Search Engine Optimisation for Small Businesses 

If you own and run a small business, you will know that there is much more to it than purely selling your services. Of course, this is a crucial part of your business, but there are also many daily challenges you will face relating to running a successful company. One of the greatest challenges is attracting new customers. Historically, many small businesses enjoyed a regular injection of customers due to word of mouth and personal recommendations. But, in this modern digital age, more and more potential customers are selecting to use the internet to find sought-after services. Consequently, many small businesses are starting to create websites for their businesses to help gain new customers or clients online.

There are a range of options that a small business owner – such as a florist, handyman, or baker – can choose to draw people to their online site. Popular methods include social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, and search engine optimisation (SEO). These options have individual pros and cons. For example, social media marketing and PPC will give you immediate results because as soon as you start an ad campaign, you will start to gain website visitors.

But, these options will be pricey and will not give you benefits or results in the long-term. New visitors to your website will only continue for as long as you continue to pay for ads. Conversely, search engine optimisation methods usually take several months to begin displaying results. However, by choosing to invest in SEO, the position of your website in search results will improve, and, therefore, more organic traffic will be brought to the site. Furthermore, your website will maintain these positions even if you decide to stop using SEO services at some point in the future. This means you can keep getting free traffic indefinitely.

Considering the long-term, investing in SEO services is a much more appealing option than paying huge amounts of money for social media or PPC ads month after month. Plus, potential clients will have more trust in you if they find your website organically through search results as opposed to seeing an advert for your small business. 

But, the fundamental question is, can small business owners actually attract new customers to their businesses and websites using SEO? Absolutely! Regardless of what your small business is, such as floristry, carpentry, personal training, landscape gardening, pet sitting, or a personal chef, SEO can be utilised to help you gain new customers. Below, we will show just how successful your small business can be if you use an effective SEO strategy. 

The Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses

SEO has become an indispensable tool for small businesses. It offers many advantages, helping businesses thrive in a competitive online environment. Here are some of the main benefits of SEO for small businesses:

• Boost Website Traffic: One of the primary objectives of SEO is to increase organic traffic to your website. By optimising your site with relevant keywords and high-quality content, you can attract more visitors who are actively searching for your products or services.
• Higher Conversion Rates: SEO not only brings more traffic to your site but also improves the quality of this traffic. By targeting specific keywords related to your business, you can attract visitors who are more likely to convert into customers.
• Enhanced User Experience: SEO isn’t just about search engines; it’s also about users. By improving the structure and navigation of your site, you can provide a better user experience, leading to longer site visits, lower bounce rates, and higher conversion rates.
• Cost-effectiveness: Compared to traditional marketing methods and PPC, SEO is highly cost-effective. It targets users actively looking for your products or services online, resulting in more cost-efficient lead generation.

To illustrate these benefits, let’s consider a case study. A small pet food company implemented an SEO strategy focusing on building backlinks. Within seven months, their keywords increased by 12,000 in six unique languages with only 25 backlinks. This led to a significant increase in online orders and a boost in overall sales.

Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid

In the quest to improve search engine rankings, small businesses sometimes make mistakes that make them fall flat on their face. Here are some common SEO pitfalls and how to avoid them:

• Keyword Stuffing: This is the practice of overloading your website content with keywords in an attempt to manipulate your site’s ranking in Google search results. Not only does this create a poor user experience, but Google’s algorithms are also sophisticated enough to detect this and may penalise your site as a result. Instead, aim for a natural and reader-friendly use of keywords in your content.
• Neglecting Mobile Optimisation: With the majority of web browsing now done on mobile devices, it’s crucial that your website is mobile-friendly. A site that’s difficult to navigate on a mobile device can lead to a high bounce rate, negatively impacting your SEO. Ensure your website design is responsive, meaning it adjusts to fit the screen size of the device it’s being viewed on.
• Ignoring Local SEO: If your business serves a specific geographical area, optimising your website for local search results is important. This includes incorporating location-specific keywords into your content and ensuring your business is listed in online directories. Neglecting local SEO can mean missing out on many potential customers in your area.
• Poor Quality Content: Poorly written, uninformative, or irrelevant content to your audience can harm your SEO efforts. High-quality content is one of the most important ranking factors for search engines. Ensure your content is well-written, informative, and provides value to your audience.
• Ignoring Meta Descriptions: Meta descriptions are the snippets of text that appear under your website link in search engine results. While they don’t directly impact your rankings, they can influence whether someone clicks on your link. A compelling meta description can improve your click-through rate, indirectly improving your SEO.
• Lack of Analytics: Without tracking the results of your SEO efforts, you won’t know what’s working and what’s not. Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console can provide valuable insights into your website’s performance and the effectiveness of your SEO strategies.

By avoiding these common mistakes, your small businesses can improve their SEO efforts and increase their chances of achieving higher rankings in search engine results. Carry on reading to learn more about the smart way to do SEO in a cost-effective way.

