SEO for Small Businesses

I was asked recently about how I would approach SEO strategy for smaller businesses. Small businesses only differ from large businesses in the amount of investment they can make and risk that they can withstand. Small businesses often need to get the basics right quickly and can’t really afford much in the way of experimentation. However, small businesses can act quickly – with less groupthink – to make the changes needed to align their web properties with their wider marketing strategies. This gives small businesses a tremendous advantage over more slow moving corporations.

I think that it’s impossible to do any kind of effective search engine marketing without an underlying marketing strategy, so this should come first. SEO isn’t a silver bullet; it only works if the business plan is viable and the marketing strategy thought through.

The first thing to do is an audit of the existing web properties. Maybe the current site is fine; maybe there’s no ROI in doing a full re-build. Maybe what’s needed is a few tweaks and some social media setup and advice. Small businesses need to focus on fast financial results. The site audit document should explain what’s wrong/right with their site, what they should change/keep and what the financial results might be of doing further work.

Keyword strategy recommendations should come next. The client should seek to own a keyword in Google, Bing and Yahoo!, and have a long list of secondary and tertiary keywords that they should be strong contenders for. This is heavily connected with the brand positioning statement in the marketing strategy.

The content strategy (owned media) should talk about the copy, images and video content that are appropriate for them, and have an ongoing schedule of content creation that will be cost effective.

The advertising strategy (paid media) talks about PPC, banners, sponshorship etc and how they can help to drive awareness.

The social media strategy (earned media) talks about 3rd party sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Maps, blogs etc and how they can also be used to build a loyal community around the brand.

The site redesign and build is next. It should fulfil and support the brand positioning, content strategy, advertising strategy and social strategy.

Ongoing maintenance, content creation, reporting, analysis, recommendations and community management should be part of a retainer agreement. Small businesses will be tempted to build a site and leave it, but this would be completely counter-productive. Better to cut the site design & build budget in half, and use the other half for the first year’s retainer.