SEO Will Help to Solve Your Marketing Problems

For small businesses, the digital landscape can be both promising and overwhelming.

Identifying pain points, such as limited budget, high competition, low brand awareness, low website traffic, or challenges in reaching the target audience, becomes the catalyst for developing an effective SEO strategy.

As a small business owner, understanding these challenges and having a strategic approach to overcome them is crucial for sustained success in the digital arena.

Let’s take a look at some pain points small business owners may be facing right now, along with some actions you can take that will help start moving your business in a positive direction:

Challenge: Limited Budget

Can’t outspend the competition? Outsmart them with your secret SEO weapon.

Your prospective customers are right on your doorstep, and are often over-looked when casting the net for new leads. Results from an effective Local SEO strategy can be achieved much more quickly and at a lower cost than a national strategy.

Action:

Create and optimise a Google Business profile
Create and optimise a Bing Places profile
Create and optimise an Apple Business Connect profile
Add your business to local business directories
Add geo-targeting to your website and content
Run a local Google ads PPC campaign
Increase local brand awareness in the community

Challenge: High Competition

Do what your competitors are doing, but do it better.

There are often some big authoritative domains taking top positions in Google, leaving the rest of us grappling for the all-important Page 1 real-estate. It’s therefore important to understand who your competitors are – your online competitors may not be your direct competitors.

Action:

Analyse your online competitors with a comprehensive Competitor Analysis. Understand which competing domains are achievable to gain advantage on. Be realistic in your expectations!
Understand what content they are ranking for, where the opportunities are. If they are ranking for certain topics, think about how you can gain competitive edge by writing better content on the same topic!
Take a look at the type of content they are posting through social channels and how much engagement they achieve. If they are doing well on a particular channel, you need to step up your brand awareness on the same channel. Don’t forget, their audience is your audience. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to capture your piece of the pie.

Challenge: Low Brand Awareness

Get your brand noticed and be heard above the noise.

Achieving strong brand visibility in the fiercely competitive online marketplace can be a real challenge for small businesses, and with the emergence of AI Search, this is likely to get even harder. So what can you do to get your brand noticed and be heard above the noise?

Action:

Gain authority for your niche. Focus on writing quality, unique and helpful content around a topic that is closely related to your business.
Generate as many positive reviews as you can to enhance trust and credibility.
Get involved with the local community, support charitable causes, and share, share, share!
Focus on building a strong backlink profile. Find high authority, relevant domains to gain backlinks from – guest posting is a good way to create natural links, as well as business directory linkbuilding.
Step up your presence on social channels. Engage with your audience – give them a reason to interact with your brand.
Optimise your Google Business profile – keep it updated with accurate information and post into it regularly to help increase local search visibility for your brand.

Challenge: Low Website Traffic

Maximise your reach with a cross-channel strategy.

Whether B2B or ecommerce, a website needs traffic if it is to be of value to a business. An effective SEO strategy will work to build your online presence over time and connect with your customers, but you will also need to embrace a more holistic approach to SEO. This means working harder to connect with your audience by interacting on social channels. Build a brand presence on the networks your audience is spending time on. If you need to increase traffic quickly there are other options.

Action:

Create a Google PPC campaign – delivering ads to people at the exact time they are searching for the products or services you offer, driving highly targeted traffic to your website – fast!
Create an effective SEO strategy that will optimise your website for higher volume keywords that will generate more traffic.
Create a Google Business profile if you are targeting a local audience. This will put your business ‘on the map’ literally so you can attract some local targeted traffic.
Increase your social media presence with a paid social campaign, to reach new audiences and generate more social referrals.
Explore link building opportunities that could also increase referral traffic.
Write customer-focused, topical content that is engaging and encourages your audience to interact with your brand and that will help you build topical authority in your niche.

Challenge: Lack of Direction

Take some time to review your strategy and set achievable objectives.

Often, small business owners are so consumed by the day-to-day running of the business we forget what we are trying to achieve and how we were planning on getting there. It is crucial to have a long-term strategy in place that defines your audience, your marketing objectives and helps you map a clear path for success.

Action:

Take some time to review your business strategy and your objectives.
Understand who your audience is and what channels they are active on.
Analyse your strengths and weaknesses – have these changed over time?
Look at where you want your business to be in 5 years’ time.
Set some goals and priorities.
Adapt your strategy so it’s aligned to current algorithms and search trends.
Measure, monitor and analyse your strategy over time and review it to ensure it is on track and is achieving set objectives.

Challenge: Lack of Resources

Gain a deeper understanding of SEO so you can take the reins, or out-source to an SEO agency.

Many small businesses are sole traders and don’t have a team of digital marketers and web developers to provide the level of support that many enterprises take for granted. There are however many tools available online to help you manage your SEO and online marketing, as well as many professional agencies who will provide expert guidance and support.

Action:
Outsource your SEO and marketing to a reliable agency. Prices vary but there are some agencies who offer affordable SEO that’s gets results (such as Whizz Marketing for example!)
Utilise Free SEO and marketing tools to help improve your SEO and campaign performance – there are some excellent resources available online.
Gain a deeper understanding of SEO and digital marketing through online learning resources so you can take on some of the SEO work yourself, helping to reduce costs.

Now you have identified your marketing pain points and looked at how to overcome these challenges, you are ready to start planning your SEO Strategy.

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.