As the owner of a small or medium-sized business, you know better than anyone how much effort goes into running your company. With so much focus on day-to-day operations, it’s too easy for your SEO to get left behind.
SEO is an essential investment for businesses. When in the right hands, SEO ensures that your products or services are found by your target customers on search engines.
Whether you haven’t paid much attention to your SEO up to now, or want to improve on your previous efforts, the team here at Distribute Digital are here to help.
What Is SEO For SMBs?
SEO for small or medium-sized businesses involves taking strategic actions to improve your
website visibility and ultimately conversions. An SEO strategy can cover every aspect of your website’s content, backlinks and technical performance. It will seek to rectify any weak points that are holding your website back. This could be on search engines but also issues once users land on the page.
As a small or medium business, a huge advantage is that you will likely be very in tune with your audience. It’s then a case of ensuring your SEO efforts align with this demographic.
How this is achieved can best be summarised by presenting your customers with relevant content that is fast to load on the page and ultimately makes them want to buy from you.
How SEO Helps Your Business Grow
A whopping 8.5 billion Google searches happen every day. But unless your website has been correctly optimised for your products, services and where applicable your location, it is unlikely to attract its fair share of traffic. As SEO specialists, it’s our job to fix that for you!
SEO is a thorough process in which we look to create search visibility where your small or medium business needs it most.
When done well, SEO takes a multi-pronged approach spanning various techniques. The aim is always to generate more organic as well as relevant traffic to your website.
Crucially, ‘relevant traffic’ is the key statement here. That’s because, we don’t just want more traffic landing on your website, but rather traffic that is most likely to convert. SEO is how we create and establish that relevance.
What Does SEO For Small To Medium-Sized Businesses Involve?
Based on your business goals and customer demographics, we’ll create a tailored strategy for your on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO.
In other words, we will look to optimise every aspect that we know Google considers when it matches users with relevant and high quality search results. Ultimately, we’re looking to deliver an ROI for your business from SEO.
Let’s cover some of the steps involved in more detail. It’s worth noting that you might not know what each of the following SEO techniques entails, and that’s okay! We can discuss anything you’re unsure of over a free consultation.
Identifying The Services Or Products You Offer Your Customers
Every SEO strategy we create is unique to each business. As a small or medium-sized business, you must understand the service or product that you offer to your customers.
Beyond providing us with a full list of products or services, we also want to get to know the wants and needs of your customers. This information will then be used to intuitively shape your SEO strategy.
Specifically, we will be able to determine what type of searches will most align with your audience based on the solutions that you provide.
Researching & Implementing Relevant Keywords
Have you ever wondered how search engines match users with relevant results? Keywords have a lot to do with this!
When selecting keywords for your website, we don’t just think about your business name, or even your products or services. We also need to understand both the pain points of your customers and their motivations. This is part of our broad approach to SEO for SMBs.
To find keyword suggestions, we use SEO software such as SEMRush. This tool allows us to start with a keyword or phrase and gives helpful indicators such as the search intent behind the keyword. It will also give us keyword variations, search volume figures and details about the keyword competition.
As SEO specialists, we’re not big on keyword stuffing or similar spammy ‘black hat’ SEO techniques. Instead, our only focus is on quality and relevance to deliver long-term value to your business.
We also have our very own SEO value calculator, which is one of the best SEO tools for small business use. It allows you to calculate the potential return on investment (ROI) based on target keywords.
Creating High-Quality Landing Pages & Blog Content
Once we know all of the keywords that are most relevant to your SME and your overall business goals, we’ll get to work adding these to your website content. Beyond your landing pages, keywords also need to go into your blog too.
When writing any SEO-friendly content for our clients, we’re very keen to follow Google’s
E-E-A-T guidelines: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
In short, this means publishing content that’s original, relevant and provides an engaging experience for your users. We want to keep users on your website for as long as possible so that they are more likely to convert.
Link Building
Every website needs other websites to link to it. Links which point to your website are known as backlinks, and backlinks are acquired through link building techniques.
The reason why we put so much effort into link building for SMBs is that link building will solidify the rankings of your site. Backlinks make it much easier for you to maintain your position in the SERPs.
You have a lot of options available when it comes to link building, such as trying to get organic links by publishing great content or creating newsworthy stories via digital PR.
However, as a small or medium business, local business directories remain the best way to get the links you need. They also give you the chance to advertise your business and what you have to offer.
We can identify the best link building opportunities and complete link building outreach on your behalf.
