Each company, regardless of its size, needs efficient SEO in order to thrive. Organic search is one of the most powerful marketing tools and research shows that 51 percent of all website traffic comes from organic search and over 40 percent of revenue is captured by organic traffic.
Better SERP rankings are essential for startups and small businesses who aim to establish their brand and are in direct competition with larger and well-known names in their industry. Creating a unique product or service in a lucrative market niche is not enough in itself to attract customers and generate consistent revenue. You need successful SEO and marketing strategies to make you visible to the potential customers and assist your market penetration.
The good news is that content marketing is an efficient and at the same time affordable tool that can be successfully used by small business. While 90 percent of the organizations use content for their marketing, it takes only about 25 percent of the budget.
With the tips below, you will learn how to harness the power of great SEO and content marketing to the needs of your company. It is essential to get professional help as a starter and then keep going following the good practices that you have been taught of.
What is content marketing?
Before you start using some of the good practices of content marketing, it is necessary to learn what stands behind the term. The idea is pretty simple – to use content in its various forms to promote the business, create engagement and lead generation, and achieve your ultimate business goals. There is a great variety of content that can be used for marketing purposes – blog posts, webinars, videos, infographics, podcasts. The essence is to provide content that is both optimized for search engines and is also informative and useful for the target audience.
Great content can increase your sales and lead to a better ROI and hence its good management is of paramount importance for a small business. To turn it into one of your most powerful tools, though, it has to be combined with social media marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) for more tangible results.
Here are a few tips that can help you organize your SEO and content marketing so that the content you create works in your favor.
Set the basic technical elements of your website
The website is your online business card and it is necessary that it looks good if you want to be picked up among the others. When you construct your website, you need a strong foundation that will make sure it is recognized and ranked high by search engines and at the same time, it will guarantee a more intuitive user interface that will make you preferred by customers.
You need to pay attention to your site speed, its security, and redirects, the tags that you use. It is a good idea to optimize your url for the presence of keywords, length, and even spelling. Your page titles also need to be clear and indicative of the content the given page contains. The title is often displayed as a search result and can help identify your product or service.
Make sure your website is mobile and usable
Once you have optimized the basics of your website, it is time to make it more attractive to users. One of the most important factors is the high usability of the site. You need to position yourself in the shoes of your prospective customers and make sure you meet their demands. The main aspects to focus on are:
- The site should be accessible through various devices. Many people prefer using their smartphones now to locate the nearest business and if your site does not display properly, they simply won’t click on it, even if it is in one of the first three positions.
- Content and images should be optimized to fit mobile devices
- The site should load quickly
- There shouldn’t be too many pop-ups that prevent the user from navigating through the site
- The font should be easy to read
The overall look of your website is also important. It is necessary to think of the colors and images that you use so that they can attract and not distract the user.
Research and focus on powerful keywords related to your business
Keywords are the essential ingredient in your content that drives traffic and helps you rank among the top results. It is not necessary simply to load all of your content with tons of keywords, on the contrary, that even may harm you. The idea is to focus on powerful keywords that will help your business rank.
You may steal some ideas from your competitors – see what they are ranking for, how they achieved it and aim to outrank them.
You can also look into longer keyword phrases, the so-called long-tailed keywords, as often they have less competition but bring back better results. Quite often such phrases better reflect what users are actually searching for.
While doing the research for the relevant keywords, you can use many free tools that give excellent results. Some good examples are Google Adwords Keyword Planner, keywordtool.io or Wordstream.
Create unique content
Once you have the list of keywords available, it is necessary to create great content. One of the most important factors to consider is that your content should be unique! No one likes copycats, search engines least of all.
You may be inspired by your competitors’ blog posts, news feed or product descriptions but never copy them. Copying may only harm your brand as Google penalizes duplicate content. Use your own words to create quality texts that will be engaging for the target audience. You need to aim for content that meets at least the following three criteria:
- Original – even if it presents a well-known topic, it shall do it from a different perspective adding value to the topic. Aim to inform the readers and to give them something to think of
- True – do not try to make things up even for your own products or services. This may not be penalized by search engines but will definitely harm your reputation among customers
- Actionable – in order to have the desired results, your content should urge users to action. Make sure to explain how this will facilitate them and provide an easy option of how the user can do what you are asking them. If you want them to share your blog post, for example, make sure that it is easy to do. If you want them to buy your product, include a link to your shop, etc.
