the number of consumers a brand has.
Additionally, optimizing your site for SEO will naturally increase its user experience. Examples of user-friendly SEO techniques include:
- Utilizing accessible alt text for images
- Structuring content in an easy-to-read manner
- Hyperlinking to additional internal and external resources.
When thinking about SEO benefits for small business marketing specifically, there’s no denying the impact an effective SEO strategy can have.
Whether you’re focused on traditional word of mouth marketing, email marketing, digital marketing or one of the many other variations of advertising, all marketing strategies have the potential to positively impact a business. But, the importance of SEO for small businesses specifically is not to be overlooked.
SEO allows a brand to uniquely position itself to digital audiences, thus allowing the brand to:
- Reach its target audience more frequently
- Improve a customer’s first impression of your brand
- Supplement paid marketing strategies
- Increase customer retention rate
- Prioritize strategies that work
A higher-ranking website will receive an increased number of page views and impressions, thus expanding the audience that you are trying to target. Once these views land on your website, the optimized user experience will make a positive first impression on the customer.
Additionally, incorporating organic SEO strategies is a low-cost way to supplement any paid marketing strategies, advertisements, and other promotions that your brand is already running.
All of these things will inevitably culminate in a positive brand experience for the customer, thus increasing customer retention rate.
Another major SEO benefit for small business growth is the ability to implement new strategies and see tangible results.
SEO should be catered to each individual brand in a unique and innovative way. As a result, it may take some trial and error before finding the SEO formula that works best for your brand.
That’s why we love software like Google Ads and SEMRush that make it easy to track how your website and its content is performing over time. With these trackable metrics, it is easy to identify which strategies are succeeding in driving traffic to your website so you can spend more time focusing on only those marketing strategies that garner positive results.
How can a brand increase its website SEO?
By now, you probably have a decent understanding of the tactics it takes to increase a website’s SEO ranking. But, it’s not only important to know what these tactics are, it’s important to understand how to properly implement them into your brand’s website.
For example, throwing a bunch of keywords into website copy may help boost rankings slightly, but you’ll have a much better chance of seeing quality results if you utilize these keywords in an authentic, organic way. Plus, it’ll be much more enjoyable for a customer to read your website this way, rather than just seeing a list of SEO keywords.
There are several ways a brand can increase its website SEO rankings. But, if you’re just getting started with SEO for small business marketing, following these five steps is a great jumping off point:
- Authentic keyword research implementation
- Utilizing image SEO
- Prioritizing blog SEO
- Focusing on content structure
- Diversifying product pages
Keyword Research
If you’re looking to reap the benefits of SEO for small business growth, implementing keyword research is crucial. This method helps you identify what key phrases and words your target demographic is frequently searching on Google.
By having this information, a brand can tailor its website copy around these words and phrases. When identifying the most important keywords for your brand, you’ll want to focus on the three different elements of keyword research:
- Relevance — The goal is to identify your website as the best resource for the phrase or word being searched (i.e. the more you include the phrase throughout your website, the better your chances of ranking higher are).
- Authority — Google will rank content it deems as authoritative higher than other competitors. The more your site is utilized as a backlink in other pieces of content, the more authoritative your website will become.
- Volume — There’s really no point in ranking high for a keyword that nobody is searching. So, when identifying key phrases to use on your website, be sure to choose those with a higher volume of search traffic to really see the best benefits of SEO for small business marketing.
If you’re thinking that the way these keywords are implemented onto your site is important, you’d be correct! Simply listing these keywords on your brand’s website won’t have the authentic, user-friendly impact that you should be working toward.
Instead, you should be aiming to incorporate these phrases and words into copy that would already otherwise exist on your site.
For example, if your brand specializes in decorative throw pillows and you want to rank highest for the keyword “best decorative throw pillow,” you’ll want to make sure this phrase appears as many times as possible.
Think about incorporating keywords into web pages like:
- Website homepage
- About Us page
- Product pages
Image SEO
Similar to keyword research, image SEO is an easy, yet crucial way to see the SEO benefits for small business marketing.
Remember when we said keyword research improves a site’s ranking for specific search phrases on Google? Well, image SEO improves a site’s ranking for specific images on Google, which is just as important in driving customers to your website.
Many small business owners already know that visual elements photos and videos are important when creating an engaging user experience on the website. So, if you’re already including images into your site for aesthetic purposes, you might as well optimize them to have higher SEO rankings!
If you’ve Googled anything recently, you probably noticed that images tend to show up at the top of the “All Results” page. The top images depicted in this section of the search results are determined by the strength of the image’s SEO, which can be largely improved with two primary tactics:
- Image alt text
- Image file name
Image alt text (short for alternative text) is a short phrase — typically 125 characters or less — used to describe an image. Not only does alt text improve SEO rankings, but it also improves the accessibility of your website. Customers who are visually impaired rely on screen readers to audibly describe what is on the page.
So, incorporating image alt text will not only make your website more SEO-friendly, but more user-friendly as well.
When paired with keyword research, the alt text of an image has the potential to improve a website’s SEO because it helps Google understand what the image is and how to rank the webpage.
Similarly, image file name is a key factor when telling Google about a photo. Typically, when we save files to our computers, the file name is something generic like “untitled1.jpg.”