Other Top SEO Techniques For Small To Medium-Sized Businesses
- Make sure your website is user-friendly and addresses aspects such as a high bounce rate or cart abandonment
- Add meta titles and product descriptions so that your content is presented on search engines in a highly enticing way
- Fix technical SEO issues such as broken links and similar issues which we identify using Google Search Console (GSC)
- Improve page speed by removing glitchy elements and optimise content so that it provides a better experience for your customers
- Review the website navigation so that it is logical and doesn’t contain unnecessary hurdles in the sales journey
Have any others to add to our list? During your SEO consultation with our team, you can let us know about anything that is currently holding your website back.
Local SEO Strategies For Small And Medium Businesses
Not every small or medium-sized business will be a local business. But where you only serve a particular area of the UK, your SEO needs to be correctly optimised for your physical location.
Let’s say you own a pet grooming salon in Birmingham. If you have people visiting your website from Manchester, London or even the United States, unfortunately, these aren’t your customers. Therefore you won’t earn an ROI from them.
We can optimise your website for local SEO so that your services are more likely to be found by those physically close to your location.
Beyond your website content, these are a couple of other local SEO tricks we have up our sleeves.
To put this into practice immediately, work through our local SEO checklist for small businesses — it covers every step without requiring technical expertise
Optimising Your Google Business Profile
You need to make sure that you optimise your Google Business Profile. Your business profile gives you the chance to target new customers by connecting your location, while also helping you to appear at the top of the Google page rankings. Optimising your profile with keywords of the services or products your business offers is always a good idea. Doing so provides useful and relevant results for search queries.
Encouraging And Monitoring Customer Reviews
Hopefully, your customers are regularly leaving ratings and reviews of your business. It’s helpful to display these reviews on your website to showcase what other customers are saying in front of potential new customers. You need to try and capitalise on trust signals like this and you also need to try and tie them to your online profiles. By doing so, you can boost your search rankings. Any customer reviews can also be used as user-generated content elsewhere within your marketing.
So Does SEO Work For Small Businesses?
Before you make any kind of investment in your marketing, you naturally will question whether it’s worth it.
If you are unsure how important the SEO aspect of digital marketing is, this is understandable. So many other businesses are in the same position as you, and in fact, only 36% of small companies have any kind of SEO strategy.
Ultimately, not having a digital marketing strategy that includes an aspect of SEO means your business is missing out.
Experts in digital marketing often stress the importance of having an SEO strategy and the effects it can have on business growth. Therefore, SEO for SMBs is one of the best ways to promote your company online. On top of this, SEO can help you to stand out from the competition.
Combined with careful monitoring and strategic optimisations, SEO can deliver fantastic results for your small or medium enterprise. So yes, SEO definitely works and is most certainly worth it!
FAQs
I Own A Small Business; Do I Need SEO For My Website?
Yes. As a small business, SEO matters because it connects your website with your target customers on search engines. Without a solid SEO strategy, your conversions will be directly impacted because your business isn’t being discovered on Google.
Why Is Local SEO Important To Small And Medium Businesses?
In short, Local SEO has a clear focus on getting your website found by those in a specific geographic area. It is the best way to capture the search traffic looking for the products or services you provide locally.
How Many Small And Medium-Sized Businesses Are There In The UK?
According to the latest figures, there are 5.1 million small businesses in the UK, and 36,900 medium-sized businesses. For context, small businesses are classed as having 49 or fewer employees, whereas medium-sized businesses have between 50 to 249 employees.
Is Branding Suitable For Small And Medium-Sized Businesses?
Absolutely! As a small or medium-sized business, branding is important to establish your brand positioning. Whether you operate locally, nationally or globally, your brand identity will shape all of your brand-related assets including your website or social media.
Where Do Small And Medium Businesses Struggle The Most?
As an SME, it can be challenging to have the time, talent and resources to do what’s needed. At Distribute Digital, we make it our mission to help small and medium-sized businesses connect with their customers more effectively, including through SEO.
How Can Local SEO Help Medium-Sized Businesses?
Local SEO offers the benefit of optimising your products and services with your geographic location in mind. Not only does this cut through the competition, but it ensures your business can be found by your local customers who are most likely to convert.
What Is The Most Important Thing To Consider When Optimising A Search Engine Marketing Campaign?
Without a doubt, your SEO campaign must be targeted to the right people and in the right ways. Crucially, SEO isn’t looking to target everyone on the internet, but rather your actual customers. Good research can identify exactly who the audience is, along with the best ways to reach them.
Distribute Digital – Discover Our Affordable SEO Packages For Small And Medium Sized Businesses
Do you own or work on behalf of a small or medium-sized business?
Based in Birmingham, Distribute Digital provides leading SEO services for small and medium-sized businesses across the UK.
Let us know more about your SEO needs along with your goals by booking your free consultation.
Alternatively, fire any questions our way by filling out our contact form or by giving us a call on 0121 318 6796.
Once you start implementing, you need to know whether it’s working. Read our guide on how to measure SEO success — including which metrics actually matter and which are vanity numbers.
