Optimizing the online presence of your small business is hard to achieve. You’re up against national brands and long-established local companies that consistently edge you out of the high-ranking spots. The main issue is that you must take a special SEO approach explicitly designed for small businesses. You might not even be using SEO, the practice of optimizing your website content and information to help attract search engines so customers can find you.
Refining your digital marketing strategy ensures you focus on the right things to improve your SEO performance and enjoy that elusive success. Do you understand how to leverage Google Maps? How do you rank in the organic rankings compared to paid ads? Do you even use paid ads? Are you using images and video content? Do you know what a featured snippet is?
All these tactics contribute to your ranking and help improve your visibility. However, without an in-house SEO team working on improving your ranking on a daily basis and that understands the changing algorithms and trends that impact search strategies, you haven’t got a chance to beat the competition. We’re talking about big brands who have even bigger budgets to crush the little guy time after time.
But fear not. Here we explain how Outreach Digital Marketing can optimize your small business’s online presence so you can finally get the visibility you deserve.
Identifying How Customers Search for Your Products
You know more about your products than anyone, but this can actually be a problem. You’re too close to your brand and too invested to objectively consider who your customers are and how they search for your products. This is the first step to help optimize your online presence, as it tells you where to invest money to find your ideal audience.
We identify who you should reach and how you solve their problems to determine how these people search for your products. We want to know the hows, whens, and wheres of the customer journey to determine who your customers are. We’ll discover:
- Whether they shop using their cell phones or at home
- What drives their purchase of your particular products or service
- Whether your resolve issues or fulfill desires
How this helps: With this information, we can develop a keyword strategy and apply those keywords to the type of content that will attract your ideal customers. We can also use it to create paid rankings to help augment your organic rankings, so you’ll see results faster.
Revealing and Correcting Technical Woes
Although many of our clients don’t have effective keyword strategies, even if they did, they often have unknown technical issues holding them back. Running an assessment of your site allows us to reveal the types of technical problems that interfere with SEO effectiveness. We have to diagnose your site and correct technical issues that keep search engines from finding you, or worse, that cause search engines to suppress your rankings. Testing reveals typical website functional issues such as being too slow to load, too many instances of duplicate content, broken links, questionable links, plagiarism, etc.
We also address other techie things like schema markup to send signals to search engines so you can appear in rich snippets on the search engine results page (SERP).
How this helps: Once we perform a technical audit, we can fix the issues and create a sound base for all your SEO efforts. The addition of schema markup helps increase the odds of your rich snippets appearing on the SERP while boosting SEO.
Optimizing Every Web Page
Using keywords isn’t enough to attract search engines. We look for opportunities for on-page optimization throughout your entire website, page by page. Our team understands how to improve the structure and create engaging content that visitors will enjoy and find helpful. This often calls for a complete rewrite of content using natural language that seamlessly introduces keywords to attract search engines.
High-quality content is hard to come by, and often companies claiming to be SEO experts copy content from competitor sites or try to repurpose it with poor editing and keyword stuffing that has the opposite effect of what you are trying to achieve.
Our experts use above-board editing to incorporate keywords that flow for readers while making it easy for search engines to find them. We address not just your content but include optimization across all areas of your website, including optimized title tags and subheadings, images/videos, meta descriptions, and links. We also include images and video content to help you rank for the most competitive keywords.
How this helps: Search engines put high-quality, original content above all else when ranking websites and will use our well-placed keywords to find you.
Revitalizing Your Google Business Profile
Many small businesses underestimate the importance of their Google Business Profiles (GBP). This is a significant miss when it comes to online optimization; your GBP is the focal point of your online presence, at least for search engines.
We revitalize your GBP ensuring all the information is provided and that your NAP (business name, address, and phone number) is consistent across all channels and directories. Google offers a valuable, free marketing opportunity that helps customers learn about you quickly, including what you sell, where you are, how to get there, and even how to purchase items, schedule appointments or book a reservation on the spot.
We will “claim” and “verify” your profile and complete all fields with photos and videos to engage customers. We will choose the right category so search engines understand what you do and even create a helpful FAQ under the questions and answer section.
How this helps: Other online directories use Google to source and collect your information to include you. We ensure the information they source is current and correct, so all online sources list your business information error-free. This increases the number of citations for your business online, further optimizing your online presence. Finally, completing the questions and answers provides the information customers need. This is important because Google also allows users to ask and answer questions, which means the information provided could be incorrect.
Researching Your Competition
A competitive analysis allows us to leverage what competitors are doing right and be better at what they are doing wrong. We look at the top-ranking brands that appear when we search for the keywords we target and analyze their websites to provide insights into their success.
We have the tools to determine what keywords they are using and match them to our list to find opportunities to add more keywords to your site. We determine how many of their pages Google has indexed and analyze their website structure to help us improve yours while studying things like their backlink profile to find opportunities. To help leverage voice search, we’ll also look for long-tail keywords that help improve their ranking and incorporate those into your site.
A visit to their site allows us to measure their site performance against yours for things like speed, quality, appearance, navigation, etc. These insights enable us to find ways to improve your site and outsmart the competition to help steal their ranking.
How this helps: Understanding how the top-ranking sites achieved their position allows us to leverage their strategy, improve upon it, and increase your ranking.
Leveraging Local Business Listings and Increasing Citations
We mentioned your GBP and citations above. Increasing citations is simple yet crucial. You want to increase your citations so your NAP appears on as many legitimate, trustworthy local and industry-related directories as possible. However, you must also ensure your NAP is exactly the same across all citations so Google recognizes your business and acknowledges your presence as a local company.
How this helps: You control NAP accuracy and share more information across essential directories to build trust and improve your local presence.
Sourcing Excellent Local Link Opportunities
While you might have links to pages on your own site, you also need links from other businesses and reputable websites to improve SEO. This is a challenge. We can approach logical partners in your area to help create more links to your site. Links can be related to your involvement in the community or logical partners, such as a décor store with a painting service or contractor or a doctor’s office with physio clinics, x-ray centers, pharmacies, and labs.
How this helps: Link building is a definite edge for local businesses and can create long-lasting partnerships to raise awareness in your community.
Soliciting and Responding to Online Reviews
Everyone looks at reviews before trusting a company to provide services or to purchase a product. We can create auto-generated emails to solicit online reviews from happy customers to help improve SEO and conversions. However, we can also help monitor online reviews and provide comments to help engage customers and show your responsiveness. This is particularly important for negative comments you’ll want to resolve ASAP to show potential customers you care.
How this helps: Google uses a ranking and review system to increase rankings, so customer feedback is essential.
Our services will build your online presence using proven strategies so search engines find you. We will continue to monitor your performance and find new tactics to meet the changing needs of your business with better and more relevant content, more inbound links, and investing in paid ads on channels trending with your target audience.
Ready to take your digital marketing to the next level? Don’t miss out on the opportunity to supercharge your online presence – let’s connect and revolutionize your business today!