SEO Strategies for Small Businesses

SEO is a complex specialisation, especially for small businesses that don’t have an in-house expert. With that said, understanding some of the basics means you can make a start. Here are some practical SEO strategies that your small businesses can implement:

• Keyword Research: This is the foundation of any SEO strategy. It involves identifying the terms and phrases your potential customers use to search for your products or services. There are several tools available, such as Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs, that can help you find relevant keywords for your business.
• On-Page SEO: You will need to optimise individual pages on your website to rank higher in search engine results. This includes using your keywords in strategic places like the title, headers, and body of your content, as well as in meta tags and URLs.
• Off-Page SEO: There are also actions to take outside of your own website to improve the impact SEO can have. For example, building high-quality backlinks from other reputable websites, social media marketing, and influencer marketing.
• Technical SEO: This involves the technical aspects of your website that affect its performance in search engine rankings. This includes ensuring your website loads quickly, is mobile-friendly, and has a secure connection (HTTPS).
• Creating SEO-Friendly Content: Content is king in SEO. Regularly publishing high-quality, informative, and engaging content that is optimised for your target keywords can significantly improve your website’s visibility on search engines.

Remember, SEO is not a one-time task but an ongoing process. It requires regular monitoring and adjustments to keep up with changes in search engine algorithms and industry trends. With these strategies, you will see improvements in your website’s search engine rankings and online visibility.

Search Demand for Small Businesses on Google

Here we have given a few examples of small businesses to demonstrate how much search demand there is for various small business ventures.

This screenshot above shows Google search data on the term ‘bakery near me’. As we can see, this is searched globally 1.7 million times a month on average, with 1.2 million of these searches coming from the United States! An average of 175 thousand of these searches occur in India, 102 thousand in Canada, 85 thousand in Australia, and 60 thousand in the United Kingdom. Clearly, there is a considerable amount of people searching for local bakeries in your country daily. 

This next screenshot shows Google search data for ‘florist near me’. Again, this search term is very popular and globally searched 515 thousand times a month on average. Roughly 316 thousand of these searches occur in the United States, 77 thousand in Australia, and 72 thousand in the United Kingdom. This again shows an impressive number of people seeking out local florists each day.

Our final example shows Google search data for ‘handyman near me’. This term is also highly popular and is searched for 204 thousand times each month globally on average. An estimated 157 thousand of these searches originate from the United States, 25 thousand in the United Kingdom, and 10 thousand in Australia. Once more, this shows popular demand for handyman services around the world. 

As we can see, various small business ventures all enjoy popular demand on Google searches. Therefore, effective SEO can help you attract tens of thousands of visitors to the website for your small business every month.

And we can see that Google Trends also paints an encouraging picture. The above screenshots show evident growth in the popularity of search terms used to look for certain small businesses from 2004 until the present day. This basically means that an increasing number of people are looking for small businesses and their services each year. If you decide to hire an SEO company to promote your small business in search results, you will be in an excellent position to get a high return on investments (ROIs) for years in the future, especially as social media and PPC are only getting more costly and competitive. 

People Use Lots of Search Terms to Find Small Businesses

It is important to know that ‘florist’ or ‘pet sitter’ is just one way people search for these small business services, and there are many other keywords that people might use when looking for a small business and its services. One crucial part of SEO is keyword research. Here, experts analyse search queries and determine which pages need to be created on the website and optimised for keyword usage to draw maximum traffic. Here we present just a few examples of search queries that people enter on Google when seeking out a small business and its services:

• ‘Small business near me’. For example, ‘florist near me’.
• ‘Small business in..’ + location. For example, ‘carpenter in London’. 
• Services required, such as fixing a sink or creating a customised birthday cake.

Below we have compiled a few screenshots of the average monthly search volume for various keywords relating to two particular small businesses: bakeries and florists. This demonstrates just how many people search online for these search terms each month and how many different keywords are used. Therefore, a good SEO-optimised small business website can bring thousands of free visitors each month just by showing up for these kinds of keywords on Google. 

Other Small Businesses are Already Getting Results from SEO

Effective search engine optimisation can bring outstanding results, helping websites to show up higher in search results and potentially saving website owners thousands of dollars on ads every month. But, don’t just take our word for it, as below we present a few examples of small businesses that are witnessing an excellent return due to their SEO efforts. 

Our first example is www.raysflorist.co.uk, a small florist business. The website has 4.3 thousand visitors per month. These visitors are people who explore the website after seeing it pop up in their Google search results. At the same time, the website’s average monthly traffic is roughly $3,600. This amount displays how much money the website owner would need to spend every month in order to buy an identical amount of traffic they get organically from contextual advertising systems, such as PPC ads. This means that the website owner can save over $3,500 per month as their website enjoys great positions in Google’s search results. The screenshot below shows which pages bring the most traffic for this website.

As we can see, the pages in this list above draw high traffic from various pages. A diligent SEO expert can examine the pages currently on your website and competitor websites, optimise existing pages to aid in attracting even more people, and create brand new pages that will draw as much organic search traffic as possible. It is essential to bear in mind that this is just one aspect of SEO work, and there are many other things that SEO agencies do to promote websites. 

