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The 3 Critical SEO Factors that Small Businesses Need to Get Right

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SEO Factors for Small Business

In addition to my personal projects on the web, I’ve done web design/setup and local SEO for businesses in my area for quite some time.

In my time operating my one man Delaware SEO company, I’ve come across many small business owners making some huge mistakes with their SEO efforts.

Worst of all, sometimes it was because their SEO guy (that they paid good money to do work) was making these mistakes, which is simply inexcusable.

Below I wanted to outline the 3 critical factors that you need to realize about local/small business SEO if you are ever to succeed in utilizing it successfully.

1.) Better Traffic > More Traffic

If there is one thing I want to warn small businesses against when pursuing any kind of SEO strategy, it’s this: don’t go for the “most” traffic possible, go for the BEST traffic possible.

What good is SEO for your small business site if the bounce rate is over 90%, or you’re ranking for terms that aren’t converting, or worse, are outright misleading?

I take pride not only in getting visitors, but in retaining those visitors, and for good reason: SEO is a waste of time if you aren’t getting the right people to your site.

Check out this screenshot from a brand new client site:

As most of you webmasters will know, that’s not too shabby, and an excellent indicator of whether or not you are reaching the right people with SEO.

Let me tell you one of the worst offenders I’ve encountered…

I was working for a client who was previously paying some guy $100/month for SEO (HA!) and was wondering why he had lost his rankings recently (DOUBLE HA!)…

Worse yet, he was trying to rank for “[his city] roofing company”… and he didn’t even run a roofing company!

He actually ran a powerwashing company that focused on roofing… yet he saw that “____ roofing company” had more queries so that’s what he tried to rank for.

Needless to say, not only was the site not ranking very well, but the few people he did manage to get on site were off in a few seconds: the avg. visit duration was less than 30 seconds.

Yuck.

Don’t let this happen to you!

Focus on ‘medium difficulty’ keywords you can rank for, and more importantly, rank for terms that interested customers are searching for, not just any old semi-related term with a decent amount of searches per month.

2.) Define Your Preferred Outcome: Focus Relentlessly

This is an aspect that you would think doesn’t have anything to do with SEO, but it certainly does.

Not only is defining your “preferred outcome” essential to getting more conversions, it also helps reduce your site’s bounce rate, which in turn has been argued to effect your site’s rankings.

Let’s take a look at a comic that perfectly defines a few sites that do things notoriously wrong, aka college homepages:

university website

University Website source.

In a nutshell: nothing you want to find on the homepage is there!

Your small business needs to define what the best possible leads are that can be generated from your website.

This can be as simple as:

  • More phonecalls
  • Contact form submissions
  • Email sign-ups
  • Buying the product “on-site”

Then, you need to structure your site on making that outcome as easy as possible to reach.

It absolutely kills me when small brick-and-mortar businesses have a website and the phone number is listed in a tiny font at the bottom of the page!

If you want more phone calls, it needs to be big and above the fold, because

If people don’t know where to go, they will always find an exit.

– Rafal Tomal

You also need to make “additional information” easier to find, in case they need to find out more about your services.

This includes info on the team members (with pictures! People love seeing who they are buying from, especially if you’re good lookin’ ;))

It can also include things like your company blog, which is a great information tool as well as being a fantastic SEO tool.

Speaking of which…

3.) Don’t Underestimate the Power of Blogging

One of the biggest misconceptions with small businesses is they think that they don’t need a blog to rank.

Well, I guess they don’t need a blog to rank, but it certainly helps, big time!

What blogging helps with (besides being an optimal way to inform/persuade customers and act as a great jump-off for inbound marketing) is that it allows you to rank for smaller search terms that can have a combined benefit.

Typically, many sites (not just small business sites) break their keyword choices down into 3 options:

  1. Main Keyword (homepage)
  2. ‘Body’ Keywords (site pages)
  3. ‘Tail’ Keywords (article keywords)

Let’s break this down with an example…

I was once working for a construction company who was trying to rank for 5 different keywords on their homepage: needless to say, they weren’t doing very well.

