How to Craft an Effective SEO Plan for a Small Business?
Creating an effective SEO plan is instrumental to any business’s growth: it helps you structure your efforts, track KPIs, and achieve meaningful progress. However, small businesses do not have the luxury of hiring a dedicated SEO professional.
In this article, we are going to look at the benefits of SEO planning, best practices, and SEO tips for small businesses.
What’s an SEO Plan and Why You Need It
An SEO strategy or plan is a step-by-step approach to search engine optimization. It can manifest itself either as a rough strategy that you keep in mind or a proper document that contains all the steps necessary for pushing your website to the top of SERPs.
Strategic SEO is especially important for smaller companies. While business mastodons have the upper hand with unlimited resources for marketing and promotion, SEO is a relatively cheap way to promote your business. In a way, SEO is a way to equalize and democratize the playing field for new players.
How to Craft an SEO Plan: 6 Steps
To create an SEO plan, you have to keep a few things in mind. Here are the six steps you need to take so as not to miss any critical points.
1. Keyword Research
Using a service like Ahrefs or Google Search Console, research the topics relevant to your business. For example, if you run a car repair business, consider giving detailed instructions on changing oil and tires or replacing a blown head gasket.
Write a list of topics you want to cover. Bonus points if they are connected beyond the initial scope of your business. For example, if you talk about changing oil, consider one of the topics to be about choosing the right one.
Make sure you target long-tail keywords, especially less competitive ones. While they have less search volume, they also have higher conversion rates as they are more specific. This allows you to gradually build an audience of invested readers.
2. Competitor Analysis
It’s always good to know what your competitors are up to, and this goes for SEO planning as well. Look at your most successful competitors and see what topics they cover and what important things they miss.
Consider their overall strategy and what you can take from them and improve. Find the strengths and weaknesses in their SEO strategy.
3. Building Backlinks
Backlinks are hyperlinks from other websites to you. They act as a vouch for your credibility from other websites to search engines. The best way to gain high-quality backlinks is guest posting by producing new articles for reputable outlets.
For the sake of clarity, here is an example of a good backlink: we recommend checking out an extensive guide to guest blogging by mention.com. This backlink improves their SEO ranking and topical authority while giving you, the reader, a useful resource to check out for additional info.
4. Brainstorm Ideas
One good strategy to build backlinks for online stores is writing content that overshadows that of your competitors. If you bring more unique insights or describe the issue in more detail, people will be more likely to flock to your articles.
Don’t commit to making the article simply larger. The main concern should be usefulness. So, if your competitors offer extensive guides where short instruction is preferred, consider doing that instead.
The key here is to understand your customers. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what they would want to read. Alternatively, you can gather data from your posted articles to understand what your readers like. Or, even better, you can ask them directly. While most readers prefer to stay silent, some will inevitably voice their wishes.
5. Plan Content Updates
Most content will eventually go out of date and fall out of grace with search engines. To keep your positions, you have to update your content with fresh insights and news.
Make sure you plan for these updates within your SEO tactic. To make your job easier, find out which articles can be considered “evergreen.” Those typically require less work to maintain and stay true for a long time. For example, this article can be considered evergreen since we are talking about general SEO strategies for small businesses.
Time-sensitive content usually refers to articles like “Best SEO Tools to Use in YEAR,” where YEAR is whichever one is current right now. You need to regularly review these articles to keep them fresh and relevant.
6. Measure Your Success
To assess the success of your SEO plan, think of the KPIs you want to reach and see how you meet those thresholds. You can measure your organic traffic, number of conversions or conversion rate, sales, keyword ranking, bounce rate, and more.
Since your SEO team is likely to be very small (or just you alone), try not to spread your attention too thin. Focus on a few key metrics at a time. When you’re satisfied with the results, switch your attention to other SEO aspects.
5 SEO Tips for Small Businesses
SEO plans work roughly the same for big and small businesses. However, beginners tend to make mistakes that big brands have learned to avoid over the years. Here are five SEO tips and best practices relevant to small businesses.
1. Produce Original, High-Quality Content
This might sound obvious, but many beginning SEOs fall into the trap of creating tons of trash content in pursuit of numbers. While there were precedents for quantity over quality, modern search engines try to pivot away from this approach.
This has become an especially big problem with the advent of generative AI, with SEOs competing to push their website to the top of SERPs with thousands of AI-generated articles. Luckily, search engines caught onto this and are working on eliminating AI-slop-filled websites.
Focus on quality over quantity. It’s fine to put out bad content when you are learning, but it’s not OK to deliberately pump out useless junk to fool users and search engines.
2. Blog Consistently
Consistency is the name of the game in SEO. You want to regularly publish content for a number of reasons:
- Search engines will boost your rankings if you keep a consistent posting schedule.
- A part of your readers will come back regularly to read a new issue or article by you, giving you higher retention and loyalty.
- Consistent blogging helps you build a reputation and authority.
- You will gradually develop your writing style and increase speed when writing consistently.
How often you post depends entirely on your resources. It’s better to post more often as long as it does not take away from the quality. But if you are working alone, there is no shame in writing less frequently.
3. Set Realistic Expectations
To meet your KPIs, it’s important to first set realistic expectations. Getting one million organic traffic in the first months of your business isn’t impossible, but it is highly improbable. Try to look for a more attainable goal: one hundred or, if you’re more ambitious, one thousand views from organic traffic.
And always remember that SEO is a slow process. It will bear fruits eventually, but it is a slow burn compared to other promotional methods, like ads.
4. Prioritize Good UX
As customers become more and more demanding, user experience (UX) comes to the forefront of SEO. Gone are the glorious days of scrappy-looking websites with walls of text and keywords stuffed at the end of an article.
Today, nobody is going to try your product or services if your website looks like it was created by a ten-year-old during lunch break. No, your website must look crisp and inviting.
Good UX comes in many ways, parts of which are also considered technical SEO. For example, page load speed plays a significant role in having high conversion rates.
Adding just two seconds to the loading time can drive 32% of users away.
Add comfortable navigation throughout the site and inside the articles. If you have a lot of service or product pages, organize them in neat drop-down menus. Make sure users can quickly access any key information about your business.
Don’t forget about consistency. Your branding should stay consistent throughout the site, heading capitalization needs to be the same on every page, and your writing style should, preferably, be the same across the business’s site and all its social media.
5. Prioritize Local SEO
If your business is just taking off, chances are you’re working locally within a small community. While word of mouth from your friends and family is amazing for any budding business, it is highly unreliable.
What is reliable is local SEO, which can bring you to the top of the search pages for a particular location. If you are a car mechanic in New York, make sure you mention that in your content and on your Google My Business page. This way, you are going to get more targeted high-quality traffic and reduce the amount of bad traffic. For example, having people from London read about your business might stroke your ego, but it doesn’t bring any sales to your NY-based business.
When your business starts to grow and you begin to branch out into different areas, don’t forget to do the same local SEO for your new joints to inform people of your location.
Conclusion
Crafting an effective SEO plan is crucial for small businesses looking to establish a strong online presence and compete in today’s market. By following the six-step process outlined in this article, you can create a solid foundation for your SEO efforts.
Remember that SEO is not a one-time task but a slow burn that requires patience, persistence, and adaptability.
By combining these strategies with the tips provided for small businesses, you can create a cost-effective SEO plan that drives organic traffic, improves your search engine rankings, and ultimately helps your business grow. Stay committed to your SEO efforts, and you’ll see the benefits over time.
