SEO For the Little Guy

The world of SEO can be challenging for an amateur, and can cost quite a bit to have done professionally. These tips will help you get started.

Make sure your page looks good

Invest a bit of your initial marketing money into a professional looking website that is adequate for your business type. A website for a cupcake business should look quirky and unique whereas a metalworking website should look clean and professional. Trust your web designer.

Use social media

You’ll be reaching more people through social media at first. Create social media pages for your company and assign someone to take care of them. Spread the word as much as you can, providing a link to your main page. If your friends share your page you have a greater chance to get backlinks from personal blogs and the like and a greater chance to reach your first customers or clients. Don’t just rach out, try to build relationships through your page, engage in dialogue, use polls and so on.

Optimize locally

Reach out to your local community. If you live in a suburb or small town, create on-line partnerships with reputable local businesses that have highly trafficked webpages. Reach out to bloggers nearby and they might be your first sources of backlinks. At the local level even citations are very important and co-citation is growing in importance even at the global level, so much that SEO agencies are starting to take note.

Localize keywords

When choosing ad words and keywords to compete for, you’ll do a lot better as a small business if you add the name of your neighborhood or town. You won’t have the budget to compete for ‘dog groomer’ but for ‘dog groomer tunbridge wells’ you might stand a chance to both rank higher and pay less.

Optimize your page

Make sure that you know the tips and tricks for optimizing your page. Put keywords in headings, bold out what’s important and use categories and meta tags. Make sure that your page is easy to understand and navigate through for both spiders and potential customers.

Finally, create content

You can now start creating content designed to attract the right readership to your page. Remember that text isn’t always the answer as 70% of people skim rather than read non-essential text. So put your essential text in short sentences. Or, better yet, create an infographic. Or, even better, create a video instead of a page long essay. You can add meta tags to video and you’ll deliver your message intact to more people through it.

If you’re starting a new business, good luck, you are definitely going to need it! But once you get the business off the ground, use the above to get your internet marketing off the ground.