Small Business SEO and Content: Getting Good to Great

Running a small business is full of perks, but extra task time and more hiring funds usually don’t make this list. Did you know that there are two hidden employees already working for you? In fact, they’re model employees: quiet and unassuming, they bring a lot of bang for the buck, don’t use the last K cup and best of all, they’ll give you unpaid overtime for their efforts. SEO and Content: The Dream Team already at work for you, ready to shine with a little buffing.

Let’s get started.

Before we do, recognize that SEO and content are dynamic tools in need of routine adjusting to work well.  These are not one-shot deals and as content varies with trends and market relevancy, your SEO strategies need to as well. Seeing results can be slow and frustrating, so focus on opportunities for quicker returns while approaching your content marketing and SEO with a set longer ROI expectation.

Two quick ways to get more out of your content and SEO are to optimize your best performing pages and to fix what could be better.  Google Analytics, Google Search Console and SEMRush all  are fantastic tools for figuring out your site page performance. Specifically, here are some areas for focus:

• Organic Traffic Insights
• Keywords
• Session length
• Bounce rate

Organic Traffic Insights

For a local small business, strong organic search results can’t be beat to build trust with your local audience. While leading people to your site is a good thing in organic searches, ideally, you want to show up organically for search terms other than your business. For example, “digital advertising Pensacola” as an organic search term for finding Lucid Advertising.

Keywords

Not enough can be written about the importance of the best keywords for your business, but are you doing all you can?

Your competition

Are you checking the keywords of your local and national market competition? How are your potential customers finding them? Use the easy HTML source code process to look for keywords in the meta description, keywords tag and image title tags, as a few examples. Of course you can integrate some unused competitor keywords into your own process, but also look for those not being used at all.

Your general audience

Step back and think like a potential customer: what terms would you use to locate a business offering your service? Use the SEMRush digest tools and filtering options to see where your pages rank on Google for certain keywords. If branded keywords are the main force behind your page traffic, this is an area of opportunity. SEO and content marketing are there to help your business rank for solutions to customer problems, not just your brand name. Improve keyword optimization through fresh, relevant content. Google will send visitors to pages that can answer a question and fulfill a need today.

Session Length

What is your session length for each page? What is the CTR for each page? Even if a page has a high ranking but very little CTR, this could be an easy fix to improve conversions. You’ll want to check your title and meta tags to ensure there is relevancy to the target keywords.

Bounce Rate

A large bounce rate on a page can mean that people don’t find what they are looking for on your site, even for pages with a lot of sessions. Check for poor content or wrong keywords associated with that page.

With a few tweaks, you can easily boost your traffic, conversions and most importantly-your business!