So, I had them break down their keywords into the above 3 categories.

We then focused on a main keyword for the homepage (it had the most searches and was really relevant), and then created pages to rank for the ‘body’ keywords.

The main keyword was for a large area (aka “[state name] construction”) and the body keywords focused on surrounding smaller areas (aka “[city name] construction).

Lastly, we picked up some major search traffic by starting a blog for the site and targeting “hyper-local” keywords, or keywords within districts.

We also created a few informational posts to post to the fledgling Facebook page, obviously nothing went viral, but it generated more traffic to the site and more people recommending the company to their friends.

This brings me to my last point…

Focus Is Key, Long Term Results Will Follow

So many small business companies I’ve worked with just don’t “get” the benefits of long term SEO, aka building great links and running a small-time blog to attract visitors.

They want results next week, yet don’t understand that the only way to achieve that is to get links from places that will likely end up hurting the site in the long haul.

Take ‘er easy as they say, keep an eye out for opportunities to drop your site on local pages, events, and even local news (your SEO guy should know about this, if not, hire someone else).

Basically, for small business SEO, you need to focus more on building a small hub for your business that generates the right kind of leads, not a static page that aggressively tries to rank for every keyword under the sun.

If you’d like to learn more about content marketing for your small businesses’ blog, definitely check out Sparring Mind.

Thanks for reading!

Image © kbuntu – Fotolia.com

About

Gregory Ciotti is a content strategist who is obsessed with behavioral psychology. He's the marketing guy at Help Scout, the invisible email support software for solopreneurs & small business owners.