Now that we have looked at a small florist business, what about a different type of small business? Is SEO still a worthwhile venture for different types of small businesses? Our next screenshot will illustrate that it most definitely is.

Clearly, the results are very encouraging, even for a different small business. This graphic designer’s website attracts roughly 6.5 thousand organic website visitors each month and has a traffic value of about $8,900. The website www.jessicajonesdesign.com ranks highly on Google for various keywords and draws very impressive traffic. This website receives $8,900 worth of free traffic from Google, meaning that the business can save this money that would otherwise have been spent on PPC ads.

It is crucial to remember that PPC ads essentially involve buying traffic in exchange for money. So it follows that once you stop paying for these adverts, you will also stop getting traffic. But, with SEO, you will keep your search positions and keep getting traffic even if you no longer use SEO services. By choosing to hire a qualified SEO agency and boosting your website’s rankings on Google, you can conserve your money and keep your website’s traffic without having to spend money on advertising channels such as PPC.

Let’s now look at the pages that draw the most visitors to this freelance graphic designer’s website:

Some keywords that bring the most traffic to these pages include ‘brand designer’, ‘lowercase logos’, and ‘identity design’. This once again shows that there is a significant range of keywords that your small business can use to draw free organic traffic on Google, not just simple, obvious terms such as ‘graphic designer near me’. A reputable SEO agency can effectively create, optimise, and promote those pages and help bring further business to your company. 

Local SEO

Local SEO techniques are used to make sure that a website appears to people who search for specific services locally. For example, if you enter ‘painter and decorator near me’ on Google, you will find websites run by painters in your local area. Consequently, local SEO is vital for businesses offering services in-person, such as builders, carpenters, pet sitters and so on. However, purely adding your website to Google My Business and adding the location on Google Maps will not bring you as much traffic as you might like. Only truly comprehensive search engine optimisation of a website can bring substantial results and help your website rise in search engine rankings. 

Key Metrics and SEO Tools

Assessing the success of your SEO efforts is a critical aspect of refining your strategy and maximising your online presence. Here are some practical ways small businesses can track and measure the effectiveness of their SEO initiatives:

• Organic Traffic: This refers to the number of visitors coming to your website through unpaid search results. An increase in organic traffic is usually a good sign that your SEO efforts are paying off.
• Keyword Rankings: This measures where your website appears in search engine results for specific keywords. Even ranking on the first page can significantly increase your visibility.
• Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can indicate that your site isn’t relevant to what users are searching for or that the user experience is poor.
• Page Load Time: This is the amount of time it takes for your website to load. Faster load times can improve user experience and contribute to better search engine rankings.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): This is the percentage of people who click on your website after seeing it in search engine results. A higher CTR can indicate that your meta descriptions and titles are compelling and relevant.
• Conversion Rate: This is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on your site, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. Increasing your conversion rate is often the ultimate goal of SEO.

Several tools out there can help you track these key metrics. Here are a few of our favourites:

When interpreting data from these tools, it’s crucial to focus on trends rather than individual data points. SEO is a long-term strategy, and it’s normal for your rankings to fluctuate from day to day. However, over time, you should be able to see an upward trend in your rankings, traffic, and conversions if your SEO efforts are successful. It can be hard to read and understand this data, so it might be worth reaching out to an SEO agency for support.

What Does an SEO Company Do?

While SEO is an excellent investment for small businesses, achieving fantastic results takes a tangible amount of expertise, skill, and hard work. This is no exception for websites that provide services. Google has exceptionally high standards to make sure that low-quality websites do not reach the highest positions in their search results. 

But, NUOPTIMA has been working with brands in a wide range of industries for many years, including small businesses. Our experts have a plethora of experience doing SEO work for a varied range of clients, including startups, e-commerce, real estate, medical clinics and more. As a result, we know precisely what needs to be done to get your website showing up on the first page of Google. Here are just a few things that we can do to improve your small business’s Google rankings:

• Arrange link placements on online directories. For example, getting carpentry business link placements onto tradespeople directories or bakery business link placements onto bakery directories.
• Create SEO-optimised content to help your website rank for more keywords on Google.
• Optimise existing pages to ensure they comply with the rules and best practices of Google.
• Create all the necessary pages to assist your website in collecting as much organic traffic as possible. 

Efficient search engine optimisation can bring incredible results if done correctly and properly by qualified experts. At NUOPTIMA, we have a large SEO team full of experience and expertise to assist your website in achieving outstanding results. Book a free discovery call today with our professional team to explore how we can use SEO to get great results for both your small business and its website. 

Elevate Your Small Business with SEO

In the highly competitive field of small businesses, it’s essential to stand out from the crowd. With the right SEO strategies, your small business can rise above the competition, attracting more potential clients and driving growth. SEO is not just about increasing website traffic; it’s about attracting the right kind of traffic – potential clients who are actively looking for your services. Don’t let your small business blend into the background. Start your SEO journey with NUOPTIMA today and watch your business flourish.