Clearly, this won’t tell Google anything about the image, so the search engine won’t know how to rank it. Instead, the file name should be something more specific. Sticking with the example from above, if you are using a photo of a decorative throw pillow on your website, the file name should be something like “decorative-fall-throw-pillow.jpg” and the alt text should be “Decorative Fall Throw Pillow” with your brand’s name incorporated into the phrase.
Blog SEO
Consistent blog content published to your website is a great way to incorporate both keyword research and image SEO simultaneously.
For a small business, this may mean writing blog posts on a variety of topics, either highlighting your product or a similar relevant topic. For the example above, great blog content ideas may be “10 Best Decorative Throw Pillows For Fall” or “Best Fall Interior Design Tips.”
Letting that content live on your site will provide your customers with useful tips and highlight your specific product. It will also be a guaranteed way to consistently enhance the website’s SEO.
When creating your blog SEO strategy, be sure to keep these few tips in mind:
- Create unique editorial content — High ranking SEO websites excel in creating unique editorial content for each of the site’s pages (i.e. don’t copy and paste sentences from other parts of the site).
- Use keywords authentically throughout the blog — In titles, headers, body text, URL, and Meta description.
- Include images — For an elevated user experience as well as a way to incorporate image alt text.
- Limit topic tags — Too many tags can be detrimental and your content may be flagged as “duplicate content.”
- Incorporate internal and external hyperlinks — External links help search engines identify the relevance and credibility of your content, and internal links help drive traffic to other pages of the website.
Content Structure
As mentioned above, one of the SEO benefits for small business marketing is that it naturally improves the user experience of a brand’s website. One of the tactics where this is most prevalent is when structuring content to be optimized for SEO.
In a Google search, one of the first things the audience will see after searching for a keyword is a featured snippet — the large box at the top of Google’s search results. This featured content typically highlights a blurb from a website above the traditional number one ranking.
Because this is the first thing the audience sees, your goal should always be to have your site appear in the featured snippet section.
But, how do you make this happen? Google typically pulls the featured content from an article with a top 10 SEO ranking. So, if you’re ranking number 10 or above for a specific keyword, your chances of being in the featured snippet box automatically increases.
When structuring your content for this featured snippet section, keep these tips in mind:
- Separate each section of your blog with subheadings, following a list format — Google will pull these subheadings into a list and show it at the top of the search results.
- Target question keywords — Questions are less competitive than broad keywords, but still have a high enough search volume to make it worth your time.
- Prioritize long-tail keywords — These are those longer phrases that you identified during your keyword research.
Product Page SEO
Since many brands specialize in a certain product or service, product pages make up a large portion of the brand’s website. Therefore, it’s incredibly important to ensure these pages are optimized for the best SEO rankings possible.
When designing your site’s product pages, be sure to follow these tips for the best SEO benefits for small businesses:
- Organize the product page with categories and subcategories for easy navigation.
- Avoid creating several pages for duplicate content.
- Keep every variation of a product (color, size, etc.) in only one URL.
- Ensure every product has a name, picture/video, unique description (with keyword research) and a call to action button (like “Add to Cart”).
What is Slam’s approach to SEO for small business marketing?
At Slam, we know our clients are busy running innovative businesses. That’s why we want to take some of the pressure off by utilizing our team of highly-skilled creatives to lead the development of your marketing strategy.
Yes, this includes SEO!
Whatever your marketing and growth goals may be, our team at Slam wants to help get you there. Our approach is simple: identify your SEO for small business marketing goals and implement the necessary strategies to reach those goals.
If you're brand new to SEO and need a crash course or could use a refresher, we just released our new FREE guide SEO Terms: Explained.
Case Study
When Worklife Studios Silver Lake contacted Slam about improving local SEO for its website, our team jumped right in.
Local SEO is an SEO tactic intended to optimize your brand’s website at a local level to increase traffic, visibility, and brand awareness. This method is achieved through three major methods:
- Optimizing the brand’s Google Business profile
- Utilizing local keywords
- Creating locally relevant content
Put simply, local SEO is a method of optimizing your brand’s website by incorporating other related content based on its geographical location.
Because Work-life Studios wanted to optimize the local SEO of its Silver Lake location, we incorporated three primary sections to its website:
- Shopping at Silver Lake
- Eating at Silver Lake
- Things to do at Silver Lake
Each of these three sections featured other local businesses, eateries, and events near Worklife’s Silver Lake location, thus creating locally relevant content.
Additionally, we titled each of these sections to utilize commonly searched keyword phrases like “Things to do near Silver Lake” and “Local eats around Silver Lake.” As a result, Worklife’s Google Business profile became much more optimized for local SEO.
Get the Best SEO Benefits For Small Business Growth Today!
At Slam, we’re committed to providing you with all the tools necessary to reap the best benefits of SEO and digital marketing. Our team of experts share a common goal of working to grow and scale your brand through SEO via website development, editorial content, and brand strategy.
If you’d like our free SEO tools, and want to be updated on SEO best practices, sign up for the Slam newsletter.
Ready to get started generating unique, SEO-powered copy for your website? Schedule a call with us today!
