How to Practice Affordable SEO for Small Businesses—Even Without a Budget for It!
In the United States alone, operate approximately 14 million business websites. Competition is fierce, and you need to do what it takes for your small online business to stand out. You probably know that doing content marketing and practicing SEO for small businesses are two ways in which your small online business can grow, beat the competition, and become a success in the business arena. But you may not be sure about what your next move should be.
One of your concerns may be pricing. You’ve heard that SEO for your small online business can cost a fortune, and content marketing, while efficient, can put a small business in financial distress.
Fortunately, experience tells us that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on content marketing and SEO. In fact, with enough ambition, you may do them the right way by yourself, i.e., without paying a dime to an agency.
To find out more about content marketing and SEO for small businesses, we recommend reading our article on what you need to know about these crafts. In fewer than 2,000 words, you will discover everything there is to know on the subject.
In what follows, you will learn some tactics that you can implement right away for your content marketing and SEO efforts. You will see how more people will visit your website thanks to your changes in SEO strategy and how more people will purchase from you thanks to the content marketing approach to your small online business.
The Link Between Content Marketing & SEO for Small Businesses
Maybe, you aren’t that sure about the link between content marketing and SEO for small businesses. Maybe, you don’t fully grasp the relationship between the two or simply don’t understand the notions well.
That’s all right! For anyone to make a connection means to understand what content marketing is and does to a small online business like yours. Also, you will have to understand the difference between good SEO and bad SEO.
Both content marketing and SEO for small businesses share something in common. Through them, you try to deliver to a target audience (your current and potential clients) messages and ideas about your products and services.
Let’s take content marketing for starters. A clue lies in its name. The inquiry has something to do with content, e.g., your blog posts, your website’s content in general, the copy that you prepare for your clients, the emails, etc. Besides that, the word ‘marketing’ in the name refers to how you market this content.
In other words, content marketing implies crafting content having a target audience in mind. It also implies structuring and strategizing that content so that your target audience understands
> what you are communicating
> why they should listen
> what they should do.
This is the foundation of content marketing and the reason why you as a small business owner cannot ignore it if you want to thrive in a hypercompetitive world of business.
However, crafting content strategically to enhance your small business online is not enough. You want to be sure that the largest number of people find out about your business, what it stands for, and why they should consider you.
What is the best way to get exposure, for free, in this busy online world? By often ranking on the first page of Google. Even today, in the age of artificial intelligence, every hour of the day, millions of searches are done via Google. Every hour, you lose potential clients by not ranking high in your expertise.
How can you change that without spending a fortune? By applying the SEO practices that are sure to get Google to notice your website and consider it an authority. For that, you will have to follow Google’s guidelines, submit an XML map of your website, and start doing your keyword research for your small online business.
As you will see, keyword research is at the heart of SEO, and by doing it, you will make all your content marketing efforts worthwhile.
The key is to understand how to place certain phrases (keywords) in your content that you craft in accordance with a content-marketing strategy. This way, you will make your content easier to find by your target audience, and with that, you will generate more leads for your small online business.
Remember one thing! Consistency is the key to making your content marketing and SEO efforts give results. By constantly delivering content and using the right keywords, you can turn your small online business into a resounding success.
Content Marketing on a Budget
A good marketing strategy can place you way ahead in the business game. Of course, to make that happen, you need to understand what you are doing. Can you have a content marketing strategy without investing a lot of money?
The answer is affirmative. You can create a content marketing strategy without spending money, and that’s exactly why you are going to read on in this article.
It All Starts with the Public
To create a winning content marketing strategy, you need to know your target audience. If you don’t know who you are addressing your product or service to, you don’t know how to approach crafting your content.
Who are the people you are addressing? Is your target audience comprised more of men or women? What’s the age range? Sometimes, the ethnic background matters. If, for example, you are addressing Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, you need to be aware of cultural sensitivities. Also, you will probably need a Spanish version for your content. Occupation can be another detail that tells something about your target audience.
All these details paint a picture of what is called “buyer intent,” and this is what you need to satisfy through your content marketing efforts.
If you sell razors, then your target audience, being majority male or female, will influence how you sell the product and what you craft for content. Sometimes, people from certain ethnic groups have their own wishes and fears about the world around them that shape their buyer intent and let you in on how to sell to them better.
With this comes a new concept that you may or may not have heard of until now: pain points.
Most people often want something to alleviate a pain rather than to offer pleasure. When trying to decipher your target audience’s buyer intent, it can be crucial to understand what hurts them most and what they fear most, i.e., their pain points.
With this knowledge, you can build your content marketing strategy that will surely increase lead generation and sales.
You don’t need to hire a team of experts to discover your target audience or their pain points. For starters, you can use common sense, imagination, and the opinion of a couple of people.
Look at your product or service and think about who would be interested in it. Think about why they would be interested in your product or service. Obvious pain points that your target audience has don’t require you to invest money in research.
Content Pillars
Now that you know whom you target with your content, it’s time to make a strategy. You need to decide on
> what kind of content to write
> its length
> where you will post it (company blog, Facebook page, etc.)
> how often you will post it
But the most important thing that you need to create is the staples of your business: the content pillars.
What are content pillars, and how can they impact your content marketing and SEO for small businesses? These are the main topics around which you will create your content.
Let’s say you run a website that sells fishing gear, accessories, and educational content (like articles, guides, or maybe even digital courses). How might content pillars look for such a site?
Main Content Pillars for a Fishing Website:
1. Fishing Techniques & Skills
2. Fishing Gear & Equipment
3. Fishing Destinations & Travel
4. Sustainable & Ethical Fishing
5. Fishing Community & Lifestyle
Each of these pillars is a category in which your content falls. If for 1. you will write content with the purpose of establishing authority by teaching readers how to fish better; in the case of 3., the purpose will be to inspire adventure and attract an audience interested in travel experiences.
