Boosting SEO For Your Small Business

I get asked this by clients ALL THE TIME. You want to be at the top of Google search right? Not quite… What your business actually wants is a steady flow of qualified leads that become good clients.

The first 7 things to boost SEO (and beat the competition)

Local listing sites & review sites

Local listing sites & review sites - Google Maps / Google Business Profile / formerly known as Google My Business, Yelp, Bing Local, Home Advisor, Angi's, Thumbtack etc. These sites offer their customers a way to find businesses for the service they need, right? So, SEO here means your hours, business description, photos, website link, phone number, etc., all need to be correct and up to date.

Respond to your reviews. Post your specials. And most importantly, setup or claim your business profile for any of these sites that are popular in your area. If you don't, any consumer can do it and then you don't have access to keep your info up to date. You'll have to go through a process to reclaim your profile.

Social Media - happy customers make posts and recommendations on social media. This is real world SEO. You encourage it with great customer service. You can try to pay people for it, but I think it's better to invest that money in customer service and inspire your customers to want to spread the word. But you need business accounts on the popular sites like Facebook and Nextdoor so you can answer questions and promote your business when the opportunity is there.

Content SEO

Content SEO - search engines want to answer questions for their customers. So, your content needs to answer those questions. This one is where people tend to lose a lot of money. It's true that content is important but, I see a lot of SEO companies treat small business sites like they are blogs. Can a content strategy work? Long term, yes. But it's expensive for a reason. It's time consuming to do it well and many SEO companies outsource the work. Most just throw up a ton of shit content out there and pollute the web with garbage hoping that a couple of articles become popular. Then you have a ton of visits to your site from all over the world and hope that a few of those will be local. If the content is decent and the traffic is legitimate, then there is the benefit of popularity increasing your search ranking in general. So, over time, you can get more leads. But this is where people get screwed sometimes.

The SEO company has to justify the cost, so they post more junk. They can't really tell if it's working and don't have the expertise to measure the results in a way that proves their effort is what increased your traffic. So the customer feels like they are paying but not seeing results. In my opinion, it's better to invest this money into local efforts. Customer service, local events, charities, community good will gestures. Imagine if you took that 1k-2k per month and did something with your business that got you into local media. That's much better than paying people to write junk articles that may or may not be relevant to your business. Or, you spend it in a way that wows your customers into becoming raving fans.

Backlinks

Backlinks - this means another site is linking to your site. For example, if a blog discusses cleaning businesses and they link to their favorites and yours is one of them. These are important but can be dangerous. This is another place people get burned. It's time consuming and expensive to get good backlinks. Only some backlinks are good for your site. For example, if a scam site links to your site, then that's a bad backlink that has a negative effect on your SEO. Where people get burned is when SEO companies use similar tactics to the content strategy mentioned above. They throw everything at the wall to see what sticks. In the end, your site has 1000s of backlinks. So they can tell you "wow, look at all the backlinks we got you". The problem is, they are junk and not helping and sometimes hurting. This is not a numbers game. The more you have isn't always better. You want to get good quality local citations. The reputation of the site that is linking to you is important. That's why it's expensive. No different than in real life. Would you want thieves recommending your business or would you want moms? It just makes sense. I'd rather have 1 great mom recommend my business than 1000 thieves.

The reason people end up with junk backlinks is because there's a whole industry dedicated to this scam. There are thousands of sites that exist for this purpose. They make it easy to get backlinks, whereas you have to actually work hard to get a link on a good quality site.

Reviews

I'm putting this one on its own because it's very important. This is where the local business owner has control and the opportunity for great impact. Good, steady reviews = good SEO.

It shows your company is relevant. It shows your company is in demand. It shows your company is doing what the customers are searching for. You don't need to pay an external source to get good reviews. Improve customer service, ask your customers, reward your employees. Once again, where is that 1k-2k per month better spent? Try spending it on your employees and measure the effect over time. Do you want to be known as the company with unbelievable reviews or do you want to be known as the company with a bunch of junk backlinks and junk blog articles that don't have anything to do with your business.

Website

Website - your site needs to be fast, work well on mobile, and it needs to be coded properly. Search engines like google use these metrics to rank sites. They want to show their users sites that are accessible and provide relevant information. They don't want their users to be subjected to junk and slow sites. And, by making sure your site is coded properly you help the search engines process your site in the best way possible. For example, if your headings are actually paragraphs that just have large font, that's not telling the search engine what your page's title and content outline are supposed to be. Your site needs to make a good first impression or everything else you do is negatively affected. If you have a good social post and they go to your site but it's slow, they may leave. If you spend $2k on ads and half the people hate your site because it's slow and it's not clear why they should book you, you just wasted $1k. If you waste your time with silly gimmicks like popups and text appearing only as you scroll, do your customers benefit or is it a distractions? The same for search engines, they visit your site on a regular basis to make sure the information is up to date and that your site follows current conventions. Is it fast? Does it answer the question the person searched for? Can the person view it on mobile? Is it properly coded for people with disabilities? Are your images broken? Are there errors on the page? Etc, etc. These search engines have criteria that are related to your customer's experience and they constantly check if you're meeting those criteria.

Google Search

About search in general - Results are different for everyone. They are based on many factors including but not limited to: your search history, your location, the relevance of the site in relation to the search term, the reviews, the time of day, what other click on, the device, how old the company is, etc.. You have to use external tools to gauge your performance. Also, there are different type of results. You may not be on the first page but because of your good reviews and service area you may come up in the local listing section "the map pack". Search is very important, for sure. But it's good to make sure it's not the only way customers can find you. Businesses get low ranked or even unlisted from Google all the time. It's good to have local roots that don't depend on people typing "cleaning service" in google. If they are searching for your name, then it doesn't matter where you rank for "cleaning service". You'll be the first result and often there wont be ads ahead of you. For general terms, the competition is huge. The bigger the market the harder it is. You are competing with companies that spend hundreds of thousands or even millions. Your Yelp listing is more likely to come up at the top than your actual website. That's why it's complicated and why it takes time.

Conclusion

When I get asked by clients about SEO, those are the recommendations I make. Yeah, I could take your money do all the typical stuff and it may work out in the long run. But I strongly believe that your business will be stronger if we concentrate on the basics. Leave the expensive SEO stuff (content and backlinks) for when your marketing budget is so big that $2k/mo isn't going to hurt you and you can afford and actually need to experiment. But if your marketing budget is less than $10k/mo, I think your money is better spent elsewhere.

Hope this helps,

—V