SEO For Small Businesses - 10 Steps To SEO Success

At Whizz Marketing, we love to help all small businesses to better understand SEO and the opportunities it has to offer. This article outlines the 10 Steps to SEO Success which we hope provides you with the SEO help you need to create an effective SEO strategy.

1. Set clear objectives & KPIs

Whether it’s boosting website traffic, enhancing keyword rankings, or improving conversion rates, clear objectives provide a roadmap for your SEO strategy.

Strategy: Align objectives with overarching business goals. Define key performance indicators (KPIs) that directly address identified pain points.

2. Run a SWOT analysis

Understanding your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) is crucial. This analysis forms the basis for leveraging strengths, mitigating weaknesses, capitalising on opportunities, and preparing for potential threats.

Strategy: Conduct a SWOT analysis tailored to your digital presence. Leverage strengths in content creation or unique offerings. Address weaknesses in website structure or content gaps.

3. Set your budgets

Creating an effective SEO strategy requires an investment, both in the initial setup and ongoing efforts. Balancing these costs ensures a sustainable and impactful approach.

Strategy: Allocate a budget that considers initial setup costs like audits, keyword and competitor research and SEO. Plan for ongoing expenses such as content creation, link building, and analytics tools.

4. Set realistic timeframes and expectations

SEO can take a long time to show results, so setting realistic timeframes and expectations is essential to avoid frustration and build confidence in the strategy’s efficacy.

Strategy: Establish a timeline that aligns with the nature of SEO results. Communicate realistic expectations to stakeholders, emphasising the gradual but impactful nature of SEO improvements.

5. Focus on what matters

Not all ranking factors carry the same weight. Prioritising elements like research, content quality, backlinks, and user experience ensures that efforts are directed where they matter most.

Strategy: Stay informed about search engine algorithm updates and industry trends to adjust priorities accordingly. Focus on creating valuable content and building a strong backlink profile.

6. Conduct keyword and competitor research

Take out the guesswork and create your strategy using realtime data. Knowing who your online competitors are and what keywords they are ranking for is valuable insight that you can use to your advantage.

Strategy: Use a reputable SEO agency to run a website audit, keyword research and competitor analysis. Utilise the results to create a data-driven keyword strategy that will get results.

7. Get savvy with your content marketing

With the emergence of AI search, it is becoming vital for businesses to adapt their content strategies to write for users, first and foremost, not search engines.

Strategy: Using the insights from your keyword and competitor research, build a content strategy that is user-focused but also incorporates keywords that are going to present the best opportunity for achieving your goals.

8. Start optimising!

When you have your keyword and content strategies ready, it’s time to start applying the on-site SEO to your website.

Strategy: Work methodically through your website, page by page. Look to optimise all page meta tags, create engaging and optimised page headlines, optimise images and add in optimised ALT text, upload optimised content and create optimised link text.

9. Don’t forget the technical elements

It can be easy to think content and keywords when it comes to SEO, but there is so much more to SEO!

Strategy: Consider user experience, site speed, server response times, searchbot crawlability and the mobile-friendliness of your site.

10. Build brand authority with off-site SEO

Off-site SEO is a really important part of the ongoing SEO strategy as it helps to build brand authority and trust.

Strategy: Consider ways you can build brand authority across the web. Your strategy may include techniques such as building quality backlinks, guest-blogging, and stepping up your online social presence.

Whizz Marketing has recently launched the SEO Hub for Small Businesses. This hub gives you the chance to Dig Deeper into SEO so you can move forwards with creating and implementing your SEO strategy with confidence.