The topic cluster offers you the possibility of thinking about and organizing your content in a well-thought-out manner.
Again, if we take 1. Fishing Techniques & Skills, we can brainstorm some ideas of what we can write about. Here are a couple of topics that can be written about on this pillar.
Here are a couple of ideas for potential content for this pillar:
> Beginner’s guide to freshwater fishing
> How to choose the right bait for each fish type
> Fly fishing vs. spinning: which is better for beginners?
> How to read water currents and fish behavior
> Common fishing mistakes (and how to fix them)
As you can see, organizing content this way comes with benefits for your content marketing strategy. You have your strategy well settled thanks to the content pillars, and this organization can help you come up with content ideas quite rapidly.
There is one final advantage of structuring your content using content pillars: you can easily determine the keywords that you will use in your SEO efforts. This is where content marketing and SEO for small businesses intersect. If you do quick keyword research, having your target audience in mind and having a well-structured set of content pillars, you can maximize your SEO efforts for your small online business to thrive.
The question that remains is the following: how can you do affordable SEO for your small online business?
Affordable SEO Practices for Your Small Business
If you’ve read the article up until now, you have a grasp of what content marketing is and why it matters for your small online business. You also should have understood the link between content marketing and SEO for small businesses. SEO is all about adding those small, important ingredients (keywords) into your larger mix called content marketing. But how exactly can you do that in an affordable way? Can we have SEO without spending a fortune?
The short, confident answer is yes, you can have affordable SEO for your small online business, and you have the opportunity of reading about it here. Here are the ways in which your website can be found easier by the right people.
Optimize Your On-Page SEO
As mentioned already, the core of SEO for small businesses is good keyword research. However, after you find your keywords, what’s there to be done with them? The first thing that you should do is to use these keywords on your pages.
Have your keywords organized based on your content pillars. For each pillar, you will use certain keywords. Don’t use keywords of a pillar on content that belongs to another pillar.
Now, when applying the keywords that we ought to use, be sure to place them in the following places:
> the headline
> subheadings
> first paragraph
> metadescription
> url
Be careful not to overuse these keywords. Google may consider your content to be spam if a certain phrase is being used too much. What does Google consider too much? It’s hard to give a clear answer, but what we can recommend to you is to write your piece as naturally as you can.
Besides using keywords strategically, one other important component of on-page SEO is link-building. Do not be afraid to anchor links on your page. Send readers to other pages on your website as well as on partner pages. This helps you build authority in Google’s eyes and helps the search engine understand the website better.
Focus On Valuable Content
This is linked to the idea of not overdoing SEO for your small online business. Some focus so much on using the right keywords and optimizing search results that they forget what the actual purpose of the website is: to offer valuable content to readers, i.e., potential customers.
Instead of focusing on using a certain long-tail keyword in 2% of the text, it is best to focus your mental energy on crafting pieces of text that your target audience finds valuable. After you have crafted the piece, you can try and stuff the keywords in your original text.
Again. Do not overdo it. Do not place certain keywords in unnatural ways just to have better SEO. Search engines penalize such practices.
Improve Your Website’s Speed and Mobile Accessibility
In technical SEO, two things you should consider as a beginner in SEO for small businesses
> loading speed
> mobile access
The speed with which your website loads affects its rankings in Google searches. Your webpages should load in less than five seconds. You can test your website’s loading speed by using Google’s tool for just this. If you face issues regarding speed, there are a couple of things that we can recommend right away:
> Compress your images to make them smaller in size.
> Use WordPress themes especially designed to improve loading speed (see here).
> Enable Browser Caching & Compression: Use plugins like WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, or W3 Total Cache.
> Delete old drafts, large unused images, and spam comments.
> Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML (done automatically by cache plugins).
> Check if you have the best hosting provider.
Concerning mobile use, keep in mind that for a couple of years, Google has been prioritizing how websites load and appear on mobile devices. In this regard, be sure that your website’s mobile version has a clean design and it’s easy to use regardless of the smartphone design. You can test if your phone version of your website is SEO-proof here.
Engage in Local SEO
If you run a local business, then doing local SEO is probably the most important part of your SEO effort. We have written an article on local SEO for small businesses, and we advise you to read it if you want your small online local business to thrive in your community.
There are two things you need to remember about local SEO, and you should never skip them.
> create a Google Business Account
It takes less than five minutes to create one, but the benefits for your local small online business will be immense. Whenever someone from your area is trying to find your product or service, Google will probably recommend your business. That’s why it is important to have a Google Business Account, especially if you have a physical store.
> get reviews
Google loves reviews because they show that a business is reliable. The more reviews your business gets, the better your local SEO efforts for your small business are. Please remember that the reviews need to be positive (four- and five-star reviews). If your reviews are often negative, Google will penalize you. Also, don’t forget to reply to the reviews that you receive. Give insightful replies to the review if you want your local SEO efforts to have a positive impact on your small online business
Other Things to Consider
As you can see, content marketing and SEO for small online businesses are interconnected and can make a difference in your success. Moreover, we hope that you have understood that you can do content marketing and SEO for small businesses on a budget, even without spending one cent on it.
If you wish, you can check our articles on the topics. Here, you can learn everything that you need to learn about content marketing for small online businesses. Also, we have two articles on the main mistakes that you should avoid when doing SEO for a small online business.
Before we end this long article on affordable content marketing & SEO for small businesses, we want to make some last remarks.
> Leverage social media as much as you can. Your social media accounts are part of your content marketing strategy, and you must make the most of them for free.