Follow these rules for all type of content – from blog posts to product descriptions and short ads or interactions with customers on social media.
Be creative with product descriptions
To avoid duplicate content, try to be creative with your product or services descriptions. Do not simply copy the manufacturer’s words. While you cannot change the specifications of the product or service, you can think of an original way to present it to the potential customers.
Establish a blog
Search engines and especially Google value new content. By establishing a blog and publishing new articles regularly, you increase your chances of ranking higher. It is essential to write on topics that concern the customers in your industry and to include the relevant keywords that will optimize your content.
Keep in mind, though, that your blog posts should not be simply stuffed with keywords. They need to contain engaging content for your readers, who would be interested in reading them and thus establish an appreciation of your business and share your values.
Engage with local customers via locally-relevant content
Most people find about local business through online search. If you want to appear on those searches, you need to create locally-relevant content. You can do it by using local keywords on each of your pages, including your business details on each page of your website, writing about events that are important for your community. Including photos of your own workplace and employees, if relevant, or images of local sites of interest will also help.
It is vital, to create a page on Google My Business and make sure your contact details and working hours are properly displayed.
Harness the power of social media
If you have established a great blog on your website, make sure that it is visible to the audience. Create outreach by using social media. You can share your articles on Facebook or LinkedIn, you can also engage your users to do it.
It is great to establish good relations with influencers in social media. If such people like or share your posts, you will get much more attention.
Promote your content by interlinking
You have created valuable and resourceful articles and some of them already rank quite well on Google. Make use of this opportunity. When writing your next post, use internal linking to further promote your specific services or products or to direct readers to other useful content.
Thus, you will keep the attention of the user on your site longer and facilitate their navigation for your website. Internal linking will have a great impact on your overall SEO with time.
Increase your site credibility with backlinks
If you want to establish your brand and increase your business credibility, you need external recognition as well. Building backlinks is one of the successful SEO tools that helps with ranking. You need links that lead back to your site published on trusted sites that are highly ranked by search engines. This will increase your trustworthiness as a business and source of quality content, products, services.
Note that the key focus here is on quality and not quantity. Google will rank your site higher if the third-party votes in the form of external links come from credible sources as well. Therefore, you need to choose your partners carefully. The same goes when you decide to write a guest post that should be published on a site.
If you produce quality content that is published on quality sites, you will get the results you need.
BONUS: Avail of professional help as a starter
As a small business, you most probably operate on a tight budget and hence, it is good to spend every bit of it wisely. It is better to invest in developing a successful SEO and content marketing strategy rather than trying to repair the damage of inappropriate choices in the field.
It is clear that you are an expert in the business niche you have chosen and no one expects that you are aware of SEO as well. Contacting a professional agency to give you an initial idea of how to design and optimize your website and blog posts, for example, can help you reach your goals much faster. There is a variety of elements in SEO that can be done by an expert in a certain field and trying to offer a substitute may be harming to your brand.
If you are aiming at foreign market penetration, for example, a professional website translation done by an experienced language service provider will help your business reach more customers. A blog post, written by an experienced writers having an academic knowledge of the topics related to your business as the experts behind the creative papers provided by Handmade Writing, WritingsGuru, and Writemyessaytoday, will significantly increase the value of your content.
Using professional tools to measure your performance is also a good way to learn and develop. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are among the most popular tools but you can also avail of MOZ, Kissmetrics, or CrazyEgg. Regardless of the tool, you will select, it will help you see which are the keywords you rank for, how your customers react to your content, which are the strengths and weaknesses of your site and help you improve your performance.
Contacting an SEO agency at the very start of your SEO and content marketing campaign will help you optimize your costs. You can get the answers that you need and receive guidelines to follow, which combined with the tips above will help your business perform better.
It is necessary to keep in mind that SEO and content marketing do not work overnight. You need to be patient and consistent in your efforts for these tools to perform their magic.
About the Author
Donna Moores is a successful content writer and CMO at Handmade Writing. Due to her outstanding marketing experience within the biggest industries, Donna helps other businesses with content writing and proofreading. One of her current projects is an American website called WritingsGuru , which provides readers with useful tips on how to develop writing skills. You may reach out to Donna on Twitter or LinkedIn.
