Effective SEO Strategies for Small Businesses with a Small Budget

Effective SEO Strategies

If you are running a small business or startup, you know it is crucial to make every dollar count. A limited customer base means limited cash flow. That would seem to indicated limited SEO opportunity, but that is where the misconception lies. If you take the time and effort to follow a few simple suggestions you can have your company’s website show up in search engine result page. Here are a few effective SEO strategies for small business with a budget.

Optimize Google My Business and Bing Places for Business

These two sites will help you show up in local searches for your type of business. First, you have to register with both. Make sure to fill out as many relevant details as possible. Some examples are the type of business, hours and days of operation, address, links to your site and any other fields that you can fill out. Add picture and videos for maximum impact with customers. Using these two tools are useful for SEO strategies.

Creating Content is Vital

Creating content relevant to your business is essential to impacting SEO strategies. Make sure that you use relevant keywords and don’t try and pack too many keywords into your content; the most visited search engines all penalize for keyword packing. Google warned they are ranking websites based on content relevant business and using keywords and content unrelated to the site risks punishment. If your site is for a shipping business, don’t have unrelated content like surfing, unless its about shipping surfboards.

Getting the Right Keywords

As previously stated, keyword packing is a frowned upon by search engines, bu choosing the right keywords is key. There are several sites that help to choose the right keywords for content so that you can bolster your SEO. One such site is Keyword Planner. If you are planning on a pay per click (PPC) campaign through Google’s AdWords, there is a tool that helps choose keywords for the ad you run; you can use these same keywords in your content to improve your SEO.

Link Building Builds SEO Results

Having links from other sites to your site is an easy and effective way to improve your SEO. One method is the oldest and no less effective for SEO strategies. Exchanging links is an excellent way to get traffic from other sites to yours at no cost.

Be sure you are trading with a reputable site, not a pornography or gambling website. Being linked to the wrong website can hurt your SEO more than improve your SEO. Never exchange links with a competitor who could possibly pilfer your customers. Another way to link building is by posting your links on social media. Search engines like links that come from social media, and it will boost your SEO results. Using the most prominent social media websites on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter make the most sense. Just be sure not to post your link too often on social media so that users don’t feel like they are being spammed and it will hurt your brand image.

Get Faster

If your website does not load quickly or is down because of a discount host, then your SEO will be harmed — search engines factor load times into their website rankings. In addition to SEO, you will have a high bounce rate if your site takes more than a few seconds to load. Internet users are famously impatient with load times.

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About the Author

Though his chief ambition is to one day control the entire Internet, Jim busies himself in the meantime running our little web development and marketing agency. He's a certified super nerd who ranks coding in old, outdated languages and watching Star Trek reruns just a bit too high on his list of fun things to do. Outside of work, Jim enjoys Hockey (Tampa Bay Lighning, to be specific), more genres of music than most people realize exist, riding his Harley (he calls it "two wheel therapy") and exploring the world through travel.