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{ 16 Responses }

  1. Christa says:
    Quality for users, as the essence of the post describes in a nutshell. Make your web-site more user oriented and for the population you're targeting instead of targeting a whole bunch on unqualified visitors.
  2. Abhik says:
    Nice read Gregory, There was some really good tips for people like me.
  3. Harmony Major says:
    ABSOLUTELY DELICIOUS. It truly is surprising how few people take into account that all traffic is absolutely not equal. Along those same lines, it can be painfully difficult for some reason to get some clients to understand that *preferred outcome* is THE REASON their website should exist. Period. How do you find out what website visitors in a particular market are *most* looking for when visiting certain sites?
  4. Justin Germino says:
    It is surprising how many people don't design a front page or homepage with what you outlined in mind, the user flow and experience is key, what do you want them to click on or what do you expect them to visit/search for when they arrive should be a factor. Keeping them on two or more pages and lowering your bounce rate is a very key metric. This is something I continue to struggle with on a blog with 79% of my visitors coming from search, and having a high bounce rate as a result. A good read.
    • Harmony Major says:
      Hi Justin. You've likely already considered this -- you definitely sound like someone who knows the ropes -- but have you evaluated the search terms that are being used against the landing pages, and seen how those match up? I know this is growing increasingly more difficult, what with Google's great "keyword not defined" being topmost on the list of the highest traffic keywords when checking analytics... but when and where you can, that's definitely a starting point. Plus, do bear in mind that all "bounce" is not bad. For instance, we must always evaluate where they're bouncing TO. In your case, I hope you don't mind me saying so, but there are many distractions on your blog. (Clicked on your latest article via cluv.) Easy to see why visitors would be jumping ship -- at least at a precursory glance; forgive me -- *but* if those visitors are, for instance, signing up with Hostgator and you've classified that as a "bounce," well... that's not such a bad thing. Is it? A great stat tracker that reveals exit pages is also key. I use and push Piwik because it's free, and because with it, I'm not giving Google all my @#%#^ data. HTH, -HM
  5. DiTesco says:
    Simple and yet effective. Outstanding advices indeed. Makes as wonder sometimes that something simple can yet be complicated for many. Like you said, I think that many SMBs tend to "try" for several keywords at the same time, without focus and then, complains why they are not generating the results they expect. Thumbs up!
  6. Farabi says:
    This is really good topic for SEO. I do SEO for my blog and i'm new in blogging and SEO also. All are right, but one problem faced by me, that is bounce rate. My blog bounce rate is high (60%+) and i try many technique to reduce this. Hope your idea will be help me. Thanks for the nice post.
  7. Murray Lunn says:
    I really, really like the example of the college websites. You can see it replicated on a lot of other industries like restaurants - people just want the number and what they can order. I think a lot of people just over analyze SEO to the point that they're not staying focused on the bigger picture. Do you want to drop 40 hours of work fiddling with a few keywords or could you have used that 40 hours to write tons of great content, networked with fellow industry players, and work on customer acquisition. Getting the higher level wins generally always have a trickle down effect.
  8. Pavel says:
    Quality of traffic has been a problem for me on my current project. I get a good amount of traffic but i have a pretty high bounce rate and low time on page. The queries that drive the traffic to the website are the one's i'm targeting but I think because of the poor design and content quality of the website visitors are being turned off and leave the site. The client doesn't want to redesign the website or change the content so i'm stuck in this situation. I've started a blog for that website and i'm hoping to drive traffic through that. Great post Greg, very informative and helpful.
  9. Chris says:
    Hi Gregory, you are totally right. Especially #2, conversion, is very important, even more important than bounce rate. For example you can have such type of page, where your destination is your squeeze page on another domain. And it makes sales for you :) Thanks for sharing.
  10. Rahman says:
    I appreciate the very useful points you've made at this post Greg! SEO services with $100/month will never work. I agree that quality is more important than quantity, but a few initiatives won't ever boost anyone's ranking in search engines. If something is good to be done, it must be done extensively and in larger scale. I also believe that targeted traffic is more important than aimless mass traffic. I should add a point here too: the keywords we choose for creating sales should be selected with ultimate care. If you want those buying visitors to your site, you have to optimize your site for the keywords that follow the purchasing goal. Otherwise, you'll find yourself just providing information for the sake of information, which I don't say it's bad. You should make a decision and define your business plan. Do you want to sell some product/service or you just want to have an informative site and generate revenue with a different strategy? I enjoyed your post. Keep up the good work. Rahman Mehraby TraveList Marketing Blog
  11. Nishadha says:
    I also work with start-ups and small businesses and I think not understanding the value of a blog and focusing on poor converting traffic is the biggest mistakes made by start-ups. Also I think most small businesses don't have the patience to follow a good SEO strategy.
  12. Henry says:
    Gregory some worthy SEO tips for all new comers here! I launched my site & was searching for some SEO to be done on a vital scale! Now got the catch how to make things progress! Good move & initiative! Like #2 a lot! Good to know!
  13. MarginHound says:
    One thing I've noticed when trying to rank for new keywords - Google is very sensitive to the relative "uniqueness" of your topic within the space. This isn't about the duplicate content slap - it feels more like Google is trying to build a "portfolio" of different items for the first page, so being "similar but different" can really help. For example, I do a lot of development in a small web framework - bottle.py. I wrote a small presentation about it (building websites using bottle.py) which made it's way onto the blog. This particular framework is several years old, so there is a number of high-PR pages already in existance for this topic (eg. github / sourceforge, etc.) and several posts on high PR blogs.BTW - at the time, the blog was a nothing blog...PR zero. However, I'm apparently the first guy to slap together a dozen page powerpoint "how-to" focused on the entry level. Oh really? Straight to the front page you go, lad. And was able to stay there for a while. Application to small business SEO? Look at the other ten guys on the first page...then find something they don't have. For a roofer, maybe it's a page about hailstorms. Maybe it's a roofing calculator (do they exist)? Who knows... just as long as it adds another nugget to Google's portfolio for that particular search. Because otherwise you are going to be guy #27 with an "about us" or "service offered" page focused on roofing.
  14. Rob Cubbon says:
    If I was in Delaware, I'd certainly use Gregory as my SEO guy! Really great article from somebody who knows his stuff. And, being an expert on psychology, he's introduced me to the "halo effect" which I'd known nothing about. Great article, Greg.
    • Gregory Ciotti says:
      Thanks Rob, you're the best! Glad you liked this one, and the Halo effect is definitely something I've kept in mind ever since hearing about it.